Sada Social Center said it had documented at least 125 violations against Palestinian digital content during the past month, noting that these violations were distributed among the majority of global social media platforms.
These platforms mainly affected the content and accounts that dealt with the Palestinian situation and the ongoing violations of the Israeli occupation, the Center said, adding the platforms continue their suppression of the Palestinian content and narrative.
Once again, Facebook ranks first in suppressing Palestinian content, said the group in its monthly report issued on Tuesday, as 77 violations were documented by the social media giant in October, including completely deleting accounts, deactivating accounts, restricting the reach, and preventing users from using some features, such as live stream, advertisements and posting on groups.
30 other violations were documented on Instagram, 4 on TikTok, 1 on YouTube, 5 on Twitter, and 1 on SoundCloud, Sada Social said.
For the first time, the Center noted, Telegram joined other social media platforms in suppressing the Palestinian content, as the Center monitored 7 violations on the application with several Palestine-related posts deleted. This came after official attempts by Israeli occupation authorities to pressure the Telegram administration to delete accounts and posts related to Palestine.
Sada Social noted that 78 personal accounts, 29 public pages, and two Facebook public groups were exposed to the digital violations.
The Center said 42% of the affected content were words and captions related to the Palestinian cause, 35.6% were pictures of Palestinian martyrs killed by Israeli occupation or pictures of Israeli attacks, and 14% were videos, mainly for funeral processions of martyrs killed by Israeli forces.
Sada Social indicated that journalists and news outlets were the most affected since the start of the year as 49% of the violations were documented against the pages of media outlets and journalists’ accounts due to their coverage of news related to the Israeli attacks, calling this a “digital assassination for the Palestinian journalism” and a “grave violation to the right of freedom of expression.”
Sada Social Center stressed that it is continuing to pressure not only towards restoring the deleted accounts and removing restrictions on other accounts but to work to fix these biased algorithms and standards.
The Center noted that these violations come about two months 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.
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.
It is noteworthy that Sada Social Center is a Palestinian digital rights organization launched in 2017 to protect Palestinian narratives on social media platforms.
In 2020 only, the Center documented 1200 violations against Palestinian content, including 25 on Instagram, 10 on YouTube, 801 on Facebook, and 276 on Twitter.
However, in 2021, it documented 1593 violations against Palestinian content, including 174 on Instagram, 16 on YouTube, 853 on Facebook, and 445 on Twitter.
