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1.

What a Cat in a Keffiyeh Reveals About AI’s anti-Palestinian Bias (English)

+972 Magazine

Recently, as part of an ongoing project examining Palestinian digital rights and narratives in emerging online spaces, I decided to explore Palestinian representations of place in a popular text-to-image AI generator. After prompting the AI program to generate images of a cat wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh in front of holy sites in Jerusalem, I realized a few clicks in that I was navigating a landscape of opaque biases within the program.

2.

Turning Occupation into Memes; 'Israel’s' Favorite Strategy (English)

Al-Mayadeen

Young dancing soldiers, jumping on TikTok trends, memes, and jokes... it all sounds "fun" doesn’t it? However, if there would ever be a backstage of the Israeli occupation forces’ social media platforms, it would be a room full of blood, murderous weapons, and the bodies of thousands of murdered Palestinians. What happens backstage is a pure whitewashing of Israeli crimes for the sake of some desperate interaction and affection. Attacking Gaza? Let's make an infographic about how many "terrorists" there are in the Strip. Palestinians defending themselves against Israeli attacks? Let’s film a short clip about our soldiers crying to get some emotions out of our audience. And this is how it works… for them…

3.

Dismantling the Facade: A Global South Perspective on the State of Engagement with Tech Companies (English)

Business & HRs Resource Center

Information Communication Technologies (ICT) companies have determining effects across personal, professional, social and political facets of our lives, for better and for worse. While increased productivity, access to information and efficiency are hallmarks of the expansive ICT sector, so too are the negative consequences of many of its products and services: unchecked proliferation of hate speech, misinformation, intrusive surveillance, manipulative algorithms, discriminatory artificial intelligence (AI) and environmental damage in the form of a growing carbon footprint and dumping of e-waste. Against this background, the role of civil society in calling for corporate accountability and transparency remains both vitally important and uniquely challenging.

4.

NSO's Spyware Hacking iPhones Again, Says Report (English)

Latin Times

At least three "zero click" attacks on members of civil society's iPhones last year were carried out using spyware from the Israeli NSO Group, a research team stated. After NSO's software infected the phones of at least two human rights advocates in Mexico in 2022, Citizen Lab published its findings on NSO's global reach on Tuesday, Apr. 18. The Pegasus spyware from NSO can access a mobile device through "zero-click attacks," which have become increasingly common in recent years. Those intrusions compromise devices without any action by the user. Messages, chats, phone calls, contacts, and emails can be monitored, Al Jazeera reported.