Social Media Complicity: Perpetuating the Digital Occupation of Palestinians

By: Sadaf Doost

[1] to overcome the physical restrictions that deadly, military-guarded checkpoints place on Palestinian freedom of movement.[2] Digital platforms have also served as an avenue for mass protest,[3] providing a megaphone to Palestinians to document the realities of living under settler colonial occupation and apartheid in real-time and fighting off sanitized and biased mainstream media narratives that have gone unchecked for far too long.[4]

At the same time, the dark apparatus of social media has been increasingly weaponized by bad-faith actors bent on silencing human rights advocacy. In October 2016, a Palestinian construction worker in the West Bank was arrested by the Israeli police after a post he made on Facebook was mistranslated from “good morning” to “attack them”,[5] by the site’s artificial intelligence-powered service.[6] The next year, when Nariman Tamimi live-streamed a confrontation outside her home in which her daughter,[7] then 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, slapped a heavily-armed Israeli soldier harassing her family,[8] she was subjected to pretrial detention and later sentenced to eight months in jail alongside her daughter.[9] The confrontation was just half-an-hour after Ahed’s younger cousin was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier. Still, Nariman’s conviction was based on “incitement on social media.”[10]

Such scenarios have only intensified in recent years, barely scratching the surface of how social media has been weaponized to further strip Palestinians of their freedom of speech, expression, and association. In 2021, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Unity Intifada,[11] 390 Palestinians were arrested by Israeli forces,[12] that deployed the same erroneous and broad-sweeping allegations of “incitement of violence” on social media.[13] And in 2022, this number increased to 410.[14] The systemic and digital repression of Palestinians is yet another bid in a much larger scheme to expand state-sanctioned violence towards and erasure of Palestinians into digital realms.[15] As Barghouti alarmingly raised: “Israel has become increasingly adept and unforgiving in inflicting digital violence against Palestinians,[16] whether by using our social media profiles to incriminate us for crimes of expression or erasing us from virtual spaces with the acquiescence of tech companies. It’s the same practice we witness in real life.”

Systemic Cooperation

The digital occupation of Palestinians is not only carried out by criminalizing dissent for justice on social media, but also by means of cooperation between Israeli officials and social media companies. Though this has existed for years, what catalyzed an increase in human rights reporting surrounding the issue was the Israeli regime’s intensifying crackdown on Palestinian human rights in May of 2021.[17]

In the summer of 2021, Israeli forces subjected Palestinians to war crimes in Gaza,[18] and forcible displacement from their homes in east Jerusalem.[19] At the same time, as UN experts documented,[20] settler violence toward Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory were more severe than recent years and included “physical violence, shooting with live ammunition, torching of fields and livestock, theft and vandalization of property, trees and crops, stone-throwing and tenacious intimidation of herders and their families.”[21] Against this backdrop, as protestors turned to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok to spread public awareness, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz communicated to digital platforms the need for proactive removal of content and their cooperation on appeals made by the Israeli government.[22]

It is no coincidence that 7amleh,[23] a Palestinian digital rights organization, documented 500 cases of digital rights violations of Palestinians between May 6 and May 19, 2021—the two-week period[24] where Palestinian dissent and human rights atrocities were at a high.[25] And as the group observed,[26] this suppression of advocacy for Palestinian human rights prompted disturbing questions about the role of private and corporate entities as arbiters of war zone reporting and human rights documentation.

By now, it is also no secret that social media platforms, in determining whether to silence Palestinians, often concede to external pressure by governments and have even worked with some state agents to create their internal policies. The coordination between Facebook and Israeli officials did not begin in 2021. It was as far back as 2016 that a Facebook delegation to Israel  led to an agreement between the two entities,[27] in regard to monitoring “incitement” on the digital platform.[28] At the time, the Israeli government publicly touted that the social media platform had removed–at the government’s request–all but five percent of  “inciting” posts.[29]

The coordination and cooperation between Facebook and the Israeli government, and social media platforms more generally, has only continued to heighten in recent years. In 2018, Israel’s State Attorney’s Office reported a compliance rate of 90 percent between the Israeli Cyber Unit–which sits in the State Attorney’s Office,[30] and “voluntarily” requests digital providers to censor content–and social media platforms at large.[31] In a 2019 press release by Adalah,[32] such “voluntary” requests were  identified as “Alternative Enforcement on a Voluntary Track,” in which the Unit “appeals to content intermediaries like Facebook and Google to remove, restrict or suspend access to certain content, pages or users. . . based on an alleged violation of domestic laws as well as the intermediaries’ own Terms of Service (ToS).”  The case of government suppression of Palestinian digital rights illustrates the dangers of unchecked state action involvement in content moderation and censorship, and demonstrates the need for public accountability.

The digital space is thus one of the battlegrounds in which we see most clearly the intentional and discriminatory silencing of Palestinians at an institutional level. According to 7amleh’s assessment,[33] content that was racist, violent, or otherwise incited actual acts of aggression against Palestinians and Arabs remained on social media platforms. The postings were often explicit and graphic in content, such as a tweet reading “Scum. Just wipe them off the face of the earth and never leave a trace. Slaughter all Gazans and all the Arabs everywhere.”[34] Meanwhile, Twitter suspended numerous accounts of Palestinian activists and advocates who were reporting from the ground, such as that of Mariam Barghouti—a writer and researcher who was documenting the human rights abuses that Israel perpetuated in May. When she turned to Twitter to report from the scene of a protest,[35] Barghouti’s account was subjected to a temporary restriction.[36] Right before Twitter restricted her account, Barghouti tweeted “I feel like I’m in a war zone in Beit El.”[37] Vice reported that Barghouti was asked by Twitter to delete tweets,[38] though she never received specification as to which ones or a clarification of which Twitter policies justified this kind of censorship.

International legal frameworks and recommendations

Legal frameworks regarding corporate accountability and responsibility–especially in the context of human rights–do exist. At the very least, such frameworks ought to be utilized by social media platforms to create a baseline for respecting users’ human rights and prevent institutional complicity in the digital occupation of Palestinians. The United Nations (“UN”) Guiding Principles on Human Rights and Businesses (“Guiding Principles”), which were endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council over a decade ago,[39] are the most authoritative international assessment outlining corporate obligations to uphold human rights.[40] These Principles provide a structure for entities to not only ensure human rights violations do not occur during the course of business transactions,[41] but also administer a mechanism of redress if and when business activity encroaches on users’ human rights. Similarly, the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation (“Santa Clara Principles”),[42] initially launched by human rights organizations and academic experts in 2018, and having undergone a second iteration of review and development from over 50 organizations and individuals in 2020 and 2021, center human rights and due process in content moderation. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has committed to respecting the Guiding Principles,[43] and endorsed the Santa Clara Principles.[44] So too has Twitter, which established that its commitment to “defending and respecting” users’ voices is informed by the Guiding Principles[45] and shared public support for the Santa Clara Principles.[46]

Notable guidance for corporate behavior,[47] as outlined by Guiding Principle 31, includes transparency to users, by releasing data about content that has been flagged—including by states—or restricted. Along these lines, private actors moderating speech must increase government transparency and states’ roles in facilitating, recommending, or guiding content moderation. As UN experts have also noted,[48] “[s]tate authorities increasingly seek content removals” outside legal bounds, including by demanding or pressuring businesses “to accelerate content removals.” It follows that channels for transparency and accountability, especially against the backdrop of state regulation or influence, are long overdue. In line with the Guiding Principles, other avenues for accountability and redress in increasing private and public interference in content moderation include disclosing (a) requests made to flag, remove, restrict, or moderate content; (b) the public or private actor(s) responsible for content flagged, removed, restricted, or moderated; (c) the ultimate outcome of the respective requests and (d) the reasoning behind the determination of the public or private actor(s) requests and the respective platform policy or policies that justify the aforementioned determination. Santa Clara Principle 4, titled State Involvement in Content Moderation,[49] further builds on such disclosures by advocating, in part, for users’ expanded access of information as to whether content moderation inquiries are rooted in the activity of state actors, local laws or company rules, or policies. For example, Principle 4 clearly outlines the need for users being able to access details of “any rules or policies, whether applying globally or in certain jurisdictions, which seek to reflect requirements of local laws” and “any formal or informal working relationships and/or agreements the company has with state actors when it comes to flagging content or accounts or any other action taken by the company.”

Increased transparency of how digital giants censor, silence, and aid in the suppression of human rights is urgently needed. Especially in times of increased human rights and international law violations, digital platform users turn to social media to document state violence, surveillance, brutality, and war crimes. This is especially clear in the case of Palestine, where mainstream outlets repeatedly fail affected communities by refusing to accurately document state violence.[50] It is past due time for social media companies to cease trading in platform users’ right to expression for the appeasement of state governments.