7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media

7amleh – the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media – is a Haifa-headquartered Palestinian non-governmental organisation founded in 2013 by co-founders Nadim Nashif, Laura Samara, and Manar Ya'qoub to defend the digital rights of Palestinians and to advance, in its own words, "a fair and free digital space for Palestinians and beyond". Registered as an amutah (nonprofit association under Israeli law) and operating from Haifa with a Ramallah office, 7amleh is the principal Palestinian civil-society anchor on platform content moderation, Arabic-language digital-rights advocacy, and the AI-and-armed-conflict register that has come to centre on Meta's wartime moderation of Palestinian content across Facebook and Instagram since October 2023.

Founding, leadership, and institutional posture

7amleh was founded in 2013 in Haifa by co-founders Nadim Nashif, Laura Samara, and Manar Ya'qoub during the early window of Arabic-language digital-rights organising that followed the platform-mediated political mobilisations of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Co-founder Nadim Nashif has served as the organisation's Executive Director since its founding and is the organisation's principal public-facing voice in international press, at convenings, and inside Palestinian civil-society coordination on digital rights. The organisation's mission, as articulated in its 2023 Annual Report, is to advance "a fair and free digital space for Palestinians and beyond" — a framing that positions 7amleh simultaneously inside Palestinian civil society, inside the wider Arabic-language regional digital-rights field, and inside the international platform-accountability and human-rights-defender infrastructure.

In April 2020 7amleh received the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for digital activism — the field's clearest international recognition of the organisation's Palestinian digital-rights work. In 2022 it was granted UN ECOSOC consultative status and joined the Global Network Initiative as a civil-society member, the multistakeholder platform-accountability body that convenes Meta, Google, Microsoft, and other major platforms with civil-society, academic, and investor counterparts; the GNI accession announcement places 7amleh inside the principal international multistakeholder venue for platform-accountability work, which the corpus's other Arabic-language anchors are not yet inside.

Named programmes

7amleh's published programme structure organises around five named anchors per the 2023 Annual Report. Research is the original research line that produces the organisation's Hashtag Palestine annual reports and shorter-form publications on platform-content-moderation, infrastructural-rights, and Palestinian-digital-economy themes. Monitoring runs through 7or — the Palestinian Digital Rights Observatory, the organisation's named data-collection platform for documenting and verifying digital-rights violations against Palestinians, which carries the bulk of the organisation's primary-evidence work and feeds into the annual reports and international advocacy. Advocacy runs into international and regional convening bodies — the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Meta Oversight Board, the Global Network Initiative — and into joint civil-society statements with Access Now, Article 19, Human Rights Watch, and other international human-rights organisations. Capacity Building trains Palestinian civil-society organisations and individual journalists and activists in digital-rights advocacy and operational digital safety, supported by 7amleh's Digital Security Helpdesk for at-risk users. Campaigns coordinates the organisation's issue-specific public campaigns, including the active roster: #ReconnectGaza on Gaza connectivity, Meta Let Palestine Speak on platform censorship of Palestinian content, PayPal on financial-platform exclusion of Palestinian users, Mapping Segregation on platform documentation of discrimination, Google Maps on territorial labelling, and Privacy and Data Protection on user-data safeguarding.

Palestine Digital Activism Forum

7amleh's signature convening artefact is the Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF), the annual gathering it has run since the mid-2010s as the central Arabic-language and Palestinian-civil-society convening on digital rights. The 7th edition convened roughly 1,500 participants per the 2023 Annual Report — the corpus's largest documented single Arabic-language digital-rights convening at the time of writing — and the 8th edition was held 4-5 June 2024 in partnership with SMEX's Bread & Net 6th edition on artificial intelligence's role in human rights, pairing 7amleh's Palestinian convening with SMEX's wider WANA regional unconference (see Bread & Net 6th edition (online, 13-15 May 2024)) into a two-stage Arabic-language regional civil-society response to the unfolding war. PDAF anchors a structurally distinct register from the SMEX Bread & Net unconference and the Paradigm Initiative Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum — 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 first Palestinian-civil-society annual convening anchor.

Meta content moderation and the BSR engagement

7amleh's primary international-engagement track is the multi-year campaign to surface and reform Meta's content moderation of Palestinian content, which has been the organisation's most-cited international register since well before the post-October 2023 intensification. After the May 2021 Israel-Gaza escalation surfaced widespread takedowns of Palestinian and Arabic-language content on Facebook and Instagram, the Meta Oversight Board recommended an independent human-rights impact assessment of Meta's policies during the escalation; Meta commissioned Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), which produced 21 recommendations in September 2022 finding over-enforcement of Arabic content compared to Hebrew and adverse human-rights implications for Palestinians' freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination. 7amleh's September 2022 statement on the BSR review — jointly with Human Rights Watch, Article 19, and other regional partners — pressed Meta for full implementation of the BSR recommendations and has been carried forward in subsequent civil-society correspondence with the company.

The post-October 2023 cycle of platform-content-moderation work intensified and consolidated the campaign. 7amleh's annual Hashtag Palestine report — the 9th edition documenting 2023 was released 17 January 2024 — documented 4,400 digital-rights violations through the calendar year, 69% of them after 7 October 2023, attributing the surge to Meta's automatic moderation systems discriminating against Arabic-language content while failing to moderate Hebrew-language incitement against Palestinians. "Erased and Suppressed: Palestinian Testimonies of Meta's Censorship", released 18 December 2024, compiled 20 first-person testimonies from Palestinian influencers, journalists, and media outlets documenting post deletions, account suspensions, and reach restrictions on Facebook and Instagram, framing the harms in economic, professional, psychological, social, and political terms. "Meta's Role in Amplifying Harmful Content During Genocide", released 2 September 2025, documented more than 2,000 pieces of harmful Hebrew-language content across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp between October 2023 and May 2025, detected 2.5 million harmful Hebrew posts in 2024 alone, characterised the asymmetric enforcement as "systematic racial discrimination in content governance", and documented Meta's advertising systems approving violent Hebrew-language content as paid advertising in direct experiments in 2023 and 2025.

The AI-and-armed-conflict register

Alongside the platform-content-moderation campaign, 7amleh has built an in-house AI documentation infrastructure under the name Violence Indicator — an AI-powered language-model analysis tool that has detected more than 15 million inciting Hebrew-language posts against Palestinians on social media since October 2023, sized at roughly 3 million instances in the Hashtag Palestine 2023 baseline and 2.5 million across the 2024 calendar year alone per the September 2025 report. The Violence Indicator is the corpus's clearest documented case of grassroots Arabic-language civil-society building its own AI tooling to scale up monitoring of the same platforms it is campaigning to reform — an operational inversion of the more familiar civil-society-watches-AI register. The tool sits inside a broader AI-and-armed-conflict register that the post-October 2023 period has surfaced for 7amleh: documentation of platform algorithmic-moderation as a wartime censorship vector, advocacy on Big Tech accountability during armed conflict, contribution to the wider Palestinian civil-society response to AI-targeting systems used by the Israeli military as documented in the international press, and coordination with the international civil-society field through Access Now, Article 19, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and Witness. Within 7amleh's own framing the AI-and-armed-conflict register is a substantive sub-theme rather than the headline of the organisation's work — the headline is the Palestinian-civil-society convening, monitoring, and advocacy register that PDAF, 7or, and the Hashtag Palestine series anchor — but the AI-targeting and AI-moderation threads run through that headline body of work in a way that distinguishes 7amleh's contribution from the international policy-side AI-and-armed-conflict register the corpus's autonomous-weapons campaign anchors elsewhere.

Posture in the movement

Within the corpus's frame, 7amleh occupies a distinctive position — the Palestinian civil-society anchor on AI-mediated content moderation under wartime conditions and the principal Arabic-language grassroots organisation engaging non-AI publics (Palestinian journalists, influencers, content creators, activists, and the broader Palestinian and Arabic-language public sphere) in shaping how AI is being deployed by platforms and states in the Israel-Gaza war. Its theory of change runs in three directions at once: outward into international platform-accountability and human-rights work through GNI, the Meta Oversight Board, the BSR HRIA engagement, and UN human-rights mechanisms; inward into the technical-monitoring and capacity-building work of 7or and the Violence Indicator on the concrete sites of Arabic-language content moderation, Hebrew-language incitement, and Palestinian-civil-society digital safety; and through the Palestine Digital Activism Forum and the 7amleh annual reports into the Palestinian and Arabic-language public sphere itself. Its substantive contribution to the make-AI-good movement, distinct from the corpus's other regional anchors, is the operationalised Palestinian-civil-society methodology of grassroots digital-rights monitoring under wartime conditions — refusing the separation between platform-content-moderation, AI-system deployment, and armed-conflict, and demonstrating that Arabic-language civil-society AI tooling and grassroots organising can survive and scale even when its target population is itself under direct attack. In the corpus's regional shape, 7amleh is the Palestinian and wartime-conditions counterpart to SMEX's Lebanese and WANA-wide Arabic-language anchor — the corpus's pair of Arabic-language civil-society anchors on AI-and-human-rights in the West Asia and North Africa region.