Palestinian activists launch online campaign demanding Meta to stop censoring Palestinian content
Occupied Palestine (QNN)- Hundreds of Palestinian and Pro-Palestine activists from all over the world participated on Thursday in an online campaign demanding Meta stop censoring Palestinian content.
The activists launched the online campaign on Thursday at 7 pm local time, tweeting on the hashtag #MetaStopCensoringPalestine. Several Palestine advocacy groups participated in the campaign, including VPalestine, Palestine Sunbird, Palestine Online, and Kuffiya.
The campaign has been launched to shed light on Meta’s long-reported censorship of Palestinian content after the social media giant that runs Facebook and Instagram suspended leading news outlets covering Israeli occupation violations against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The activists have decided to rise up against Meta’s repression of Palestinian content, accusing the social media giant of ignoring the Palestinian narrative that reveals the crimes of the Israeli occupation.
Palestinians are humans and have the right to express their suffering at the hands of Israeli occupation.#MetaStopCensoringPalestine pic.twitter.com/dDve8thFw3
— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) October 20, 2022
Instagram & Facebook suspend leading news outlets in Palestine: pick a side! wake up! rise up! and demand #MetaStopCensoringPalestine pic.twitter.com/NAu7r2z77u
— Sarah Wilkinson (@swilkinsonbc) October 20, 2022
Why is showing the crime the issue when the problem should be the crime itself, not documenting it and making it visible. Why the ugly complicity? #MetaStopCensoringPalestine
— Mariam Barghouti مريم البرغوثي (@MariamBarghouti) October 21, 2022
#Meta is taking the side of Israeli occupation!
It is time for Meta to stop censoring Palestinian content and allow Palestinians to convey the truth about Israeli occupation.
#MetaStopCensoringPalestine pic.twitter.com/Bn1doXuWaO
— Enas W. (@ENASSULIMAN97) October 20, 2022
Earlier last week, Quds News Network (QNN) was forced to temporarily deactivate its main Arabic and English pages on Facebook due to a series of “unjustified reports,” the Network announced at that time, stressing that Facebook’s actions aim to “block and restrict Palestinian content.”
The Network said the restrictions came after Israeli occupation War Minister Benny Gantz stated on October 13 that more efforts must be done on social media platforms to restrict Palestinian content. His remarks were amid successive Israeli attacks on the ground in several Palestinian areas.
On Wednesday, Instagram briefly suspended Eye on Palestine, an account with over three million followers that highlights Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians. In a post from a back-up Instagram account, the managers of Eye on Palestine confirmed the suspension with a screenshot of a message from Instagram that read, “We suspended your account on 19 October 2022. There are 30 days to disagree with this decision. Your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Guidelines on dangerous individuals and organizations.” The suspended account was not visible to users for several hours but was restored later on Wednesday afternoon.
Pro-Palestine networks are no strangers to such restrictions on social media as the latter have been deleting and deactivating the accounts of Palestinians and pro-Palestinians.
However, Palestinian activists and networks have always said that fighting the pro-Palestine content on social media will not deter the news outlets or Palestinians from documenting and covering what the Israeli occupation commits in Palestine to the whole world.
The temporary ban and the unjustified reports come just weeks after an internal Meta report found that Facebook and Instagram policies during Israel’s aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip in May 2021, when 256 Palestinians, including 66 children were killed by Israeli forces, harmed the fundamental rights of Palestinians.
“Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” says the report, which was first obtained by The Intercept in advance of its publication.
At that time, many Palestinians attempting to document and protest the aggression using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously disappeared without recourse.
According to the report, Meta deleted Arabic content related to last year’s aggression at a much greater rate than Hebrew-language posts. This was found among posts reviewed by both automated services and employees.
Sada Social Center, a Palestinian digital rights organization that specializes in protecting Palestinian narratives on social media platforms and monitoring violations, documented more than 1200 violations against Palestinian content during 2020 only. Facebook topped the list with 801 violations, followed by Twitter with 276 violations, Instagram with 25 violations, and 10 violations on YouTube.
The Center said it has documented more than 990 violations against Palestinian content on social media platforms since the start of 2022, 49% of which were against journalists and media accounts as Israeli occupation has allocated huge budgets to fight the Palestinian content and pressure the administrations of social media platforms to restrict the Palestinian narrative and delete even journalistic content.
Moreover, suppressing and fighting the pro-Palestine content has been done in coordination with the Israeli occupation government and security agencies, on the pretext of preventing Palestinian “incitement and hate speech” on its platform, stifling the Palestinian voices while giving the Israeli narrative complete freedom. At the end of 2016, the Associated Press reported that “the Israeli government and Facebook have agreed to work together to determine how to tackle incitement on the social media network.”
