The Instagram account of a well known anti-Zionist Jewish comedian was deleted after Meta’s Public Policy Director for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora viewed one of his stories. This is just one example of the anti-Palestinian bias across Big Tech.
Democracy for the Arab World Now is calling on the U.S. government to investigate four lobbyists connected to the NSO Group for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Recent headlines have only confirmed people’s fears: Israel is monitoring and censoring everything about Palestinian life — both online and in the digital sphere. Mondoweiss speaks with 7amleh’s Nadim Nashif about the launch of the first open source online platform to monitor, document, and follow up on the digital rights violations of Palestinians.
Social media platforms are pulling seemingly innocuous observations that Palestinians are incurring a great deal of harm from Israeli actions under the specter of “hate speech” violations.
A new investigation shows how governments used an Israeli spyware company to target journalists and activists around the world.
In recent weeks Palestinian rights advocates have faced varying forms of censorship across social media while the same heavy-handed regulation has not been enforced for Israeli content, allowing hate speech and incitement against Palestinians to spread unfettered. Former Facebook executive Ashraf Zeitoon tells Mondoweiss, “This is part of a smart system and it is a deliberate, systematic silencing of Palestinian voices due to pressure from the Israeli government…there is no sugar coating it.”
The organizers of the Open Classroom event, “Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine” say they had their right to free speech silenced by private tech companies Zoom, Facebook, and Eventbrite when the companies bowed to the fraudulent threat of prosecution. Now the organizers are calling on supporters to demand an end to corporate control of academia and an end to Israel lobby censorship and bullying.
On April 12 Facebook removed the event page for a panel on Palestine. The next day the tech company shut down the page for the academic program, the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program at San Francisco State University, that sponsored it.
BDS activists in Gaza tried to promote a video on Facebook that compares Israel and apartheid South Africa. The platform rejected the promotion and shadow banned the account. Unfortunately this is not an isolated case.
A California judge recently threw out a lawsuit launched by a former Israeli solider which attempted to apply Israeli defamation law against Palestinian activist Suhair Nafal. Nafal’s attorney says the attempt to introduce Israeli law into a U.S. courtroom was truly unprecedented. “This was not a lawsuit against Suhair,” he told Mondoweiss. “This was a lawsuit from Israel against all activists.”