Associated Press fires Jewish employee for ‘showing bias’ in tweets on Israel-Palestine issue

Emily Wilder, who was hired just 16 days before being let go, said she was not informed which tweets of hers violated AP's social media policy.

Emily Wilder was let go by Associate Press for violating agency's social media policy | Twitter

New Delhi: American news agency Associated Press terminated the employment of one of its staff amid an uproar over her tweets about Israel and Palestine.

According to a report by the Washington Post, Emily Wilder, who was hired on 3 May, fired “just 16 days later” for violating the company’s social media policy.

“It’s really devastating,” she told Washington Post in a phone interview.

Wilder, who is Jewish, claimed she was not told which of her social media posts had violated the policy, but was told that she had shown “clear bias”.

A spokesperson for the news agency had confirmed Wilder was “dismissed for violations of AP’s social media policy during her time at AP”, according to the Post.

Among the tweets Wilder had put up was one “referencing her advocacy for the Palestinian people and opposition to the actions of the Israeli government,” the report said.

‘Objectivity feels fickle’

Wilder said that “she was an active member of the pro-Palestinian groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine at Stanford University, from which she graduated in 2020”.

Her Twitter timeline is full of posts related to the Israel-Palestine issue.

On Sunday, she tweeted her criticism of how the news media describes the situation in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem that has seen deadly conflicts between Israeli settlers, Palestinian civilians and the Israeli military, according to Post report.

“‘Objectivity’ feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly stake a claim,” she wrote. “Using ‘israel’ but never ‘palestine,’ or ‘war’ but not ‘siege and occupation’ are political choices — yet the media make those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased (sic),” she tweeted.

The Post said “the Stanford College Republicans flagged a post that Wilder made in college, characterizing her as an ‘anti-Israel agitator’ and criticizing the Associated Press for hiring her”.

In the following days, news outlets such as the Federalist, Washington Free Beacon and the website of Fox News “published stories calling out the wire service for Wilder’s hiring and attempting to tie it to the Israeli army’s recent destruction of the Associated Press’s Gaza bureau…”

Wilder, according to the Post, believes AP acted in response to those high-profile pieces of criticism.

(Edited by Manasa Mohan)