New report reveals social media giants silencing Palestinian voices

A new report exposes how social media giants are actively silencing Palestinian voices. Activists struggle to be heard on platforms owned by Meta. The study comes from the Palestinian NGO 7amleh and Utrecht University. They analyzed 3,520 cases of digital rights violations against Palestinians over five years. These numbers point to a systematic crackdown rather than random mistakes.

Jerusalem-based journalist Faten Elwan has more than 300,000 followers on Instagram. Her page regularly covers events in Palestine and documents the Israeli occupation. Now her posts typically get just a few hundred views. In April 2026, she was on a hike when she discovered her account had been unexpectedly reactivated after a two-month suspension. She believes this happened because of her pro-Palestine content.

Her first story back showed a walk along the sea and reached 30,000 views. Within an hour, the number for later stories dropped to a few hundred. Elwan is one of many account holders who believe they have been shadow-banned by Meta. This technique allegedly restricts visibility so fewer people can see their content.

"People tell me: if we don't specifically search for you and type your name, 'Faten Elwan', together, we can't find you. I no longer exist," she told Al Jazeera. Her account was suspended for the first time in late 2023, shortly after Israel started its assault on Gaza. It has been taken down eight times since then. In May 2025, Elwan met Meta representatives to flag her silencing. She said their response appeared dismissive and noncommitted.

"During my meeting with Meta, they heard my statement, and there was no reaction whatsoever," she said. "I gave my statement and provided examples of what happened to me, how I'm technically just a shadow on social media." Elwan compared Meta to a school principal who punishes the bad student and shuts him up. She argued this role plays out on a global scale now.

Elwan's case is one of many documented in a report investigating alleged suppression of Palestinian voices. The Platformicide of Palestine 2021–2025 was published by 7amleh and the Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media. They partnered with an academic research team at Utrecht University for this work. The analysis covered more than 3,500 verified cases logged through 7or, a user observatory run by 7amleh.

The report coined the term platformicide to describe structural erasure. This includes intentional removal of Palestinian digital presence and participation across social media. Fabio Cristiano led the research at Utrecht University. He said findings clearly show this trend is not a series of errors.

"This is an approach, a structural and intentional approach, which goes beyond content moderation alone," Cristiano told Al Jazeera. Meta's erasure operates through broader governance architecture. It combines overbroad policy application with disproportionate enforcement. Ad hoc revisions happen alongside algorithmic suppression. Content restoration is often delayed while communication with users remains opaque or absent.

Platformicide is not simply about removing content. It targets the very ability of Palestinians to speak online. The government faces pressure to address these digital rights violations. Regulations could help stop this systematic erasure before it becomes permanent.

It is about denying a population access to the infrastructures through which they can claim their existence online." This stark reality lies at the heart of a new investigation into Meta's handling of accounts tied to the war in Gaza. The report stops short of claiming that Meta is censoring users with malicious intent. Instead, it argues that the patterns of restrictions and deactivations for pro-Palestine accounts cannot be explained by simple error. These actions are structural. They fit the authors' definition of platformicide.

Data gathered between January 2021 and December 2025 reveals a troubling lack of transparency. Only 32.5 percent of documented cases carried an identifiable policy violation. The majority of Palestinian users whose content was removed, restricted, or suppressed received no explanation they could point to. When reasons were given to suspended accounts, the justification followed a familiar script: Meta's Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy. Internally known as DOI, this rule was applied in 57.2 percent of cases where a violation could be identified.

That figure climbed sharply among journalists. The DOI policy rose to 71.1 percent for reporters covering the conflict. Designed to prevent the promotion of terrorist and violent organizations, the policy is being used to moderate media outlets, NGOs, and newsrooms reporting on Israel's war in Gaza, activists and experts claim. In this sense, the overbroad application of DOI seems to criminalise Palestinian society as a whole, said Cristiano.

The suspension of pro-Palestine accounts has hit journalists working directly in Gaza hardest. Their primary mode of communication with the outside world relies on these social media platforms. These accounts serve as an essential medium for getting news out of the genocide, particularly given the ambivalence among some sections of the mainstream media about carrying pro-Palestine voices. Meta and platforms in general have a responsibility with regard to the public debate, Cristiano said.

Elwan illustrates the human cost of these rules. She was banned from livestreaming on Instagram three years ago for 360 consecutive days. The restriction renewed automatically since then. Meta cites breaking community guidelines as the cause, yet Elwan has never been told which specific rules she allegedly breached. Back-up accounts set up by Elwan were subsequently suspended hours after being created. What's happening is that they're completely silencing journalists on the ground, she said. Many human rights organisations and groups like the United Nations and the European Union used to collaborate with her to amplify voices or criticise certain issues. Now my content doesn't reach anyone at all.

The report found account suspensions were the most common enforcement mechanism, affecting about a third of all documented cases. Restrictions on features such as going live ranked second. Content takedowns followed. After October 7, 2023 – the date of Palestinian group Hamas's attack on Israel and the start of Israel's war on Gaza – shadowbanning rose from near-zero to 3.5 percent of enforcement cases. This is the covert reduction of a user's reach without notification.

Maisoon Zoubi, a journalism teacher and media specialist who works with I'lam, a Palestinian media centre, described a different but related pressure: the chilling effect that visible enforcement creates on journalists who have not yet been targeted. A state of tension has been prevalent ever since we learned about cases of investigations, arrests, and page bans against journalists, she said. This makes me strengthen my own self-censorship on myself and on the interviews I conduct. During the war, Zoubi said, her team refrained from publishing events, images or reports that could trigger a complaint.

The danger facing Palestinian journalists comes from more than just Meta's automated filters. Coordinated reports by ordinary users play a huge role too. One woman described this as "civilian censorship by ordinary people who monitor journalists and file digital complaints against them."

Yousef Abu Watfa, the Gaza-based editor-in-chief of Quds News Network, sees a different pattern entirely. He says Meta has systematically restricted his outlet's content since 2015. The pressure spiked sharply after the war in Gaza began. His Facebook page went down during the conflict itself. It faced two earlier attempts at blocking beforehand which he blamed on an Israeli incitement campaign. Now nothing remains on Facebook for Arabic or English speakers.

On Instagram, only the Arabic-language account survived while the English version vanished from both platforms. This forced them toward other services like X and Telegram. They found some relief there but still face restrictions. Abu Watfa told Al Jazeera that this shift pushed them to new channels.

"All of this has certainly affected the Palestinian narrative," he explained. The war and global media coverage helped images reach the world. Yet what actually gets conveyed does not exceed 20 to 30 percent at best of the real picture of life in Gaza. That gap is too wide to ignore.

A Meta spokesperson pointed toward independent due diligence reports on Israel and Palestine published in 2022. They also highlighted implementation updates found in their 2022–2024 human rights reports. The company stated it introduced a system that routes flagged content to moderators most likely to understand the relevant Arabic dialect. They revised its Dangerous Organisations and Individuals policy too. This change allows more social and political discourse in certain cases.

Yet there is still no recourse for many users. 7amleh submitted 2,828 appeals to Meta on behalf of affected users over a five-year period. They received no response from the social media giant for nearly half of those requests. 7amleh is a member of Meta's Trusted Partner programme designed to give civil society organisations preferential access to escalate cases. The report's data challenges the value of that status.

Lama Nazeeh, advocacy manager at 7amleh, told Al Jazeera that independent reviews show who gets real responses. "Independent reviews show the partners who get real responses are those with private contacts inside the company, not those using the official channel," she said. She questioned their participation too. "We hold our participation to one test: Does it protect Palestinian users, or does it protect Meta's reputation?"

Meta remains notoriously difficult to contact despite the EU's Digital Services Act and other international legal obligations requiring social media platforms to promptly communicate with users. For better accountability, Cristiano from Utrecht University said that Meta should not be treated as a remote private actor but as a platform accountable to its users. He argued they need better content moderation instead of less. "Private companies also have responsibilities," he noted. "We do not need less content moderation, we need better content moderation, one that does not exceptionalise and criminalise Palestinian users and Palestinian content."

The removal of content from Gaza creates serious legal problems too. Videos of air strikes or testimonies of survivors get deleted regularly. This affects evidence gathering for future accountability proceedings. The Berkeley Protocol adopted by the UN to guide the use of digital open-source information in international investigations treats such material as potential evidence of war crimes. When that content is deleted, this evidence may become inaccessible. That raises concerns for future accountability proceedings and turns it into an issue of international law. They preserve the fragments they can reach but many are lost forever.

Nazeeh spoke bluntly about Meta's approach to evidence, stating that the tech giant holds the entire archive yet treats it as disposable. She argued that a people's right to document its own existence during a genocide is too important to leave to the discretion of a single company. The remedy requires a change of framework: from voluntary commitments to binding obligations.