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1. 7amleh Publishes its Annual Report for 2022 (English)

7amleh 

7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media released its annual report, in which it summarizes the most important achievements of 7amleh during the year 2022. The most prominent achievement of the organization was the awarding of consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and acceptance as a member of the Global Network Initiative (GNI). Throughout the year, 7amleh released 13 publications that vary between reports and research. The organizations also trained more than 3,000 trainees in various fields during the year, in addition to documenting more than 1,119 violations of Palestinian digital rights through (7or) platform, in addition to organizing and participating in a number of local campaigns. Additionally,  there was the successful launch of the sixth edition of the Palestine Digital Activism Forum 2022.

2. When Content Moderation is Selective (English)

Columbia Journalism Review

The Business Social Responsibility Network (BSR) report proved that Meta’s policies are biased against Palestinians and that company practices over-enforce its content moderation policies on Palestinian Arabic content and under-enforce Israeli Hebrew content. The report pointed out that this affects the right to freedom of expression in Palestine, among many other rights, while allowing hate speech and incitement against Palestinians to remain on the platform, which often leads to real-world harm. Another report by 7amleh confirmed a fifteen-fold increase in incitement, hate speech, and violent discourse in Hebrew during the May uprising, compared with the same period of the previous year.

3. Israel is World Leader in Crackdown on TikTok Videos (English) 

Memo

A glimpse into the scale of Israel's crackdown on social media users was given today with the revelation that the occupation state is one of the world's leading countries in demanding the removal of videos from the TikTok social media platform. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, TikTok received 2,713 requests from governments around the world to remove or limit content or accounts in the third quarter of 2022. The company removed 110,954,663 videos uploaded to the platform worldwide during this time, roughly one per cent of all the videos uploaded to TikTok. Of the videos that were removed, 80.1 percent were removed before even viewing the entire video, while 89.8 percent were removed within 24 hours. Two per cent are said to have been removed worldwide due to hateful content. In the case of Israel, 252 official requests were submitted, making it one of the leading countries cracking down on TikTok videos. The figure represents 9.2 per cent of the total number of requests to TikTok worldwide. By way of comparison, the US had 13, Canada five, France 27, the UK 71 and Germany 167 applications which were submitted on behalf of their respective governments.

4. Twitter Under Fire for Censoring Palestinian Public Figures (English)

Al Jazeera 

Digital rights groups say social media giants have restricted, suspended the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists. Twitter owner Elon Musk suspended the accounts of some journalists, including reporters from newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Defending his decision, Musk claimed the journalists had breached the company’s new rule about revealing people’s locations. The suspensions were condemned by the journalists’ newspapers and other media organisations – even the European Union and the United Nations weighed in, saying the move set a dangerous precedent. A day later, Musk lifted the suspensions after running a poll in which respondents went against his preferred outcome. 

5. The Israeli "Jorge" and his Sisters... A Chapter in the History of Disinformation (Arabic)

New Arab

The investigation published by the French "Forbidden Stores" website, in cooperation with several international media institutions, has examined the Israeli "Jorge" crew, and its use of advanced methods of manipulating information, creating fake accounts, misleading public opinion, with the aim of serving political clients and businessmen and helping them win in their battles and deals. Through this investigation, which is part of the "Story Killers" project, we understand how false news has turned into an industry that generates millions of dollars to its owners, how mercenaries on the network are working to manipulate the results of elections or financial deals.