Digital Rights Weekly Update: 27 March - 2 April 2026

Policy Insight:

This week marked the conclusion of the Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF), as highlighted in recent coverage, bringing forward conversations on truth, narrative, open-source intelligence, digital erasure, and information integrity. The forum underscored the scale of digital repression facing Palestinians, while also serving as a step in the right direction, creating space for collective reflection, knowledge-sharing, and stronger alignment on the need for accountability from both states and tech companies.

In this context, we also encourage readers to engage with a recent piece by 7amleh’s Head of Monitoring & Documentation on algorithmic bias, which sheds light on the persistent and often unjustified removal of Palestinian content, including posts featuring the Palestinian flag (in Arabic). The article offers an accessible and important perspective on how these biases operate in practice.

As digital systems continue to shape narratives and realities, strengthening awareness and collective action remains essential to protecting Palestinian digital rights.

News Digest

Palestine digital forum explores the role of digital narratives to control the Palestine question

The New Arab

The forum seeks to draw attention to the human cost of such digital repression, linking it to the systematic silencing and killing of journalists, the erasure of Palestinian cultural memory, and the destruction of Gaza’s communications infrastructure. Organisers say these efforts work together to isolate Palestinians digitally and physically, burying living testimonies from the occupied territories. 7amleh identified accountability as the central thread of the conference, with calls to hold both states and major technology companies responsible for amplifying propaganda and enforcing asymmetrical moderation policies during crises such as the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The Technology of Politics: How Digital Platforms Reshape Palestinian Consciousness?

Alquds Press

Politics is no longer made only in decision-making rooms, and the shaping of public opinion is no longer exclusive to parties or traditional media. Instead, the center of gravity has shifted to a more complex and dangerous space: the realm of digital platforms. In this space, power is not measured by the number of votes or political programs, but by the algorithms' ability to direct attention, reorder priorities, and create collective perception in an invisible way. This is where the features of what can be called "the technology of politics" begin, where the algorithm transforms from a technical tool into an undeclared political actor. In the Palestinian context, this transformation cannot be read in isolation from the general context in which society lives. A reality characterized by political and economic pressure, and daily restrictions, makes the digital space not just a communication area, but an alternative space for life and expression. This explains the deep integration of Palestinians into digital platforms, not only as a means of entertainment, but as an environment that provides a relative sense of freedom and control, even if this feeling is manufactured within a precise algorithmic structure.

The proliferation of AI-enabled military technology in the Middle East

Charting Middle East

The Israel–Hamas war of May 2021 was described in the Israeli press as ‘the world’s first AI war’, integrating a number of new artificial intelligence (AI) systems into military technologies, from new target-identification processes to enhanced weaponry. Since then, the integration of AI into military technologies has progressed in leaps and bounds, with countries across the region seeking to make AI a part of their military architecture. Much of this has involved partnerships with commercial entities, from Israeli start-ups to big-tech corporations including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. As these entities have shown a tendency to circumvent their self-professed human-rights commitments and due-diligence obligations, greater regulation will be required to protect civilian lives and infrastructure during armed conflict.  As the player with the greatest access to this technology, Israel is pioneering the deployment of AI-enabled military technologies in the region, often to devastating effect. It first did so on a significant scale in the May 2021 war, but its use of these technologies has increased exponentially since 7 October 2023. Within the first few weeks of the Gaza war, Lavender, an AI decision-support system (DSS), was reportedly used to generate a list of 37,000 individual targets.

Inside the far-right network targeting Europe’s digital rules

Multinationals Observatory

In December 2025, Elon Musk called on Xfor the abolition of the EU, comparing it to Nazi Germany. This followed the European Commission fining Musk’s social media platform for a lack of transparency regarding its algorithms, as well as for the misleading use of the blue check verification mark. A few days later, in retaliation, former European Commissioner Thierry Breton and four NGO members combating hate speech were barred from entering the United States. This was only the latest in a series of wide-ranging attacks by the Trump administration, its tech sector allies, and US far-right think tanks on EU digital regulations, especially on the Digital Services Act (DSA), which sets out a framework for content moderation on social media. These attacks are supported in Brussels by conservative organisations close to the Hungarian government, Christian fundamentalists and by far-right MEPs. On 2 and 3 February this year, the Patriots for Europe group, chaired by Jordan Bardella, co-hosted a transatlantic summit in the European Parliament with several figures from the MAGA sphere and the international far-right discussing what they describe as threats to “free expression”.