Palestine Digital Activism Forum 2024 (PDAF 2024), 8th edition (online, 4-5 June 2024)

On Tuesday 4 and Wednesday 5 June 2024, 7amleh — the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media convened the 8th edition of the Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF 2024) online under the theme "Artificial Intelligence (AI): Revolutionary Promises & Discriminatory Realities" — the corpus's first major Palestinian-civil-society convening organised explicitly around AI's role in human rights and the first PDAF edition to take AI as its substantive headline frame. The 8th edition drew more than 1,200 participants from around the world, 70 local, regional, and international speakers and trainers, and 50 collaborating partner organisations, sized inside the 7th edition's 1,500-participant 2023 cadence as a continuation of the PDAF series rather than an off-year departure.

Context

The Palestine Digital Activism Forum is 7amleh's signature annual convening, the central Arabic-language and Palestinian-civil-society digital-rights gathering, which the organisation has run since the mid-2010s as the principal regional venue for Palestinian digital-rights advocacy, content-moderation campaigning, and Arabic-language platform-accountability work. PDAF anchors a structurally distinct register from the corpus's other WANA and pan-African regional civil-society digital-rights convenings — Palestinian-civil-society and wartime-conditions at PDAF, Arabic-language WANA-regional at Bread & Net, pan-African digital-rights at DRIF — and is the corpus's only Palestinian-civil-society annual convening anchor.

The 8th edition was the first PDAF held entirely after the post-October 2023 intensification of 7amleh's content-moderation, AI-monitoring, and infrastructural-rights work in response to the Israeli war on Gaza, and the first to organise its programme explicitly around AI as the substantive operating theme rather than as one programme thread inside a wider digital-rights agenda. 7amleh framed the agenda around the central proposition that AI technologies' permeation into "various aspects of life" had become a primary site of Palestinian digital-rights risk during the war on Gaza, and that the forum's role was to "put Palestinian digital rights in the spotlight both regionally, and globally" through a two-day examination of AI's "revolutionary promises and discriminatory realities". The online format extended the post-October 2023 reformatting of regional civil-society convening cadences out of in-person Beirut and Haifa formats into accessible online formats, opening the forum to global participants who could not travel into the regional conditions of the war.

The 8th edition was explicitly paired with the Bread & Net 6th edition (online, 13-15 May 2024), SMEX's WANA-regional annual unconference, which had run earlier the same month also online and also under a wartime digital-rights frame. SMEX's own announcement of the May edition named the June PDAF as the partner Palestinian-civil-society convening on artificial intelligence's role in human rights, and 7amleh founder and Executive Director Nadim Nashif led the partnering organisation's contribution into the SMEX edition; the two editions together operated as a two-stage Arabic-language regional response to the unfolding war, with SMEX anchoring the WANA-regional infrastructural-rights and surveillance frame and 7amleh anchoring the Palestinian-civil-society AI-and-armed-conflict frame.

What happened over the two days

PDAF 2024 ran as a two-day online programme, with day one structured around policy discussions on AI's human-rights impact and day two around 14 parallel specialised workshops. The substantive agenda spanned the corpus's central AI-and-human-rights threads.

The opening policy day examined AI's discriminatory impacts on Palestinian and broader marginalised communities, the role of platform AI-mediated content moderation in suppressing Palestinian and Arabic-language content during the Gaza war, and the use of AI in wartime targeting and surveillance. Dr. Timnit Gebru — founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute — addressed technological oppression and the structural dynamics by which the dominant AI-development pipeline reproduces discriminatory outcomes for the populations it categorises; her contribution anchored the forum's connection between Palestinian-civil-society AI-and-armed-conflict work and the wider Global-South critical-AI-research register that DAIR convenes. Sam Gregory, executive director of WITNESS, anchored the programme's deepfakes and synthetic-media track, addressing how the AI-generated-media field has begun to shape the wartime information environment that Palestinian and Arabic-language civil society operates inside. Antony Loewenstein — the independent journalist whose 2023 book The Palestine Laboratory documents the export of Israeli surveillance and military technologies to authoritarian regimes — addressed the technological infrastructures inside which the Israeli occupation operates, and Dr. Abdul Razzaq Al-Natsheh, the Palestinian Minister of Telecommunications and Digital Economy, addressed Gaza telecommunications infrastructure rebuilding inside the war's operational realities. The international policy track also included Spanish Congress member Tish Sidi on digital transformation and US Senator Elizabeth Warren on ethical AI protection, alongside representatives of Google, TikTok, and other tech companies, placing the forum inside a multistakeholder rather than purely civil-society convening register.

The second day's 14 parallel workshops took the AI agenda into operational practice. Named workshop tracks included AI-assisted iterative development of social-impact projects — the use of AI tooling for project development and adaptation to community needs in civil-society organisations; natural-language-processing frontiers in combating hate speech; AI's impact on gender commercialisation; and social-media intelligence as a repression tool — the use of platform-data harvesting by governments and private companies to target human-rights defenders, journalists, and political opponents. The workshop programme also covered open-source intelligence and information verification — including the Meedan-led workshop on information verification and misinformation-combating practice — and the use of digital tools in uncovering war crimes.

The forum closed with PDAF Awards to two Palestinian projects — "Untold Palestine", the digital series produced by the We Are Not Numbers project, and the "Gaza Speaks" campaign of the Filastiniyat organisation — recognising Palestinian narrative and storytelling work conducted inside the wartime information environment.

Significance

PDAF 2024 is the corpus's first Event whose substantive theme is artificial intelligence directly named in the convening title, the first major Palestinian-civil-society convening anchored to AI as the headline operating frame, and the first PDAF edition entered into the corpus — closing the Palestinian-civil-society convening anchor (previously zero, despite 7amleh already present elsewhere in the corpus), the corpus's AI-and-armed-conflict event-thematic anchor (previously zero — distinct from the AI-and-policy, AI-and-platform-content-moderation, and AI-and-workplace event types the corpus had already begun to populate), and the global-scale online-format Palestinian-civil-society annual convening sub-type that the wartime cadence has produced.

Inside the corpus's regional convening shape, PDAF 2024 pairs with the SMEX Bread & Net 6th edition (online, 13-15 May 2024) as the two-stage WANA-regional civil-society response to the post-October 2023 war — SMEX's WANA-regional infrastructural-rights and surveillance frame in May, 7amleh's Palestinian-civil-society AI-and-armed-conflict frame in June, both run online from the regional anchors that the wartime conditions had pushed out of their usual in-person cadences. Sited alongside the Asia-Pacific DRAPAC and pan-African DRIF annual-convening cadences elsewhere in the corpus, the 8th edition extends the corpus's regional convening trio with a Palestinian-civil-society anchor whose substantive frame is the war-conditions AI register that the corpus's other regional convenings have not had to centre.

The 8th edition's 70-speaker, 50-partner, 1,200-participant scale — across two days rather than the longer in-person formats prior PDAF editions had used — demonstrates that Palestinian-civil-society digital-rights organising scaled its convening cadence through the war rather than contracting under it, and the convening's substantive AI-headline frame is the corpus's clearest documented case of grassroots Arabic-language and Palestinian civil-society publicly committing to AI-and-human-rights as the operating frame of its annual gathering at a moment when the same population was under direct attack.