Digital Rights Weekly Update: 21 - 27 March

The Digital Divide: New Report by 7amleh on the Systemic Discrimination in Digital Infrastructure Against Palestinian Citizens in Israel

7amleh

March 25, 2025, 7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media released its latest report titled “Digital Divide: Discrimination in Digital Infrastructure Against Palestinian Citizens in Israel,” authored by researcher Habeeb Makhoul. The report documents systemic discrimination in digital and internet infrastructure within Palestinian communities inside Israel, focusing on the significant disparities Palestinian citizens face in accessing fair and equal digital services compared to Jewish citizens—particularly in Palestinian towns and the unrecognized villages in Al-Naqab (Negev), which are home to over 120,000 Palestinians and remain deprived of basic internet services. The report reveals that over 25% of Palestinian citizens in Israel rely on mobile phones as their primary means of accessing the internet, compared to a significantly lower percentage in the Jewish population—reflecting the severe lack of fixed digital infrastructure in Arab localities.

Gaza and the Collective Political Costs of Algorithmic Warfare

EJIL Talk

Since Israel started its military campaigns against Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank after the terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, both academia and the media have intensely debated the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) use of so-called artificial intelligence-enabled decision-support systems (AI-DSS) for its combat operations. Controversies have mainly revolved around the staggering number of deaths in Gaza, which at the time of writing stands at nearly 50,000, conservatively estimated, with the vast majority of them civilians. Focusing on the systems’ possible contribution to this immense loss of life, as most of the scholarly interrogations of the AI-DSS in use have done, has been and remains of utmost importance. However, in this post I will, instead, appraise some of the less immediate, larger societal costs that AI-supported systems, like the ones deployed by the IDF, cause. In particular, the piece attends to how such systems, due to the pervasive surveillance without which they cannot function, innately impede political agency and, as a result, ultimately violate the collective right to self-determination of populations living within their area of deployment.

Global Social Media Censorship Trends (2024–2025)

VIEWS4YOU

During the Israel–Gaza war (Oct 2023 onward), Instagram was widely accused of shadowbanning pro-Palestinian content – i.e. reducing its visibility algorithmically without notice. Users reported their Stories and posts about Palestine received drastically fewer views and that their accounts became hard to search or interact with. Hundreds of such reports were collected by digital rights groups, indicating a pattern of Palestinian voices being down-ranked or hidden. Meta denied intentional bias, blaming a technical bug and automated safety filters for Arabic content that mistakenly flagged many benign posts. Nonetheless, Human Rights Watch documented over 1,050 removals or suppressions of pro-Palestine content on Meta’s platforms in Oct–Nov 2023 alone, calling it “systemic and global” censorship of one side of a conflict.

Google 'playing with fire' by acquiring Israeli company founded by Unit 8200 veterans

Middle East Eye

Google employees and human rights groups have raised concerns about the tech giant’s purchase of an Israeli start-up in an unprecedented $32bn deal. Google on Tuesday announced the all-cash acquisition of Wiz, an Israeli cloud security firm which was founded by former members of Unit 8200, an elite Israeli army cyber-espionage and surveillance unit. The deal comes with the Google already facing internal and external pressure over its controversial Project Nimbus contract, through which along with Amazon it provides cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government and military. A spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, a coalition of Google and Amazon workers campaigning against the companies' involvement with Israel, said Google was "playing with fire" by buying Wiz.