AMMAN — Jouman Barakat, a woman living in Amman, was used to
getting 20,000 views on her Instagram story. But when the influencer started
posting content in support of Palestine, she noticed that her views dropped to
only 4,000, a fifth of what she had before.
اضافة اعلان
Hoping to increase viewership, Barakat, (who has 60,000
followers on Instagram and 100,000 on TikTok), initiated a new strategy:
censoring her words, writing “P.lestine” instead of “Palestine” or “Isr@el”
instead of “Israel” for instance. Soon her views shot back up to 16,000.
“It was truly appalling to see how easy it was for
organizations like Facebook and Instagram to censor Palestinians all over the
world,” she said in a message to Jordan News.
Several Jordanian social media users similarly told Jordan
News about having their viewership drop after posting pro-Palestine
content. One said that her views occasionally dropped to just 20 when she
posted Palestinian content; another said that his viewership had dropped by
three quarters.
Across social media, posts have circulated advising
activists on how to best use their platforms to avoid censorship. A creative
consultancy based in Amman called Loop, for example, posted a list of tips on
Instagram titled “How to Stop Getting Censored on Social.”
The list includes asking followers to interact with your
posts, using alternative spellings, and taking breaks from the content facing
censorship (like interspersing screenshots of casualties in Gaza with cat
photos, as some creative users have done).
The censorship these users describe is less direct than a
post simply being removed or an account banned: instead, they are
“shadowbanned.” Shadowbanning describes “either your account being suspended or
features restricted, or engagement tampered with, without receiving a
notification about it,” according to Raya Sharbain, program coordinator at the
Jordan Open Source Association (JOSA). So while the user is able to post
normally, their pro-Palestine posts might be hidden from other users’ feeds,
she told Jordan News.
The reason Instagram or Facebook might shadowban a user
instead of just banning them is simple, according to Dima Samaro, a lawyer and
digital rights expert and activist. “When these platforms keep banning all the
content and users that violate their community standards, this is harmful for
their business model,” she told Jordan News during an interview,
explaining that social media companies rely on high numbers of users and level
of engagement to sell ads.
“Shadowbanning is a kind of leeway for them to escape any
accountability or criticism from organizations and activists from different
stakeholders and actors,” she added.
Shahed Jallad, a choreographer, dancer, and Palestinian
social media activist living in Amman, told Jordan News that she had
never heard of shadowbanning until she saw friends posting tips on how to trick
Instagram’s content moderation algorithms.
She noticed that when she posted heavily about Palestine,
views on her Instagram story, where she has over 2,000 followers, dropped from
800-1,000 to only 200.
“I haven’t seen this strategy used before,” said Samaro.
“This is the first time.”
Jallad pointed out that the domination of
Facebook and
Instagram makes it impossible to avoid them despite their censorship.
“Boycotting Instagram and Facebook would backfire because we are getting 99
percent of the news through those platforms unfortunately,” she said. “They are
giving us the chance to stay informed and watch actual footage of or taken by
people in Palestine.”
“So we had to find ways to take advantage (of the fact) that
for once Palestine’s reality and truth can be seen by the whole world.”
Sharbain explained that the content moderation policies at
social media platforms are an opaque “black box.” There is no way to know which
posts come first in your Instagram feed, for instance. Sharbain said that
social media platforms use a combination of machine moderation which processes
posts automatically and human content moderation. “So it’s not always the
algorithm, it’s a mix of everything,” she said.
According to Sharbain, it is not unusual for governments to
request social media content be censored or shadowbanned. In 2020, 7amleh, a
Haifa-based organization advocating for digital rights, found that Facebook
complied with 81 percent of the Israeli government’s requests to remove
content, including content related to Palestine.
Both Barakat and Sharbain brought up recent meetings between
the Israeli government and the leadership at Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok.
“Lobbyists and executives from these social media platforms prioritized meeting
with (officials) to address the situation and delayed meeting with Palestinian
authorities for a week,” said Barakat.
“What else do we expect from platforms like these when the
people who head them cannot be trusted?”
There are other links between content moderation and the
Israeli government; Samaro told Jordan News that Emi Palmor, one member
of Facebook’s Oversight Board, oft-called the company’s “Supreme Court”, used
to lead Israel’s cyber unit.
“Shadowbanning” is just one of a toolbox of methods used to
censor pro-Palestinian social media content. Recently, the Intercept leaked a
secret Facebook policy for moderating the term “Zionist.” While the policy was
originally designed to censor only speech that used anti-Zionism as a proxy for
anti-Semitism, according to Sharbain, in reality it was used to suppress any
criticism of Israel and documentation of Israeli aggression towards
Palestinians.
“This is a social media war. Israel is being exposed
worldwide for the atrocious crimes it’s doing against Palestinians and
humanity. The truth is finally coming out and it is all thanks to the power
that the camera and social media equally hold,” said Barakat, the influencer
and activist.
Social media platforms “must be held accountable,” said
Sharbain. “This is a fight for liberation that’s being tampered with. When
you’re talking about a population mostly in the diaspora, they rely on
specifically these channels to express what they’re going through.”
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