PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Inside Meta’s war on Palestinian content
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
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Alaa Salama
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Alaa Salama
For years, Palestinian journalists, activists, and media organizations have encountered widespread restrictions on social media: posts removed, accounts suspended, livestreams cut off, and audiences suddenly 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, 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.
With us today is Nadim Nashif, executive director of 7amleh, to explain how the organization analyzed more than 3,000 documented cases of Meta restricting Palestinian content over the past five years, how 7amleh is fighting back, and occasionally, winning, and how media and civil society organizations can do the same.
Nadim, thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for all the work that you do.
Nadim Nashif
Thank you for having me.
Alaa Salama
It’s our pleasure. In your report, you introduce the term ‘platformicide’ to describe the structural and intentional erasure of Palestinian digital presence. Why did you decide to anchor digital censorship in a concept that’s close to physical erasure?
Nadim Nashif
Well, because we are speaking about processes of erasure that are also happening on the digital sphere: erasing Palestinian existence from maps, adapting Israeli terminology on Palestinian areas, wiping out, erasing Palestinian narratives from social media. There is a larger process that’s happening on the online that is a parallel to the offline. And that’s why we chose this name.
Alaa Salama
All political content is now getting disadvantaged by social media platforms to some degree. We know that algorithms favor engagement. We know that platforms want to stay advertiser friendly, and so they try to limit how much political content gets an exposure. We also know that they try to incentivize people to stay on the platform, and so external links are discouraged. Can you tell us a bit what makes Meta’s treatment of Palestinian content specifically different from this baseline?
Nadim Nashif
I agree with you. Most of the platforms want to see themselves as entertainment platforms, right? So they would prioritize through their algorithms content that is around entertainment rather than political content or news content. So they would push back through the algorithms that kind of news. But when we are speaking about Palestinian narrative, this is very different because it’s not about priority. It’s about erasure. It’s about the deleting. And this has been happening over a decade. There is almost a decade that 7amle We are struggling with the content moderation policies of those platforms, specifically Meta, and before that, they were just Facebook. And through the years, they have been systematically working to delete, basically to hide, to do account restrictions. And this is very different from, let’s say, a news website that having social media accounts somewhere, let’s say, from Europe or from Africa. that its news is not getting as exposed as they would want to, to Palestinian media that they cripple the accounts in a way that it could be restricted. There is hardly any reachability to their content. So it’s very different between both situations.
Alaa Salama
I want to go back a bit to the concept of platformicide. Can you briefly tell us specifically about what the reports mean? findings are.
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, so the basic idea is that 7amleh has been documenting since May 21 cases of restrictions, takedowns, and other violations that Meta, through its different platforms, have been doing to Palestinian content. and during the year we documented thousands of cases. So what we did is basically we took all these cases and together with a group of researchers from Utrecht University, we analyzed to show the patterns because what we wanted to say is basically we have different cases, but when it comes for us to study these more than 3,000 cases, we are basically seeing and showing the patterns, right? So we’re seeing hundreds and thousands of cases of being deleted or restricted because of use of DOI or any other policy. So basically this research and study, it’s also proved through thousands of cases, how much meta is biased, how much my meta is hostile towards Palestinian narrative and what has been happening in the different five years in the different basically stops and stations. So because we also cover May ‘21 and the Sheikh Jarrah events, we also cover October ‘23 and the events followed. And we covered the declaration of Mark Zuckerberg in January ‘25, where basically he changed also the content, globally changed the content moderation policies. So we go through this kind of historical moments and we see their impact on Palestinian content moderation. And the only stable point here is that basically Meta systematically continued to silence Palestinian narratives. And we show that in numbers and figures.
Alaa Salama
You mentioned DOI, which is the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals Policy, which is a policy that Meta, I suppose, uses to censor content that has to do with violence. Can you tell us why such a policy would be used against activists and journalists? In the report, you mention over 57% of identifiable violations from Meta relying on this policy. Tell us what it is and why is it being used for journalists?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, so the main tool that is used against Palestinians is the DOI, which we basically learn from that, that Meta is dealing with Palestinian content from a security lens, right? And basically, through this policy, they are harming very legitimate content that is coming from journalists, media organizations, content creators and basically harming them, restricting their accounts, deleting the content. But I think we need to go back in history a little bit, like to go 10 years before that, because this policy was built from the beginning into two layers. Palestinians basically suffer from two layers of discrimination. One layer is being part of the Arabic language and the Arabic sphere, because we need also to remember that those companies specifically Meta, but also the other U.S.-based companies and the way they dealt with Arabic language content through the years was in a very suspicious way. It came on the background of 9/11 and the mentality to see the Arabic world and the Arabic language and the Muslim culture as part of something suspicious and something that is pushing for violence and for terrorism. And that’s why the Arabic classifier, the machine, the automated machines who are doing basically The automated content moderation is more than 10 years. It’s very developed. From our perspective, it’s overdeveloped. Comparing, for example, with the Hebrew language classifier, which was deployed only in September ‘23, right?
There is almost one decade difference between the two classifiers. And this is coming on the background that they are looking on Arabic language as something that’s suspicious. One of the examples, for example, of how much the hostile approach is that for decades and more, they basically banned the word ‘shaheed’ on their platform. So each time that you wrote ‘shaheed’, they explain it as that you are praising violence and that you are supporting terrorism, et cetera, et cetera. And obviously this approach is very Islamophobic. It’s something that, you know, you’re not understanding the culture.
The word ‘shaheed’ has so many interpretations in different contexts and definitely not necessarily praising violence. And finally, they changed that policy a couple of years. But it meant that the way how these platforms are looking onto Arabic language and Arabic culture and Muslim heritage. Now, on this background, Palestinians have also another layer. The second layer is being Palestinian. So most of the actually all except Fatah or of the Palestinian political party are designated by the U.S. government, etc.
So it means that any political discussion like now with the coming elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council any kind of election, even if you are mentioning these political groups, armed groups, etc., even if you are criticizing them, your account would be restricted, the content will be taken down. So this is the background of how Palestinian content is being dealt with, several layers of discrimination, while at the same time, the Hebrew language classifier was only deployed recently And as of 7amleh’s test, it’s a very weak classifier. It’s not really holding, it’s not really preventing the incitement, the genocidal rhetoric that has been happening on those platforms in the last two and a half, three years.
Alaa Salama
Could you just explain this to us? Is this an automated system that reads and understands language and flags posts by itself?
Nadim Nashif
Today, the vast majority of the content moderation processes are automated and done by machines, basically. So if the machine believes that there’s a threshold, that it’s violating the rules according to certain standards, it will automatically take down the content and restrict the account. So this work is vastly, specifically today, but also in the last years, more and more moving to machines and automated work. And there are really like very few cases, maybe 10% or less of cases that are looked at by humans, specifically when there are appeals. But the vast majority of this work is done by automation.
Alaa Salama
As journalists on these platforms, we have to report on violent events. We have to use images that maybe contain, I don’t know, weapons that maybe contain injured people. We might quote anyone, terrorists or not terrorists, state actors, politicians, that’s part of journalism. It seems like that needs to be protected. Is that not the case?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, so at certain point the DOI policy was changed into a place where they were saying if you are reporting or discussing those organizations in a way that you are not glorifying them and not supporting them. It could be a media context or otherwise or political discussion. This should be a legitimate on the platform of Meta. There was also another part which called the newsworthiness. So even if there is a content that is violating the platform policy, but because it’s very important for people to know that this is happening and somebody is saying that, they will allow this too.
Unfortunately, this is not being implemented in the Palestinian content. When Palestinian journalists, and we have like hundreds of cases like this, are reporting on what’s happening, and they are putting it in contextualization, right? As a journalist, you have to put the contextualization, not just, you know, to copy paste the declaration of certain personality, for example. So even when it’s done in a proper journalistic way, still the account would be restricted and the content would be taken down. And we have to understand, in the context of war, for people in Gaza, it could be decisions of, you know, it’s a matter of life, right? Your decision.
So we need the information. You need to understand who’s saying what in order for you to react in your life and to save yourself and your family. And this is creating a huge problem. And we have to understand that the work of the journalists and the media creators and the content creators is very essential. The camera, the photo, the video is very important because in many cases also it’s something that is protecting the people against the attacks that are happening from the occupation army, from other sides, etc., from the settlers. You know, the camera of the people who are standing in Masafer Yatta and filming the attacks of the army, the attacks of the violent settlers, So it’s very important for the people to know that this is happening, that there is violence, even if there are graphic photos.
And in many cases, this is being prevented by the platform, despite long -time criticism. The criticism happened even in Sheikh Jarrah uprising on May ‘21, where the people in their houses were filming the attacks from the police and from the settlers, and still being banned from the live stream and still being restricted. Unfortunately, our history with Meta, you know, it’s repeating itself since 10 years. There’s always restrictions. There’s always stopping the people from, you know, documenting what’s happening in a minute of human rights violations and the minutes of attacks where the camera and the live stream is the only protection those people have.
Alaa Salama
Speaking of Gaza, as we know, international journalists are barred from Gaza and Israel has killed over 200 journalists there so far, which means that citizen journalism is very essential there. Have you noticed Meta restricting the access of Gazan journalists to its platform or suspending their accounts or stopping their reporting?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, Meta did that in a very systematic way. But I think we need also to go back to October ‘23 and look how the company, you know, after the 7th of October changed their content moderation because it was a moment that they changed the content moderation in October ‘23 in a way that they looked at it that there is, you know, bad guys and good guys and align themselves with Israel. And this is not something that 7amleh or other human rights organizations or digital rights organizations are saying. This is something that was leaked in the Wall Street Journal report at that time, basically saying and the leaks were basically the internal correspondence and the emails between the executives and the company. So they at that time, they decided that they want to lower the threshold of the machines. So as we spoke before, there’s a certain. confidence that the machine needs to reach in order to take down the content. And that was 80% confidence that this specific piece of content is violating the rules. They decided at that point to lower the threshold to 25% for Palestinians, for Egyptians, for Jordanians, for Lebanese. So Palestinians and the surrounding countries had aggressive content moderation policy. People criticize 80%. So let’s think, what does it mean to reach a situation that you have 20 % assurance or threshold of the machine? It means that you are doing huge takedowns, that there are lots of false positives, and it’s very problematic.
Alaa Salama
Your data also shows that when it comes to Palestinians or to Palestine related content. Meta favors banning accounts or suspending whole accounts as opposed to just deleting a post. Why do you think we see it more often in the Palestinian context?
Nadim Nashif
So we were surprised by this approach, also taking into account that normally this is not the way that they do things. Normally they, you know, at least they give three strikes until reaching, you know, the level of restricting the account itself, because obviously this is much more aggressive way of dealing with the problem. So even if we assume that somebody is violating with certain content, rushing to, you know, ban the whole account or restricting the account. There’s no reasonable approach in this thing. Instead of saying this, let’s say this account, this content is being violative, so we take down this content. But, you know, restricting the whole account obviously means that that person cannot continue and express himself and do the reports if he’s a journalist or content creators.
Alaa Salama
There are also more insidious ways, like shadow banning, for example, or restricting certain access to certain tools that creators have. But specifically shadow banning, which seems very difficult to prove, because by definition, the person would not be able to contest it because they might not even know about it. How did you go about documenting that? And how often do you see Meta using it on Palestinian content?
Nadim Nashif
It’s used very often, specifically in the first year of the war on Gaza. It was used aggressively. I mean, this is something that is also, in a way, I mean, they’re not saying this officially, but you can see it in the reach, right? So content creators, influencers and others were seeing that normally when they speak about certain topic, they are reaching, let’s say, 200,000 people with that piece of content, and suddenly when they are speaking about Palestine, it’s like 2,000, 3,000. So there is a dramatic drop, and they are seeing it with the specific pieces of content that are around Palestine. So the company is using this to tune down the issue of Palestine, to tune down the issue of Gaza, and to have less reachability, basically, to the wider public around the world.
Alaa Salama
That’s something that you’ve also mentioned in the report, which is that sometimes people don’t have access to certain abilities within the platform, while the platform is showing that the account is actually in good standing. And this is something that I’ve dealt with, and it’s very frustrating, and there’s no way to actually deal with it, because on paper it looks like nothing is wrong. Is this something that you’ve also noticed being used a lot? How do people deal with it?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, this is the problem. That this issue and the shadow banning are not official policies so sometimes to do these kind of more, in a way, sneaky approaches to shadow ban without letting you know. I mean, we were asking about accounts and saying this account is having this and that problem. We’re saying, no, the account is fine. There’s no restriction from our side. But clearly, in terms of reachability, clearly that there are some features that they are not able to use. And there’s lots of excuses sometimes, like, around, yeah, we had a technical problem, we had a glitch, though this is a phenomenon. I mean, it’s not just, you know, one case. We’re seeing it in many accounts, so probably something is much more than just a glitch or a technical problem with a specific person.
Alaa Salama
Has Meta responded in any way to these findings?
Nadim Nashif
Not yet. We did send the report to them and ask for their reactions on that. But I have to tell you that there’s not much hope from our experience doing advocacy in front of the company. We are not putting many hopes on their reactions. They have been doing very bad policies and discriminatory policies. And I have to say, this is not only Palestine. We have to, if we zoom out and look at how Meta is dealing globally, Meta seeing themselves as part of the Western world and its interest and its economy. So they want to satisfy the U.S. administration, specifically after Trump administration got into the job, but also even before. And if we compare their policies and their changes of policy in Ukraine and after the Ukraine war started, right, and them adapting their policies and allowing lots of violations that were from the side of Ukrainians and saying this is a specific case so we will allow more and we will be much more flexible comparing with Palestine where basically they are against the occupied party and the contrary of what they did in Ukraine. And then If we even look in other places, if we look about how Meta and Facebook dealt with the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, if we look at how they dealt with the Tigray people genocide. So for example, if we speak about Kashmir and the relationship of Meta with the Indian government, which is India for them, obviously, it’s a huge market, there are economic consideration, et cetera, et cetera. So the result basically is that they are aligning their policy with the government. So the economical interest of the company and the political interest and the way they see themselves and the way that they see in which camp, political camp, they are part of it, it also implies a lot in their policies and how they are doing the content moderation in the different areas around the world.
Alaa Salama
So what you’re saying is that this is not simply an attack on Palestinian content. It’s much wider, but also it’s really affecting everyone who wants to know more, regardless of where they’re from, as long as they’re interested or can relate to specific issues, META is stopping them from having the same access to content and information that they would normally need to get. How do we deal with this?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, I want to stress also, it’s not only about the information they get, but it’s also the issue of the incitement, which is really problematic. If we speak in the context of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, Meta did zero on stopping the incitement against the Rohingya people before the genocide happened and before they were ethnically cleansed there. We all know how much a huge impact this smear campaigns, incitement, genocidal rhetoric would impact on the ground, and then how the companies reacting to it. So there’s a huge consequence to those content moderation policies. how we react to the company.
It’s very difficult to impact their policies and to change policies at Meta. Obviously, it’s a huge company with huge resources. Sometimes they are stronger than even states and governments. And they have, you know, all the teams and all the abilities to have, I don’t know, hundreds of lawyers, you know, tackling you back. So that’s not a simple story. But still, I think as civic society, we have the role to, you know, gather the evidence.
And as 7amleh is doing, always to have like a very grounded evidence, well documented, so we have the case and we are not just being gaslighted by the company in an easy way, which is normally their tactics. And to expose those, to expose in media, to expose in other places, to try to influence also decision makers on the EU level, the U.S. level, political level. Obviously, there is not much to talk currently, because obviously, they’re in a totally different place. But at least in the places in the UN, mechanisms in the EU and other places where we can impact and through regulatory processes to try to impact as much as possible.
Alaa Salama
Meta and other platforms, they’re private companies, but we’re getting to a point where we don’t have a choice in whether or not we use them and whether or not we publish our content on them. All over the world, news websites, magazines have seen huge reductions readership after Meta introduced some regulations about disadvantaging political content. It feels like we have become stuck in a system where we don’t have much of a choice, where there is this kind of monopoly and we have to play within these rules. Would you say that we can try to affect these companies in a way that really could force them to at least play more fair? Or is that a lost battle and we need to start looking for alternatives?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, I think what the companies such as Meta right now care about is like two things mainly, is the issue of court orders and court decisions and government decisions. And I can go back to the example of the media outlets in Canada and Australia, basically, because the government forced Meta. If you’re going to take the content and allow the content in a platform, you have to compensate them. And then the company decided not to allow it. And there is the whole legal struggle that’s happening there. So this is one example of pushing the company in a serious way to adjust its policy and to compensate the media. Because obviously they harmed the business model that all the media outlets are working on. But I can tell you on the Palestinian level, it’s even worse because even the monetization processes that is allowed in many countries is not allowed for Palestinian media, which means that the Palestinian media is even suffering more. But in general and globally, I think, yes, we have to continue pushing wherever we can, either legally by courts or when there are like governments who can protect the media outlet and create these decisions that, you know, under regulatory frames, for example, the Digital Service Act and the EU is one of the regulatory frames that is coming basically to protect the people and the citizens and their rights. So there are attempts to regulate this in a way that to give some limits on the company. The problem is that in the U.S., the approach is very different, right?
The approach of the this administration, and even the ones before, is basically to have as less possible legislation and regulation, and to give their companies the freedom of, you know, to make as much profit as possible, to keep the growing in a context that they want to have like as, you know, zero even regulation on those companies, and obviously all the harm that come from such approach.
Alaa Salama
You mentioned something interesting, which you also touch on in a different report, which is that Palestinians are disadvantaged even before they put their content on these platforms by not being monetized, by not having access to tools such as PayPal, but also on an infrastructure level. We know that the Palestinians in the West Bank have only gotten 3G, I think, a few years ago. In Gaza, they’re still running on 2G which is much much slower and it doesn’t even stop there like we know that in Nazareth where it’s a majority Palestinian city they have weaker infrastructure than Israeli cities, for example. Can you talk to us about that?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, we have to recognize when it comes to infrastructure that there is an apartheid state that is making sure Palestinians are not getting the technology, that they are staying backwards. We have also to go back to Oslo agreements that are limiting Palestinians because each piece of communication, each component that the Palestinian telecommunication companies want to get every cell tower, everything around this have to get the Israeli telecommunication ministry. And we know what Minister Karhi have been doing in the last years, basically disapproving anything. And as you mentioned, even before the war, the telecommunication infrastructure in Gaza was second generation, which is the oldest basically, I think globally, maybe the oldest network. And only recently, the Palestinian telecommunication companies were allowed for 3G in the West Bank. And again, we are speaking in the world right now in the 5G and moving to the sixth one, while Palestinians are backwards and not allowed to get this.
And even after the American administration was pushing, you know, the Israeli government to allow those companies to have 4G, till now, it did not happen. And obviously also there is like lots of money and interest behind this decisions because Palestinians in certain areas in the West Bank, many of them are using Israeli telecommunication companies, right? So somebody who is also profiting from this. But there is like a political decision to keep the Palestinians in the backward and the level of infrastructure to make sure that’s easier to control. And now even in Gaza, like why to destruct all the telecommunication and not allowing any components to come in? So this is the system. But this is about the infrastructure, but also there’s Israeli pressure on international companies not allowing Palestinians to use their platforms and. For example, if we take the case of PayPal, so Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot use PayPal. And this also comes from Israeli pressure, right? It’s not just the company decision. There are influences there, and there are arguments that have been used. Part of the argument, if you allow this, you would allow terror financing.
If you allow this, you allow money laundry, et cetera, et cetera. Despite that, the Palestinian banks reached to international standards. They did all the reforms that they requested. They are working with several international systems of payments. but still there is this pressure to collectively punish the Palestinians and to see Palestinians from a security lens and that they are not allowed and they have to be controlled and in this way also to harm any possibility of future development of Palestinian independent digital economy. And I guess this is basically the aim of all of those pressures.
Alaa Salama
In one of your reports you talk about how violent Israeli content is being monetized, and thus both the company and the people making this content are making money from it.
Nadim Nashif
Right. So one of the examples I can tell you about is the very violent groups of No’ar Gva’ot, the Hilltop Youth, also being monetized. This was mind -blowing for us when we were doing the research and we are finding all these very violent groups are being violated. So it’s not only that the company is allowing the hateful, the genocidal rhetoric, the insightful content to be on its platform and not dealing with it, they are incentivizing these entities and personalities to keep doing this. They are incentivizing the violence of the Helltop youth in the West Bank because, you know, they would publish content on their pages, getting more crowd and then getting more money.
And they will do again the attacks and to film the attacks and doing money. It’s a good business for them. And Meta is complicit on that. And this is basically the monetization research we published recently. Basically, we show the evidence how these groups and entities are being incentivized by Meta to continue to do these horrible things that they are doing in the West Bank. One of the things we did not speak about is that all the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are categorically excluded from this monetization program, right?
So if you are an Israeli, you are allowed to join the monetization program. But if you are a Palestinian, you are not allowed to join the monetization program, which creates a situation where basically, if you are, you know, either a legitimate media in Ramallah doing your work, your journalist, etc. you’re not allowed to monetize it. But if you are a violent sitter in one of the hilltop youth groups somewhere in the area of Ramallah, you are getting monetized. And this is part of the problem and how the system is creating the imbalances and the discriminatory approach.
Alaa Salama
Ironically, social media was seen as a tool of social change. It was giving voice to the voiceless. I’ll go back to the Arab Spring, and this maybe touches a bit on 7amleh and how it started. When we use social media to organize, we use social media because we couldn’t get access to mainstream media, especially in Arab countries. Is this over? Are we in an era where social change and political change through social media is being engineered out of it?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, definitely it is. I mean, at that time, at the time of the Arab Spring, we were very optimistic and people were saying, you know, technology would liberate the people and social media is some kind of decentralization, right? Because before, I mean, we were getting news and information through somebody, like there was like editing setting or an editor who decided, you know, what’s the public taste, what’s the public need to know or not to know, and then you had the social media and people had this kind of atmosphere. Yes, we can speak about whatever we would like. We can report about whatever we’d like. And different kind of journalism started and content creation. But unfortunately, this is not the reality we’re living in. I mean, social media platforms in the background, they have political interests. We saw what happened with TikTok, maybe the only company regarding Israel-Palestine that was not like really in the same exact line of the American-based companies like X, YouTube and Meta. Not that TikTok was not like censoring Palestinian content, they were, but maybe a little bit less. Somebody decided to buy the company in the U.S. and with a very clear political interest, and basically to engineer the whole platform in a way that they want the American youth to see the world in a very specific way. So obviously we are in an era that is very problematic, even in that sense, and maybe some of the margins that we have right now will not be there in the years to come.
Alaa Salama
I want to close on an optimistic note. If that’s even possible. But we know 7amleh has succeeded on multiple occasions. You have succeeded in lifting the outright ban on the use of the word martyr, ‘shaheed’ in Arabic. You’ve succeeded in enforcing Meta to check their rules in regards to Hebrew language. Right now, in this moment, what can we as media outlets, as content creators, as civil society organizations do to to get back some of these rights and protect our rights on these platforms?
Nadim Nashif
Yeah, despite how much the situation is problematic, obviously we have to keep the struggle and to find any creative ways of how to push back those policies and the companies and to hold the companies accountable. So yes, 7amleh managed in the past years to change certain policies around the ‘shaheed’ and around other policies. And we will keep doing this engagement. But I think it’s very important for us to do the documentation because the work that we have been doing is very much grounded on evidence, on case documentation. And this is not something like in general, a kind of a general feeling, but rather than an approach of advocacy that is based on data and documentation. I think generally for civic society, I’m now speaking also globally, not only Palestine-Israel related, we need to have much more kind of creative approach towards tech accountability, right? Because after Trump administration, or since Trump administration, the companies went to much more to the right side in their approach. So they were like pretending things before that they cared about human rights, that they care about different things, they dropped the masks and they started acting in that way. So even the advocacy approaches, meeting with civic society, et cetera, it also changed. So that’s why the advocacy approach need to be changed. And I think many of us trying to find new tactics and new ways to leverage, you know, to some influence on those companies.
So for example, in 7amleh, we are doing lots of shareholder engagement. So we are reaching out to shareholders at Meta, explaining the problem, asking them to ask questions to the leadership of the company in the annual meeting of the shareholders. voices to that meeting. We managed to bring a recording of Fatin Alwan, a prominent Palestinian journalist, to that meeting through friendly shareholders and to introduce a resolution in that annual meeting that the company needs to do much better in terms of human rights due diligence to make sure that they are not doing harm in Palestine in the Palestinian context. So there are different ways of more kind of creative ways and tactics that we have been using in order to impact and in order to have our cause still there and pushing the company on their policies that are discriminatory towards Palestinians.
Alaa Salama
Thank you so much, Nadim, for all the work that you do and for talking to us at +972.
Nadim Nashif
Thank you, Alaa. It was a pleasure.
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Alaa Salama
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