Tech This Week: Social Media Platforms Practice Digital Apartheid on Pro-Palestine Content Published May 20th, 2021 - 06:30 GMT
Pro-Palestine activists, who turned to the digital space for airing the horrible erasure of Palestinians, were sadly surprised to find their posts, photos, or videos removed or their accounts blocked starting last week, Reuters reported. (Shutterstock)
Highlights
It s important to know that these digital rights violations also affected users around the globe who uses cyberspace to expose the vicious attacks of Israeli unlawfully prolonged occupation.
Over the past week, the social media platforms have been systematically silencing and deleting users posts who are protesting and documenting the horrors the Israeli occupation has inflicted on the indigenous Palestinians.
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Mark Zuckerberg F8 2018 Keynote (Photo: Wikimedia)
Human rights activists launched a campaign this week to stop social media giant Facebook from adjusting its hate speech policy to classify the word ‘Zionist’ as a protected category, a move that would make any criticism of Zionism a violation of Facebook’s Community Standards and hate speech policy.
The campaign, entitled “Facebook, we need to talk,” was launched in response to efforts from Zionist organizations, backed by the Israeli government, to get Facebook to consider ‘Zionist” as a proxy for ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish.’
Facebook is in the process of assessing if posts of a critical nature on their platform that use the term ‘Zionist’ “fall within the rubric of hate speech as per Facebook’s Community Standards,” Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) said in a statement released Wednesday, adding that Facebook could be making a decision by the end of February.