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international.
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Israel’s digital apartheid is silencing Palestinians
By: []
Date: None
Recently, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter received significant criticism after removing hundreds of posts and accounts that documented protests taking place in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where eight Palestinian families are threatened with forced expulsion, and in al-Aqsa Mosque, where Israeli police began attacking worshippers on 8 May.
Posts and stories that used the #SaveSheikhJarrah hashtag were taken down, and accounts that reposted real life footage and images of events taking place on the ground were suspended. Instagram later on released a statement claiming that content was removed due to a widespread technical bug.
However, at 7amleh, the Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement, we view these takedowns as part of a larger and much older campaign to censor Palestinians online. It is the biases in the automated algorithms that identify “inappropriate content,” as well as the lack of transparency in these platforms’ content moderation policies, that enabled this type of indiscriminate mass censorship. In addition, we at 7amleh have also come to notice that these algorithms often tend to interpret content in Arabic without context, leading to more takedowns, often without legitimate reasoning.
This latest episode was an example of the obstacles faced by Palestinians in the digital sphere, obstacles which cannot be separated from – and indeed reproduce and reflect – the broader apartheid system imposed by Israel.
Recently, multiple Israeli and international human rights organisations, most notably Human Rights Watch, have released reports stating that Israel has established an apartheid system according to all recognised standards. This is effectively what Palestinian organisations have been saying for decades now, as such a system is based on the dominance of one people over another, the systemic oppression of one people by the other, as well as committing inhumane acts by one people against the other.
Palestinian human rights organisations have documented and publicised all such violations for decades, both locally and internationally. For over 70 years, Palestinians have been subjected to the most horrifying violations of their human rights, including depriving them of the right to freedom of movement and the right to education, in addition to the demolition of their homes and the imprisonment of over 1 million Palestinians in the span of 40 years, including women and children.
A digital apartheid
In the digital age, the power relations offline are reflected online too. There are three main ways in which this is conducted, the first being Israel’s control over the infrastructure of the Palestinian telecommunications sector.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/israels-digital-apartheid-is-silencing-palestinians/
