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Motaz Azaiza/Instagram


A BOMBING IN GAZA KILLED AN INFLUENCER’S FAMILY—INSTAGRAM RESPONDED BY
SUSPENDING HIS ACCOUNT


SOCIAL MEDIA POLICIES ARE BEING ENFORCED UNEVENLY, ACTIVISTS SAY.

 

Ernie Piper

Tech

Posted on Oct 24, 2023

In a video on Oct. 13, Instagram influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza
shared footage of the rubble of an apartment, the site of an Israeli bombardment
that killed 15 of his family members.

He turns the camera on himself first, visibly upset, and then shows the
scene—the ruin of the building, a bloodstain, a neighbor carrying a child’s body
draped with a shroud. 

In response, Meta restricted access to his account.

Some of his 3 million followers responded by sharing screenshots on other
platforms of the locked account, asking whether he was still alive.

In the hours it was down, he created an alternate account, which accrued a
million followers before his access was restored later on Oct. 14. 

His Twitter account is still suspended for unclear reasons. 

Social media remains one of the most important tools for Gaza residents to
document the atrocities they’re seeing and to communicate with the outside
world. Foreign journalists are not allowed in Gaza right now and the ones
already reporting there are targets. According to the Palestinian Journalism
Syndicate, 11 journalists have been killed since Oct. 7.

And people in Gaza still face myriad issues with the basic communications tools
necessary to document their side of the war.

Palestinian accounts have been targeted with bans, shadowbans, or blocked posts
or hashtags. Al Jazeera compiled a number of stories from other content creators
in Gaza—some comedians, some day-in-the-life influencers, some journalists—who
struggled with accessing their accounts in the past weeks. The Intercept
similarly documented how the TikTok and Instagram accounts associated with
journalists at the left-wing outlet Monzoweiss in the West Bank were repeatedly
taken down or the content was restricted. 

These decisions don’t simply amount to forms of censorship—they also affect how
Palestinians tell their story. The Daily Dot recently reported on how
Instagram’s auto-translate was inserting “terrorist” into its translations of
Palestinian accounts.

Meta denied it was censoring Palestinians. In a larger statement detailing their
efforts to moderate content from the war, it said: “Our policies are designed to
keep people safe on our apps while giving everyone a voice. We apply these
policies equally around the world and there is no truth to the suggestion that
we are deliberately suppressing voices.”

Mona Shtaya, a digital rights defender who works at the NGO Digital Action as
their Middle East lead, spoke to the Daily Dot about how tech platforms
reinforce power imbalances. Glitches, automated moderation, and policy decisions
all tend to come down on the side of people with power, and all put a thumb on
the scale of deciding who can speak.

“It’s a war of information,” she said. “This is connected to the disinformation
on the platform. When someone is spreading disinformation and then the internet
is shut down, the electricity is cut off—the counter-narrative is not there.”

Shtaya has been documenting other examples of this. After the Al-Ahli hospital
bombing, Palestinian users got automated messages suggesting that their posts
about the bombing had been filtered out of everyone’s feeds. 

During the 2021 clashes in the Al Aqsa mosque, Shtaya documented how other
pro-Palestinian hashtags, like #SaveSheikhJarrah or #AlAqsa, got blocked or
filtered from searches on social media. Meta’s rules say, “Hashtags on Instagram
may not be searchable if the text or the content associated with the hashtag
consistently do not follow our Terms of Use or Community Guidelines.”

A 2022 third-party audit of Meta’s policies from that time found that it
negatively impacted “the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression,
freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and
therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about
their experiences as they occurred.” 

When forms of automated censorship stop Palestinians from countering harmful
narratives, the information gap can be filled by posts that spread
misinformation or incite violence against them.  

Shtaya explained that Israeli settlers used social platforms to incite violence
against Palestinians in the West Bank earlier this year. “People on the ground
are sometimes beaten, there were towns burned because of this incitement on the
platforms,” she said.

Analysis from 7amleh found that an attack on the village of Hawara in the West
Bank was precipitated by a deluge of violent content containing the Hebrew
hashtag WipeOutHawara, The month before and after the attack, “80.2% of all
(15,250) tweets about Hawara included negative content against the village and
its residents via the Hebrew-language digital space.”

“This is a real harm,” she said.

Digital Action, along with 49 other civil society organizations, signed a
statement on Oct. 13 demanding that large tech platforms protect Palestinians
from hate speech, disinformation, and bans or blocks.

“Restrictions on activists, civil society, and human rights defenders represent
a grave threat to freedom of expression and access to information, freedom of
assembly, and political participation,” the statement reads. “This censorship is
also affecting journalists’ ability to work and resulting in a chilling effect.
It is imperative that companies urgently address this censorship and genuinely
commit to ensuring that all voices are heard.

“We’re talking about a global equity crisis when it comes to tech,” Shtaya said.

The promise of social media was that anyone anywhere can get their story out and
find their audience—and for a lot of people that’s been true. It’s been hugely
important for members of marginalized communities to share their perspectives
with new audiences and more importantly, organize. But in Gaza, that flow of
information is being strangled. 

After posting images and memorials of his family to his Stories, Azaiza
documented receiving a call in English from a number with a blocked caller ID,
where the caller implied that his footage could get him killed, advising him to
“leave Gaza one way or another.”

Azaiza wrote that he wasn’t sure who was behind this but it was clear that his
posts on Instagram had made him a target. 

Azaiza’s most recent Instagram Story from yesterday is titled simply, “Stop
killing us.” It shows the aftermath of bombs falling in his hometown on the Gaza
Strip and the “dozens of massacres” occurring, showing an array of shrouded
bodies on the ground. 

“Please someone stop this,” he says, speaking from a hospital in another Story.
“Someone end this, please.”

Share this article
 * 
 * 
 * 

*First Published: Oct 24, 2023, 8:43 am CDT

ERNIE PIPER

Ernie Piper is an investigative journalist that writes about conspiracy
theories, digital culture, and travel. He grew up in Alaska, lived in Istanbul
for a long time, and now lives in London.



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