Information about the war in Gaza on social media suffers from censorship, especially images of civilian killings. Although the flow of misinformation spread by dangerous organizations such as Hamas is validly limited on social networks, journalists and human rights organizations believe that platforms, primarily Facebook and Instagram, are actively suppressing news about suffering from that part of the world.
Journalist Youmna El Sayed spent two months in Gaza, after which she left for Egypt with her family. During the period of her reporting on the bombing of Israeli forces, she witnessed a reduced reach of her posts about the suffering of civilians.
“On a personal level, I have experienced this problem several times on different social media platforms. And the problem has always been that my posts slow down on the way to others. So, if a group of people is allowed to freely publish whatever they want about their story, or their side of the story or their point of view, while other people are not, then it’s just not fair,” El Sayed said.
”I code a lot of words that I know could actually lead to censorship. But the problem is not solved when I try to post a picture or a video,” said El Sayed.
For this reason, journalists around the world resorted to playingon words when publishing posts, so that algorithms on the platforms would not mark them as problematic. Adnan Rondic, a journalist from Al Jazeera Balkans, is one of them, and he is in constant communication with journalists from Gaza, so he shares information from Palestine on his personal profile.
He and his colleagues broke words like “Gaza” into syllables to fool the algorithm.
Jalal Abu Khater from the organization “7amleh” from Haifa, which, among other things, deals with digital human rights, pointed out that the problem is not only in suppressing information about the suffering of civilians, but that the problem of spreading hate speech is felt.
“This is particularly evident in the context used to justify collective punishment and violence against Palestinians. At a time when there is a possibility of genocide happening in Gaza, we are concerned that the platforms are not showing accountability,” mentioned Abu Khater.
According to research by the Human Rights Watch organization– “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestinian Content”, Deborah Brown says, “Meta”, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, recognized the activism for a cease-fire in Gaza as spam, that is, worthless content.
Fedja Kulenovic, an information expert and assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, believes that the rules of social networks, including artificial intelligence, are not completely clear regarding the censorship of content about the war in Gaza.
Kulenovic reminds that social networks made an exception when it comes to sensitive content and the war in Ukraine, and therefore the question arises why such an exception was not made in the case of Gaza, i.e. – why the public interest in events is not taken into account.
“Facebook didn’t think it would become so big that it would have to take into account the responsibility of the public interest. OK, none of us will promote terrorism, but then we get into a situation where we watch videos of victims who are innocent, or the media is punished because their posts about the events in Gaza are removed because they mentioned the name of an organization that is on the American list of terrorist organizations,” concludes Kulenovic, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
