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.
