The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been longstanding, brutal, and fraught with controversy. Although many reputable human rights bodies, including the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Amnesty International, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, all have asserted that Israel’s actions in Gaza are a genocide, Palestinians worldwide are still facing harsh criticism and even censorship. Indeed, the insidious roots of this censorship go far, and tap into one of the most ubiquitous yet unrestrained powers of the modern world–social media. Indeed, in recent years, and especially over the last few months, multiple social media platforms have been receiving harsh pushback as testimony reveals systemic censorship and erasure of pro-Palestine ideals, facts about the genocide, and even testimony and witness from Gaza.
Late last year, Farah Awadalla published in the news page “Waging Nonviolence” detailing the myriad ways in which social media proprietors, specifically Meta, silence Palestinian voices, specially in regards to the genocide. Over various platforms, the system is largely the same: using a strategy known as “shadowbanning”, Palestinian creators and witnesses in Gaza have their posts or stories deleted without warning or explanation, their account is stripped of certain features, and they’re blocked from appearing in main streams or when searched for–essentially crippling their platform. This stems from a series of issues, but all of them come from a baseline of censoring Palestinian voices. For example, Meta, the company overseeing Instagram and Facebook, uses an AI moderation for censorship, but for servers working in Gaza, the AI is programmed to need far less “confidence” to censor a post than it would in other parts of the world (Awadalla). Moreover, the Arabic language is subjected to far more automated scrutiny and posts in the language are much more harshly criticized for hostile speech than other languages; notably, Hebrew.
Today, the problem persists, and Meta isn’t the only perpetrator. Elon Musk’s “X”, formerly “Twitter”, has been accused of suspending hundreds of Palestinian accounts. Just a few months ago, staff at the Palestinian Chronicle released a public plea after their exposure on X collapsed, seemingly overnight, with posts that once reached tens of thousands, if not millions, dropping to almost nobody without a word. Clearly, shadowbanning is still at work, and Palestinian voices are being silenced and censored from overhead, but the fight is not over. The genocide receives more attention and pushback each day, despite what social media companies are clearly trying to hide, and with greater exposure and pressure the victims can, with hope, find peace.
Author’s Note: In our age of information, the advent of social media seems like the natural next step in connection: widespread, instantaneous, and encompassing. However, the unchecked power of social media companies, clearly, is a mandate for tyranny of censorship and erasure. Though companies, with the goal to make money, will always foster content that would create the most clicks, there are clear bounds that, for moral and societal reasons, they choose to place censorship around. In the case of the Gaza genocide, however, it is clear that this information is being buried–shadowbanned–because Zuckerberg, Musk, and the rest want it to be. For their own reasons, far be it from me to denote, they are choosing to exercise their unrestrained power to take viewpoints they don’t like and make them, essentially, disappear. The point isn’t social media, though, its the fact that these are the victims of a Genocide and their supporters, and it’s like they don’t even exist. It is imperative that when a creator online says their piece, desperately trying to raise awareness and protect families from slaughter, we listen, we support, and we do not let them be silenced. Whatever systems fall into place to eliminate these individuals, these voices crying out for help, we will stand by them, and protect the truth of this genocide through all censorship and erasure.
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