Digital Rights Weekly Update: 16 - 22 January 2026

Policy Insight

The start of a new year brings no reset for digital rights, but only brings the normalization of practices we have been warning about. Across platforms, surveillance infrastructure, and humanitarian governance, the same power asymmetries persist, and in some cases deepen. Rather than meaningful reform, we are seeing entrenchment: technologies of control becoming routine, and accountability mechanisms lagging further behind real-world harms.

Meta’s newly published 2025 Human Rights Report illustrates this gap. While years of civil society pressure, including 7amleh’s work, pushed the company to adopt human rights reporting, the substance remains thin. Structural discrimination against Palestinians, failures in moderation, and limited transparency continue to undermine Meta’s obligations under the UN Guiding Principles, turning reporting into compliance theater rather than protection of digital rights.

At the same time, the Palantir revelations and plans for biometric “communities” in Gaza expose a broader trajectory: surveillance and AI-enabled governance tested on Palestinians are now exported outward, from Gaza to U.S. immigration control (ICE). Palestine is not an exception, but a proving ground. As civic space contracts globally, the central policy challenge is no longer whether these systems will spread, but whether governance, regulation, and public accountability can restrain them before data-driven control becomes the default architecture of rule for states and platforms alike.

News Digest

My final message before I'm on an FBI watchlist: Palantir, Epstein, & The New York Times

Zig Art

The internet has become a place where real wars with deadly consequences are carried out. Today, a tweet can determine a drone strike target, and kill civilians, halfway around the world. It can also empty an entire city, as Trump did in June when he cast Tehran into evacuation chaos after threatening airstrikes that never came. Now that the internet is a war zone, success largely depends on one’s ability to wield the power of information to mislead, misinform, or scare one’s enemies. As a big-data platform with connections to the CIA and foreign intelligence operations, Palantir has likely been central to the waging of this kind of warfare: where nation-states try to win not only using conventional weapons, but by weaponizing data and influence for covert “hybrid” operations. Palantir’s executives understand this more than anyone.

Meta’s 2024 Human Rights Report: too little, too late

SMEX

In a long-overdue move, Meta finally published its 2024 annual human rights report in December 2025, strategically releasing it just ahead of the holiday break, a timing choice potentially aiming to curtail scrutiny from the press and civil society. This delay is particularly striking given that the company’s previous human rights report was released in September 2024, suggesting a consistent pattern of contempt towards human rights and the company’s commitments under the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).

Posting Palestine: Questioning social media potentials and intentions from a diaspora perspective

My Kali

At the forefront of social media and Palestine is the pursuit for fair and accurate news coverage. Sources well known in the Arabic-speaking world have been censored and banned from many social platforms, while new ones rise in pockets of the social media sphere and continue to spread truths. Choosing which news and news platforms we engage with has never been more pivotal. We’re past the days of tuning into manipulative Western sources for accurate news; they’re a mockery at best. The news we pay mind to and the platforms we seek it from are intentional choices we all make every day. With Palestine, we’re tuned into the voices on the ground.

Leaked Documents: “Planned Community” in Rafah Would Force Palestinians Into Israeli Panopticon

Drop Site News

The U.S. military-led group supporting “stabilization efforts” in Gaza has put forward plans for a housing block for Palestinians in Gaza in an area under full Israel military control. According to materials circulated by the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) and obtained by Drop Site News, the “planned community,” if developed, would contain and control its residents through biometric surveillance, checkpoints, monitoring of purchases, and educational programs promoting normalization with Israel. Palestinians would have to pass through a checkpoint to access the zone. “Residents will be able to enter and exit the neighborhood freely, subject to security checks to prevent the introduction of weapons and hostile elements,” the materials state. “All entering residents will be registered with biometric documentation to enable identification for movement and civil services.”