by OMAR ZAHZAH
The colonial application of digital technologies spurs Palestinian resistance.
It’s an increasingly familiar contradiction: digital platforms that position themselves as an accessible alternative to corporate media emerge as new censors in their own right. Social media and the internet make it possible to disseminate material that would otherwise have been suppressed, thereby helping to bring alternative conversations to the fore of mainstream awareness. And yet, for all of their hype and propaganda, the parent companies of these popular digital platforms are no less dedicated to the preservation of an imperialist status quo than their institutional predecessors, with all of the attendant silencing and repression this entails.
Big Tech’s handling of content critical of the Zionist state’s latest genocide of Palestinians in Gaza—described by former United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunnes as “the first genocide in the history of humanity that is livestreamed on television”—reveals that silencing is the norm. In this way, Big Tech companies reinforce Israeli settler colonialism through systemic anti-Palestinian policies. I analyze the meeting point between Big Tech and Zionist oppression of Palestinians as digital/settler-colonialism.
An Egregious Culprit
Facebook acquired Instagram on April 9, 2012, and rebranded itself as Meta on October 28, 2021. In addition to these other changes, the company has consistently worked to facilitate the censoring and repression of Palestinians on its platforms—often with deadly consequences. Israel relies on membership in WhatsApp groups as one of the data points for Lavender, the AI system it uses to generate “kill lists” of Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) are not required to verify the accuracy of the “suspects” generated by the AI program, and make a point of bombing them when they are at home with their families. Another AI program, insidiously named “Where’s Daddy?,” helps the IOF track Palestinians targeted for assassination to see when they’re at home. As blogger, software engineer, and Tech for Palestine co-founder Paul Biggar notes, the fact that WhatsApp appears to be providing the IOF with metadata about its users’ groups means that Meta, the parent company of the messaging app, is not only lying about its promise of security but facilitating genocide.
This complicity in genocide has also assumed other, sometimes more subtle guises, including systematic erasure of support for Palestine from Meta’s platforms. On Tuesday, June 4, 2024, Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian American software engineer, launched a lawsuit against Meta when the company fired him after he used his expertise to investigate whether it was censoring Palestinian content creators. Among Hamad’s discoveries was that Instagram (owned by Meta) prevented the account of Motaz Azaiza, a popular Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza, from being recommended based on a false categorization of a video showing the leveling of a building in Gaza as pornography. Improper flagging based on automation is one of the key mechanisms by which pro-Palestine content is systematically removed from Meta’s platforms.
On February 8, 2024, The Intercept reported that Meta was considering a policy change that would have disastrous implications for digital advocacy for Palestine: identifying the term “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew/Jewish” for content moderation purposes, a move that would effectively ban anti-Zionist speech on its platforms, Instagram and Facebook.
The revelation came as a result of a January 30 email Meta sent to civil society organizations soliciting feedback. This email was subsequently shared with The Intercept. Sam Biddle, the reporter of The Intercept piece, notes that the email said Meta was reconsidering its policy “in light of content that users and stakeholders have recently reported,” but it did not share the stakeholders’ identities or give direct examples of the content in question. Seventy-three civil society organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, 7amleh, MPower Change, and Palestine Legal, issued an open letter to Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg to protest the potential policy change.
“[T]his move will prohibit Palestinians from sharing their daily experiences and histories with the world, be it a photo of the keys to their grandparent’s house lost when attacked by Zionist militias in 1948, or documentation and evidence of genocidal acts in Gaza over the past few months, authorized by the Israeli Cabinet,” the letter states.
If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2020, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) launched a global campaign entitled “Facebook, we need to talk” with thirty other organizations to pressure Meta not to categorize critical use of the term “Zionist” as a form of hate speech under its Community Standards. That campaign was prompted by a similar email revelation, and a petition in opposition to the potential policy change garnered over 14,500 signatures within the first twenty-four hours.
In May 2021, Biddle also reported that despite Facebook’s claims that the change was under consideration, the platform and its subsidiary, Instagram, had already been applying the policy to content moderation since at least 2019, eventually leading to an explosive wave of suppression of social media criticism of Israeli violence against Palestinians that included the looming expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, Israeli Occupation Forces’ brutalization of Palestinian worshippers in Al Aqsa mosque, and lethal bombardment of the Gaza strip in 2021.
Still Denied: Permission to Narrate
These 2021 waves of anti-Palestinian censorship across digital platforms prompted me to write an op-ed for Al Jazeera. I connected Palestinian History Professor Maha Nassar’s analysis of journalistic output related to Palestine over a fifty-year span to social media giants’ repression of Palestine. What Nassar found—thirty-six years after the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said declared that Palestinians had been denied “Permission to Narrate”—was that an overabundance of writing about Palestinians in corporate media outlets was belied by how infrequently Palestinians are offered the opportunity to speak fully about their own experiences. I argued that the social media censorship of Palestine was a direct continuation of this journalistic anti-Palestinian racism despite the pretext of and capacity for digital platforms to serve as an immediate and widely accessible corrective to the omissions of corporate media. Palestinians are doubly silenced by social media censorship, once again denied “Permission to Narrate.”
Before, the sole culprit was the corporate media. Today, it’s matched by Silicon Valley.
I identified this phenomenon as “digital apartheid.”
At the time, I assumed this would be a one-off piece. The wide-scale social media censorship of Palestine in 2021 certainly seemed to be an escalation, but it also came on the cusp of what felt like a global narrative shift in the Palestinian struggle. Savvy social media use by Palestinians resisting displacement from Sheikh Jarrah made Palestinian oppression legible in seemingly unprecedented ways, which in turn helped promote increased inclusion of Palestinian voices and perspectives within corporate media outlets such as CNN.
So when Big Tech companies such as Meta tried to backpedal by ramping up censorship as Israel increased its colonial violence, it felt like a desperation born of unsustainability. Yes, Big Tech was erasing Palestinian voices, taking the baton from corporate media in an astoundingly egregious fashion, but this had to be temporary. Surely, the increased support for the Palestinian struggle born of a paradigm-shifting moment would eventually compel social media giants to desist.
To state the obvious, this was not the case, and what I thought would be a one-time topic became the focus of repeated freelance journalistic output. I wrote articles for Mondoweiss and The Electronic Intifada about various forms of digital repression, from blacklisting and harassment by online Zionist outfits such as Stopantisemitism.org and their affiliate social media accounts to deletion and censorship of Palestinian content on platforms like Meta and X (which was still Twitter at the time the bulk of these pieces were written).
Project Censored for more