AMMAN — An Israeli police officer with his knee on a
Palestinian protester’s face; a video of stun grenades blasting inside
Al-Aqsa Mosque as protesters scatter; an Israeli settler with a machine gun. In the
past week, social media platforms have been flooded with scenes of violence and
protest in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of
Sheikh Jarrah over the pending
evictions of Palestinian families from their homes.
اضافة اعلان
But many users have reported that their posts about Sheikh
Jarrah have been taken down in what amounts to censorship by social media
platforms.
“This is clearly a systematic crackdown and censorship of
Palestinian content,” said Dima Samaro, a lawyer and digital rights expert and
activist, in an interview with Jordan News.
One Palestinian-Jordanian living abroad, for instance, posted
several infographics related to Sheikh Jarrah to his Instagram story on Friday
night. But eleven hours later, they disappeared, he said in a message to Jordan
News.
AccessNow, an international NGO working to defend digital
rights and protect online freedom of expression, alongside 7amleh, a
Palestine-based organization advocating for digital rights, and a variety of
other organizations released a statement on Friday stating that both Facebook
and Twitter are “systematically silencing users protesting and documenting the
evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in the neighborhood of
Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem.” AccessNow claimed that hundreds of posts
documenting the use of violence by Israeli police and settlers against
Palestinian activists protesting the imminent threat of eviction have been
taken down on the platforms.
According to Samaro, this kind of censorship is not
uncommon. “This is not the first incident,” the activist said in an interview
with Jordan News. “There have been many other incidents, not only in Palestine,
but across the region, where it seems there is a certain bias against the
Arabic content. Facebook, for example, does not have content moderators in
Arabic who can also understand the context”, leading to the removal of content
that does not violate Facebook’s policies.
Likewise, Raya Sharbain, program coordinator at the Jordan
Open Source Association (JOSA), told Jordan News that even before protests
erupted in Sheikh Jarrah, “pages that talk about the Palestinian cause, that
try to show the police violence or even settler violence, get removed very
quickly.” In other instances, she said that while the content was not deleted,
the posts received unusually low engagement, indicating that the platform
altered the post’s visibility.
For Sharbain, the censorship of content related to Sheikh
Jarrah exemplifies an ongoing form of discrimination against Palestinian
activists. “When Sheikh Jarrah happened, (censorship) was almost immediate,”
she said. “I’m very glad that it happened because it just proved the point,
what everyone has been saying for years: that Palestinian voices are
continually erased on social media.”
She pointed out that social media is a vital tool for human
rights advocates in the Arab region and beyond. “Social media, it’s not
specific to only the Palestinian diaspora,” she said, linking the posts
documenting violence against Palestinians to posts documenting police brutality
against Black people in the United States, particularly George Floyd, who was
killed by a police officer.
“If it wasn’t for that specific video of George Floyd being
killed by the policeman, the whole uproar that happened and even the trial
against the policeman wouldn’t have happened,” Sharbain said.
“In the Arab world we don’t have any other form of
expression or media expression,” Sharbain said. “These policies affect us a
lot.”
Samaro linked the usage of social media by advocates for
Palestinian human rights, those both from Palestine and from across the world,
to the usage of social media during the 2011 Arab Spring. Social media
platforms weren’t “created for people to organize themselves and mobilize. But
this is how people in the region, and especially countries where the Arab
Spring happened, Tunisia, Egypt, even in Palestine” utilized them, the attorney
explained.
But activists now face the double burden of censorship from
their governments and the social media platforms they once used to advocate.
“There is no way left for you to express your opinion,” said Samaro. “I think
this is clearly discrimination and a way to silence them.”
Both Samaro and Sharbain noted that the Arabic Instagram
hashtag for Al-Aqsa was restricted, just as on Friday night Israeli police
entered Al-Aqsa Mosque and fired rubber bullets and stun grenades at
Palestinian protesters, according to Reuters.
One concern for activists is transparency. Most users whose
content about Sheikh Jarrah was removed received no information about why it
was removed. “As a starting point, they have to be transparent about when they
take the content down,” said Samaro. She called for platforms to publish
“transparency reports about the number of accounts taken down, the reasons
why.”
Instagram acknowledged some issues with the Stories
function, which allows users to post an image that is only available for 24
hours. In a tweet, Instagram’s communications team wrote that, “this is a
widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic and we’re
fixing it right now.” Twitter did not comment.
Some efforts have been made by social media platforms to
produce standards in line with international human rights guidelines and
prevent censorship: Sharbain, for instance, highlighted Facebook’s
much-discussed
Facebook Oversight Board which will make content moderation decisions.
“Facebook has locked users in their products, and there’s no
other medium to effectively share what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah and reach a
wide audience,” said Sharbain.
“We have to get our rights back,” Samaro added. “I think
social media is the only way or platform left to us so we can continue our
battle in getting back our freedoms.”
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