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1.

Hashtag Palestine 2022: 7amleh restored a third of the deleted Palestinian content from social media platforms (English)

7amleh

Thursday, February 2, 2023, “7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media” issued its eighth annual report, “Hashtag Palestine”, in which it sheds light on the violations of Palestinian digital rights that Palestinians and their supporters are subjected to in the digital space by the various governments and big technology companies. The report diagnoses the state of digital freedoms, and outlines the most prominent patterns of digital rights violations and their trends during 2022. 7amleh collected and documented information on violations during the year within the Observatory for Documentation of Palestinian Digital Rights Violations (7or) and monitored local, regional and international media materials in addition to cooperating with partners in analyzing and monitoring digital violations.

2.

7amleh and the Faculty of Modern Media at the Arab American University organize a conference on "Digital Security: Privacy in the Age of Surveillance" (Arabic)

7amleh

7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, in partnership with the Faculty of Modern Media at the Arab American University, organized a digital security conference under the title "Privacy in the Age of Surveillance", which was attended by media faculties in Palestinian universities, including male and female students, academics, journalists, and experts and specialists and in digital media, where the conference was held on the campus of the university in the city of Ramallah. 

3.

Facebook’s Jordana Cutler Appointed Head of Controversial Israeli Ministry, Speaking Censorship Fears (English)

Mint Press

On Jan. 11, Israel’s new minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, named Facebook senior employee, Jordana Cutler, as the ministry’s director general. The ministry is notorious for combatting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and promoting a positive image of Israel abroad. Yet with Cutler’s biography and Facebook’s history of censoring Palestinian content, experts and activists are sounding the alarm over the appointment. Cutler worked as Facebook’s public policy director for Israel and the Jewish diaspora since 2016. During her time there, the social media giant was consistently accused of restricting Palestinian content on its site — a problem that persists today.

4.

A case of digital apartheid: How tech giants suppress Palestinian activism (English)

The Business Standard

The Palestinian struggle of self-determination faces a bleak fate, even in the digital world. The Israeli authorities continue to install powerful mechanisms to stifle the Palestinian cause, and now with, they seem to have intensified their reach and influence across the digital space. Technology companies are complicit, partly due to their unwillingness to partake in political issues with powerful regimes. And, the ultimate result is the widening scope of the digital apartheid and infringed space for the Palestinian cause in the digital space, much beyond the physical checkpoints that occupy Palestine.

5.

From Fauda to Facebook: Exploring Palestinian Censorship and Bias in the Media (English)

The Jerusalem Fund

With the release of season 4 of Netflix’s Fauda this month, the treatment and portrayal of Palestinians by the Western media and Israel is immediately brought back into the forefront. It’s not just Fauda, which is an Israeli TV show, that fails to portray the Palestinian struggle in a fair way; there’s also a constant display of pro-Palestinian media censorship, primarily on Twitter and Facebook throughout the last few years. This brief essay will explore the media censorship that plagues Palestinian activism