Digital Rights Weekly Update: 7 - 13 ِAugust 2026

Policy Insight

Protection is becoming one of the defining questions of our digital environment, but protection from what, and at whose expense? From proposals to restrict children’s access to social media, to the growing use of bots, AI-generated content and influence operations around supposedly democratic practices, the challenge is increasingly about protecting people from harm while protecting information, public debate and truth from manipulation. This week’s stories show how difficult that balance is: platforms can amplify violence and suppress Palestinian voices, while the same technologies can be used to engineer political perceptions and target candidates. Meanwhile, 7amleh’s research on Meta’s monetisation of violent settler content points is in the news, reminding us of another uncomfortable question: what happens when the systems meant to protect users instead create incentives for causing harm?

News Digest

MENA social media bans: Can governments protect children without expanding surveillance?

The New Arab

From Canberra to Paris, governments are increasingly turning to social media restrictions and age verification systems in an attempt to protect children online. Australia became the first country in the world to prohibit children under 16 from accessing several major social media platforms, while France has since passed legislation banning children under 15 from using social media, with implementation due to begin later this year.  In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans in June to introduce similar restrictions that would prevent children under 16 from accessing platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X, and Facebook by 2027. But in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where online spaces have long been shaped by government regulation, censorship and surveillance concerns, experts warn that child safety measures could take on a very different meaning. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) became the first Arab and Muslim-majority country to prohibit children under 15 from creating or operating personal social media accounts. The UAE government said the policy aims to address concerns over children's exposure to inappropriate content, unsafe online interactions, excessive social media use and the collection of personal data.

‘Platformicide’ of Palestine: Activists struggle to be heard on Meta

Al Jazeera

Jerusalem-based journalist Faten Elwan has more than 300,000 followers on her Instagram account, a page which regularly covers events in Palestine and documents the Israeli occupation, but now her posts typically get just a few hundred views. In April 2026, Elwan was on a hike when she discovered her account had been unexpectedly reactivated after a two-month suspension, something she believes was due to her pro-Palestine content. Her first story back on the platform was of her walk along the sea and reached 30,000 views. Within an hour, the number for later stories had dropped to a few hundred. She is one of many pro-Palestinian account holders who believe they have been “shadow-banned” by Meta, a technique allegedly used by social media companies to restrict the visibility of certain accounts, consequently limiting the number of people who can see their content. “People tell me: if we don’t specifically search for you and type your name, ‘Faten Elwan’, together, we can’t find you. I no longer exist,” she told Al Jazeera. Elwan’s account was suspended for the first time in late 2023, shortly after the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and her account has been taken down eight times during the war. In May 2025, Elwan managed to meet representatives of Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, to flag her silencing on their platforms, but she said their response to her complaint appeared dismissive and noncommitted.

Poll-rigging Bots and AI Robocalls: The Dark Tech Running Israel's Election Campaigns

Haaretz

A month after Israel's last general election in November 2022, ChatGPT was launched. In the four years since, though Benjamin Netanyahu's government has remained in power, political campaigns and the available technology have changed dramatically. A Haaretz investigation has found a slew of new campaign and influence tools, among them bots that try to rig online polls in favor of a party's candidates. The new tools, experts say, show how the laws designed to safeguard election integrity are woefully obsolete. Drawn up in the 1950s, these laws were updated recently to address new threats including deepfakes and other AI-generated campaigning ploys. But sources across the parties' campaigns and senior figures at the tech companies serving them have exposed the new toolbox of Israel's election industry, a full range of unregulated technologies. These are the parties' instruments for identifying and persuading voters, including bots and avatars, advanced intelligence tools and efforts to engineer public opinion through AI chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT. Some of these tools are illegal, and none are subject to any election oversight.

Israel Used AI-assisted Technology to Destroy Infrastructure in Gaza, Continues Genocide of Palestinians

Institute For Palestine Studies

An ongoing system of surveillance and policing in Occupied Palestine by Israel, aided by Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be traced back to the 2010s, when facial recognition was being “tested” at checkpoints and large information databases through cyber warfare programs. As Israel continues its most recent genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank, the Occupation heavily relies on AI-assisted tools, majorly funded by the U.S.  In the first two months after October 2023, Lavender, an AI program created by the Israeli military as part of Unit 8200, specifically to automate “kill lists,” generated at least 37,000 recommendations for “human targets,” as reported by +972 Magazine in April 2024. Officers reportedly spent as little as 20 seconds reviewing each target before approving strikes, with human oversight often serving as little more than a "rubber stamp." With a reported error rate of around 10%, the system misidentified thousands of civilians. Sarah Dweik, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), spoke with Palestine Square about ‘Predatory State,' a 200-page report recently released by the organization detailing Israel's gendered violence against Palestinians, including the use of  AI-assisted technologies and the systematic targeting of reproductive health and freedom.