Listen here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
In 2011, when people in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and beyond took to the streets demanding democracy and political change, social media seemed like a tool that empowered people to document, organize, and report without the filter of legacy media and state-controlled newspapers. For a moment, social media placed power in the hands of the people, helping to destabilize regimes that had stood strong for decades. Fifteen years later, the same cannot be said today.
For years, Palestinian journalists, activists, and media organizations have faced systematic restrictions on social media: posts removed, accounts suspended, livestreams cut off, and audiences reduced without explanation. However, the idea that this was due to political censorship has remained mostly speculative, with the people affected having no way to prove it definitively.
But a new report by 7amleh (pronounced “Hamleh”), the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, based on years of empirical research — which adds to earlier reports by Human Rights Watch and the BBC — demonstrates beyond any doubt that Palestinians are being systematically censored on social media platforms owned by the technology company Meta, which include Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The report also gives this phenomenon a name, “platformicide,” which 7amleh describes as the deliberate erasure of Palestinian existence and narratives in the digital sphere.
While referring to online platforms, the term is clearly evocative of the physical erasure taking place across Palestine — from the depopulation of hundreds of villages during the Nakba of 1948, to the genocide in Gaza and the almost complete destruction of the enclave, to the accelerating displacement of dozens of Palestinian communities across the West Bank.
In this episode of The +972 Podcast, Nadim Nashif, 7amleh’s executive director, explains how the organizations analyzed more than 3,500 documented cases of Meta restricting Palestinian content over the past five years. The findings reveal a pattern: the repeated deletion of posts, suspension of accounts, and quiet limiting of the reach of content by or about Palestinians.
The consequences, especially in Gaza, have been life or death. With Israel barring international journalists from entering the Strip and killing around 250 Palestinian media workers, social media has been one of the few avenues for Gazans to document attacks, issue warnings, and communicate information that can determine whether others survive. Yet Meta has repeatedly restricted their accounts, blocked them from live-streaming, and removed footage under policies related to violence or dangerous organizations, even when the material was clearly journalistic.
Reflecting on the stark contrast between the Arab uprisings and today’s reality, Nashif notes how these once-celebrated platforms have become centralized systems whose rules reflect corporate, economic, and geopolitical interests, and how these policies control what audiences see in an effort to shape public opinion.
Although facing an uphill battle, 7amleh’s work shows that these policies can and should be challenged. To do so, Nashif argues, civil society must develop methods of holding technology companies accountable — methods grounded not in anecdote, but in evidence.
Additional reading:
