Sada Social: More than 130 violations of Palestinian content last September

Sada Social: More than 130 violations of Palestinian content last September

Sada Social Center documented more than 130 violations of Palestinian content in September 2022, including 93 violations that represented the complete deletion of accounts and pages from the digital space.
 
The violations that were monitored by Sada Social across the various social media platforms were as follows: The platforms run by Meta company came at the top of the platforms in committing violations, with 91 violations on the Facebook platform, which varied between deleting the post, restricting access, preventing publication and preventing the use of some features such as live broadcasts and advertisements. Participation in groups for a certain period of time, deleting the account completely, in addition to 20 violations on WhatsApp, including deleting the numbers of Palestinian journalists and officials.
 
In addition to 11 violations monitored by the Echo Social Center on the Instagram platform, 4 violations via the TikTok platform, and two violations on Twitter, which marked many Palestinian news content as sensitive, followed by the Center´s monitoring of two violations on the YouTube platform against news and Palestinian channels.
 
Sada Social Center indicated that journalists and media organizations were the most vulnerable to documented violations with 73 violations against pages belonging to media organizations and accounts of journalists, including those whose accounts were completely deleted. As for the distribution of violations by account type, the center monitored 85 personal accounts whose owners were subjected to digital violations, and 41 A public page, and 4 Facebook groups.
 
The Center contacted the Twitter platform regarding blocking the content of some press accounts, which in turn removed this blocking of tweets, and these accounts no longer suffer from this label.
 
During the month of September 2022, the Center attempted to document the nature of the violated content related to the Palestinian cause, and the Center found that 48% of the content that was violated were texts and words related to the Palestinian cause, and 32% of the content included Palestinian pictures of martyrs or events describing the Israeli attacks, And 16% of the violations were for videos that mostly included the funerals of the Palestinian martyrs who rose during the past month, while what was remarkable this month was the presence of 3% of violations due to comments with Palestinian content written by their owners on publications related to the Palestinian cause.
 
Sada Social Center noted that these documented violations came despite the issuance of the BSR Center for Human Rights study, which expressed in its results the bias of the Meta platform against Palestinian content , which was acknowledged by the owner company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which indicates that Meta did not take the results of the investigation. seriously, and push to improve its algorithms with regard to Palestinian content.
 
Meta justifies this restriction on Palestinian content as either incitement and praising acts of violence, and it contradicts the list of terrorist figures and organizations according to their classification, which means more obliteration of crimes against humanity carried out by the occupation, as well as preventing the Palestinian narrative from spreading.
 
Echo Social Center stressed that it is communicating about the accounts that have been violated, and the center stresses that it is still continuing to pressure not only towards returning the deleted accounts, and removing restrictions on other accounts, but to work to correct these biased algorithms and standards, in the context of its quest to provide free space of Palestinian content, giving priority to the freedom to publish news content, and the consequent rounds of discussion with communication platforms for the need to understand the specificity of the Palestinian case, and that digital restriction is a crime and a violation of international law.