Source: Asia Pacific Report
COMMENTARY: By +972 podcast presenter Alaa Salama
As +972 Magazine’s audience engagement manager, social media is a huge part of my job. I use it daily — not only to promote the magazine’s articles, but also to gauge audience reactions, opinions, and ideas regarding our work.
We simply cannot escape using social media: Most of our readers are there, and it is where millions of people around the world get their news and analysis.
But doing this work also puts me in the position of seeing how social media reacts to our content. I don’t mean the people there; I mean the hidden hand that is the platforms’ algorithms and policies.
In other words, I see how some posts remain hidden from much of our audience, while others spread far and wide.
Among Palestinians, and those who write and report on Palestine, it has been common knowledge for years that social media platforms are not neutral, and have in fact actively fought against Palestine-related content — even to the point of limiting posts that merely contain the word Palestine in Arabic.
Palestinians and Arabs alike have responded to this by trying to trick the system: misspelling the word Palestine, or hiding the word shaheed (martyr) by inserting periods and commas.
For the most part, this suppression has remained anecdotal. No one knew exactly how these systems work or what the algorithms prioritise. People could describe the censorship they were experiencing, but evidence of a formal policy was difficult to come by.
Thanks to an extensive new Palestinian-led investigation into Meta, however, that is no longer the case.
Five years of deliberate erasure
7amleh (pronounced “Hamleh”), the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, gathered more than 3500 documented cases of Meta restricting Palestinian content over the past five years, on platforms including Facebook and Instagram. They gave this phenomenon a name, “platformicide,” describing the deliberate erasure of Palestinian existence and narratives in the digital sphere.
On the latest episode of The +972 Podcast, I spoke to 7amleh’s executive director, Nadim Nashif, about what exactly they discovered — and how we can fight back.
Meta is censoring Palestinian content, and now we have proof
The consequences, especially in Gaza, have been life or death. Social media is one of a few avenues for Gazans to document attacks, issue warnings, and communicate information that can determine whether others survive.
Yet Meta has repeatedly restricted their accounts, blocked them from live-streaming, and removed footage under policies related to violence or dangerous organisations, even when the material was clearly journalistic.
Although facing an uphill battle, 7amleh’s work shows that these policies can and should be challenged. To do so, Nashif argues, civil society must develop methods of holding technology companies accountable — methods grounded not in anecdote, but in evidence.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Nadim Nashif, and subscribe to The +972 Podcast wherever you listen.
Republished from +972 magazine.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/01/meta-censoring-palestinian-content-and-heres-proof-of-platformicide/