“Palestinian Digital Rights During and After the Coronavirus”

Ramallah, Haifa, February 9, 2021 - “7amleh - The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement” announced the opening of registration for the Palestine Digital Activism Forum in its fifth digital edition, which will be the biggest digital event focusing on Palestinian digital rights. PDAF will last for four days between 29 March and April 1 of this year. The PDAF will shed light on the impact of the Corona pandemic on Palestinian digital rights, and the future of these rights in the post-pandemic era, through a number of policy sessions, digital dialogues, and training workshops aimed at building the professional capacity of participants in various fields.

The PDAF is being held this year with the participation of major social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as a number of UN, international, regional and local institutions. It will host more than 70 speakers and trainers from different fields, to share with us their different experiences and expertise within the various forum activities.

The activities of the forum will begin on Monday, March 29, 2021, where the activities of the first and second days focus on a set of policy sessions that discuss the issues of Palestinian digital rights, with the participation of representatives of social media companies and a group of inspiring speakers who will share their experiences with the PDAF audience such as Noura Erikat and Amer Zaher. The activities of the third and fourth will mainly focus on various and diverse evening training sessions, workshops and digital dialogues aimed at building and enriching the professional capabilities of the participants in various fields.

Forum Agenda

The first day of the forum deals with three policy sessions; the first deals with the issue of the privacy of medical data and discusses the problem of protecting medical data and violating privacy in light of the pandemic, while the second discusses the topic of misleading news and the tools  to combat it and tackles the issue of fighting this type of news and its impact on freedom of expression in Palestine by hosting representatives from Twitter, UNESCO, and Palestinian academics. The third session deals with the future of digital activism in the Arab and Palestinian areas, with the participation of regional and local experiences to discuss digital activism in the Arab region and the points of intersection between them. In addition to these policy sessions, Noura Erikat, an inspiring speaker, shares her experience with content monitoring through social media platforms, and an evening session that discusses the role of artificial intelligence: prejudice, racism and social change.

Based on 7amleh’s belief in the importance of digital campaigns, and its continuous work on building the capacities of civil society organizations and activists to build digital campaigns, it will award during PDAF’s first day, the winning digital campaign that was perceived as the best digital campaign that was launched during the year and left a positive impact on the Palestinian digital space.

The session of the second day will be rich in its international and Diaspora participation, in addition to the giant technology companies. The first session discusses the Palestinian narrative in the era of digitization, while the second session deals with surveillance techniques in Palestine and around the world and it discusses the expansion of the use of these technologies globally, especially in light of the Corona pandemic under the pretext of public safety. It sets mechanisms and tactics to unify efforts to resist the use of these means to oppress people or its manipulation for the occupation interest. The third session discusses the reality of data protection in Palestine and the Arab region. In addition to these sessions, the PDAF hosts Instagram  in a workshop on using the platform as a tool for social change in addition to a Q&A session about content management policies and their impact on the Palestinian context with representatives of Facebook. The Palestinian-American comedian Amer Zaher will join us as an inspiring speaker to share his experience and talk about the challenges that Palestinians face in the digital space by narrowing the space for freedom of expression.

The third and fourth day of this year’s Forum includes a series of training workshops in partnership and cooperation with a group of local and international partners and giant technology companies and will be held by experts. These workshops include one that will be conducted in cooperation with Facebook regarding Facebook and Instagram platforms’ value for entrepreneurial projects. There will be another workshop with Twitter on the use of the platform in advocacy and social change, in addition to other workshops covering issues of digital advocacy, documenting human rights violations digitally, data visualization, news coverage of digital rights issues, verifying false news, digital training, digital safety for parents, and various other workshops.

In addition, there will be a group of dialogues discussing different and various topics such as social media at the time of elections, and how social media platforms contributed to stereotyping the image of women, and archiving Palestinian history and memory.

Therefore, 7amleh - The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement invites you to hurry and register to reserve your seats to participate in the Palestine Digital Activism Forum 2021 through our website.

 For more details about our program and how to register, please visit our website on the following link: 

www.pdaf.ps