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This month 7amleh, an advocacy group supporting the digital rights of Palestinians, released a report entitled, Palestinian Digital Rights, Genocide, and Big Tech Accountability. MAHMOOD SANGLAY analyses this damning report as Israel continues its genocidal onslaught in Gaza and expands its assault on Lebanon.
The 37-page report exposes the active and passive roles played by global technology corporations in enabling digital repression, censorship and even the automation of violence. The complicity of Big Tech companies in perpetuating human rights abuses has become undeniable.
Meta, Google, Amazon and others have exacerbated the suffering of Palestinians through digital tools and platforms. Some of these companies have opted for profit-driven partnerships with oppressive regimes like apartheid Israel.
At the heart of the 7amleh report is the extensive documentation of systematic censorship targeting Palestinian voices across platforms like Meta, Instagram and TikTok. Since October 2023, over 1,350 cases of censorship have been recorded, including the removal of content, shadow-banning and the suspension of accounts belonging to Palestinian activists, journalists and human rights defenders.
One of the most alarming aspects of this censorship is how it is deeply embedded in algorithmic bias. Meta’s content moderation systems disproportionately flag Palestinian content while allowing anti-Palestinian rhetoric to thrive. The 7amleh report shows how Meta’s algorithmic thresholds for flagging Palestinian content were deliberately lowered to 25% certainty compared to the 80% threshold for other content. This bias is designed to limit the visibility of pro-Palestinian narratives while amplifying anti-Palestinian hate speech.
Mona Shtaya, a Palestinian digital rights advocate, shows how her posts and those of her colleagues faced shadow banning on Instagram. Despite having massive followings, posts critical of Big Tech’s role in facilitating oppression reached only a fraction of their usual audience. This phenomenon is not unique. The voices of thousands of Palestinian content creators are stifled by digital algorithms.
Meta is a platform for amplifying hate speech and incitement to violence. The 7amleh report reveals that between October 2023 and July 2024, over 3,300 instances of harmful content, including calls for genocide against Palestinians, were documented on X and Facebook. Such incendiary content was permitted to flourish while legitimate Palestinian voices were censored.
A prime example of this double standard was the December 2023 post by the deputy mayor of Jerusalem on X, describing Palestinian detainees as ‘ants’ and calling for them to be ‘buried alive’. While this post was eventually removed, it is just one of many that dehumanise Palestinians with impunity. At the same time, comments like ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Ceasefire Now’ were systematically flagged as spam or removed entirely under Meta’s content moderation policies.
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Despite promising to address hate speech in Hebrew, Meta has continuously failed to implement effective mechanisms, allowing hate speech against Palestinians to proliferate. As Shtaya and others have pointed out, this bias not only silences Palestinian voices, but also fuels physical attacks by Israeli settlers.
Project Nimbus and Israeli war crimes
Google and Amazon have taken their complicity to new heights. Project Nimbus is a joint Google and Amazon contract, worth $1,2bn, to provide cloud computing services to Israel. This project, which provides Israel with AI-driven surveillance and data processing technologies, has been instrumental in enabling the Israeli military to carry out mass surveillance and targeted killings in Gaza.
According to the 7amleh report, technologies developed under Project Nimbus have been used to automate the process of identifying targets in Gaza through systems like Lavender and Gospel. These systems use massive data inputs, including facial recognition, to identify individuals and assign them as targets for airstrikes. The Lavender system alone identified over 37,000 potential targets, many of whom were civilians. Google and Amazon are directly implicated in the mass killings in Gaza.
Advertising amidst atrocities
The monetisation of violence by Big Tech is also covered by the 7amleh report. Platforms like Facebook have profited from advertisements that promote violence against Palestinians. Ads calling for the assassination of pro-Palestinian activists and the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank were run on Facebook.
At the same time, YouTube permitted the Israeli government to run ads that used graphic imagery to sway public opinion in favour of military actions in Gaza. These campaigns not only violated YouTube’s own policies, but also contributed to the normalisation of war crimes under the guise of counter-terrorism.
Partnerships with authoritarianism
The complicity of Big Tech extends beyond the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As noted in a MERIP report by Marc Owen Jones, tech companies have long partnered with authoritarian regimes to expand their market reach, even if it means aiding in digital repression. In Turkey X agreed to censor certain accounts at the request of the government during the 2023 elections. Similarly, Facebook has been instrumental in amplifying disinformation campaigns and suppressing dissent in India and the Saudi kingdom.
This pattern of kowtowing to authoritarian regimes reflects a broader trend in which Big Tech companies, driven by profits, have become active players in transnational repression. They enable governments to silence dissent and control populations through digital surveillance and censorship.
The 7amleh report shows that Meta, Google, Amazon and other tech giants are not neutral actors in the digital space. They are corporations that have made calculated decisions to prioritise profits over human rights and to facilitate digital repression and violence on a massive scale.
