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Omar Zahzah is an Assistant Professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies (AMED) in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies (RRS) at San Francisco State University. A scholar-activist of Lebanese Palestinian descent, Dr. Zahzah is the former Education and Advocacy Coordinator of Eyewitness Palestine has been an organizer for Palestinian liberation for many years.

In issue #151 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Dr Zahzah's book, Terms of Servitude. Here he writes about a Palestinian advocacy group's Instagram account getting deleted over a Women's Day post, exemplifying how social media platforms use opaque censorship and "black box gaslighting" to suppress Palestinian political expression.

On March 8, 2022, Instagram—owned by Meta—deleted the main account of the organization Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a New York City-based Palestinian community organization. The social media account was removed over a post that highlighted revolutionary Palestinian women in commemoration of International Women’s Day. WOL explained that their account was suspended “after years of online censorship and shadow banning.” Shadow banning is the practice of restricting social media content without explicitly alerting the user. In a phenomenon Kelley Cotter calls “black box gaslighting,” social media companies hide the specific functioning of their algorithms, forcing users to rely on contradictory and at times false information provided by company officials to explain sudden drops in engagement. This endows social media companies with an oppressive epistemic authority, as users come to question the accuracy of information and even the validity of their own experiences on digital platforms. While companies like Facebook, X, and YouTube once styled themselves protectors of free speech, especially during the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011, their actions in the years since have proved otherwise. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in 2020, rampant social media censorship is targeted against the same countries in the Middle East and North Africa that these platforms initially used as examples of their commitment to “free speech.”

When pressed on this issue, social media companies provided vague responses that “only focused on technical issues and did not adequately explain the high rate and diverse types of censorship documented by rights advocates,”  according  to the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh. The targeting of WOL’s Instagram account “shows that we need to whitewash our history as an [organization] in order to survive on social media. These actions show there’s a limit to how much history, culture, and politics you’re allowed to express,” WOL chair Nerdeen Kiswani said in a March 2022 interview. Kiswani explained that the post initially received a disciplinary action—called a “strike”—from Instagram, which she said was common. Historically, she explained, Instagram would strike WOL posts with no clear pattern. The company even flagged a January post about a Palestinian prisoner, Hisham Abu Hawash, being infected with COVID-19 while in an Israeli hospital. “Why should we assume that a post about a Palestinian prisoner getting COVID is going to get a strike?” Kiswani said.

Arbitrary Measures

Kiswani explained that the Women’s Day post not only received a strike, but Instagram also sent a warning that the entire WOL account could be deleted permanently. Following this warning, WOL organizers found themselves unable to access the account. They launched a social media campaign to pressure Instagram to restore the account and, on March 12, 2022, received an email from Instagram saying that the account had been “disabled by mistake” and it would be restored. “While the restoration of our main account following a massive outpouring of support from our comrades and supporters around the world marks a victory, we know that Instagram continues to uphold anti-Palestinian racism and actively works with our oppressors to silence us,” WOL stated. Instagram’s lack of transparency and seemingly arbitrary punitive measures indicate that the platform remains an embattled site for liberation-focused political messaging about Palestine.

In April 2021, after removing an advertisement for an Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program event at San Francisco State University that featured Palestinian icon Leila Khaled, Facebook  deleted  the academic program’s page. This deletion followed months of collaboration between San Francisco State University and private tech companies like Zoom to violate the academic freedom of the AMED Studies Program Director, Rabab Abdulhadi, by preventing an event with Khaled from appearing on any digital platform. But even without deletion, organizers continue to struggle with censorship. A member of the grassroots organization Palestinian Youth Movement, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that the group has had its social media activity challenged since at least 2018, when Facebook began disappearing their posts about protests for the seventieth anniversary of the Nakba. “We wouldn’t have the option to invite people to the protests, and we continued receiving messages saying that our page was not being recommended to people,” the PYM member explained.

The digital repression escalated in May 2021, when PYM began working with the Yemeni Liberation Movement on actions including a hunger strike opposing US support for the Saudi-led blockade against the Yemeni people. The PYM member mentioned that after the collaboration with the Yemeni movement, their social media began to experience heavy shadow banning to the point that PYM organizers would have to instruct followers to manually seek out their group’s posts, which were not visible to them otherwise. Instagram has admitted to limiting the visibility of content it deems inappropriate even when the posts in question do not run afoul of the platform’s community guidelines.

Excerpted with permission from Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle by Omar Zahzah. All rights reserved. 

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