Meta's digital restrains policy against pro-Palestinian content reveals its deep coordination with "Israel" to stifle Palestinian voice and narrative. 

"Israel" is no longer satisfied with occupying more than 78% of Palestinian territories and displacing 700,000 original Palestinian dwellers from their lands, but it systematically seeks to digitally occupy Palestinians and silence their narrative.

The parent company of Facebook, Meta, adopted a new strategy earlier in 2016 represented in imposing firm censorship on Palestinian content through which Palestinian journalists, writers, and social activists encounter furious suppressive procedures in digital space on every occasion they report on Israeli crimes. 

Palestinians utilize social media apps to tell stories about their occupied lands and document the occupation brutality against them, which is usually ignored by mainstream media outlets. Thus, taking down Palestinian content has a significant negative impact on the Palestinians' ability to protect and defend their rights.

Similar to the physical Israeli occupation military checkpoints, Meta precisely cracks down on any content against "Israel" by using a wide range number of algorithms that automatically remove or ban any post or graphics that shed light on Israeli terror in occupied Palestine. These repressive measures were carried out after signing an agreement with "Israel" to fight Palestinian content and ease the spread of the Israeli narrative. 

Besides being monitored by the occupation cyber teams on a daily basis, an intensive campaign was launched by Meta against Palestinian content in which hundreds of Palestinian journalists’ accounts were erased and restricted after covering the Israeli violations in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Sada Social Center, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization, observed that their accounts were immediately deleted even though their posts didn’t include any direct call for hate speech or incitement.

The former director of the Israeli Cyber Unit, Eric Barbing, admits that this work is done by the Israeli government, as it officially asks Meta to delete words or phrases that "Tel Aviv" deems "offensive".

Additionally, various prominent mainstream media outlets in the Middle East witnessed abusive restrictions without a clear reason, including the Al Mayadeen Media Network, which was prone to such limitations due to its longstanding support for the Palestinian cause. Deborah Brown, a digital rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, confirmed that Meta and its platforms do not do enough to support human rights around the world. 

Ironically, Meta's administration didn’t restrict Israeli incitement videos of killing and raiding Palestinian villages, despite its claim of being utterly transparent as mentioned in its guidelines. 

"We need to arrange a holocaust for Arabs, exterminate them, murder their children who will grow up and become terrorists, neuter their women, sterilize their men, bomb their homes, send them to incinerators, shoot them in the head, and dump their bodies in the street."

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According to the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, these lines were posted by a group of Zionist settlers on Facebook without receiving any warning to remove or restrain the content. Such a post doesn’t only call for incitement but to widely mobilize and organize for carrying out attacks against Palestinians.

With the Palestinians' relative success in delivering their oppressed voice to the world by using social media platforms, "Israel" intensified its efforts to develop tactics that limit Palestinian freedom of expression. The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media observed that in 2018, "Israel's" direct requests to social media companies to ban Palestinian content contributed to the deletion of more than 26,000 posts on multiple platforms. This reflects the surging collusion between the most prominent high-tech company in the world and the last colonial occupation on Earth.

While Palestinians are wounded on the ground, they are also killed online by being prevented from interacting with the outside world.

"Israel" used Meta to achieve its policies. A massive number of algorithms were ameliorated to track content against "Israel" via specialized electronic units that carried out various covert and overt online operations to delegitimize Palestinian advocacy efforts and practice several misinformation campaigns against pro-Palestinian communities to make a huge shift in their attitudes toward the Palestinian cause.

During the first week of the recent Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip in 2021, the majority of social media platforms crippled the Palestinian freedom of speech except for the TikTok platform, which allowed Palestinians to freely practice their right to speech without imposing restrictions. According to a recent survey conducted by Business for Social Responsibility, it was revealed that Meta restraints harmed Palestinian users’ human rights by blocking their accounts without any previous warning after publishing videos documenting "Israel's" forcible displacement of the residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

Palestinians face mounting challenges in the online space due to the ongoing changes in social algorithms, which force them to search for alternative methods to bypass Meta’s censorship. They tend to strip out phrases and blur martyrs' photos to avoid being banned.

Meta has built deep cooperation with the occupation due to the booming Israeli high-tech industry that can be a rich market for Meta's services. Furthermore, the company’s office in "Tel Aviv" made Meta close to the Israeli decision-making circle. 

Historically, "Israel" has kidnapped Palestinians for posting against Israeli atrocious violations. Now, the Zionist occupation has broadened its aggression scale by committing digital massacres against Palestinian content. In December last year, the Israeli cabinet passed a bill in coordination with social media companies to remove any content against "Israel" on all platforms. This move will pose a serious threat to Palestinians who will be subjected to further rigid censorship.

Palestinian digital rights are an integral extension part of their existing rights which fundamentally must be protected by social media companies equally with all nations around the globe. 

As Palestinians, all efforts made to erase us from the digital space reflect the level of systematic terrorist policies we resist in our real lives. Our legal practices to document discriminations and calls to end settler-colonialism are unjustly dubbed as "incitement" by Meta. 

Despite all limitations, we will continue to tell our anguish to make the world listen.