The Attacks on Palestinian Digital Rights

The Attacks on Palestinian Digital Rights is a short-form documentary report by 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, published on 21 May 2021, that documents digital-rights violations against Palestinians on major social media platforms between 6 and 19 May 2021 — the central window of the May 2021 Israel-Gaza escalation that followed the Israeli Supreme Court's Sheikh Jarrah displacement decision, the Israeli police raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque, settler violence in mixed Israeli cities, and the bombing of the Gaza Strip. The report is the corpus's first Palestinian publication anchor, the second West Asia and North Africa regional anchor on the publications slate, and the foundational artefact of the multi-year 7amleh campaign on platform content moderation of Palestinian content that the post-October 2023 cycle of Hashtag Palestine annual reports, Meta-side BSR HRIA engagement, and AI-mediated-content-moderation documentation has built on directly.

Trigger and documentation window

The report's framing window is the two-week period from 6 to 19 May 2021, when — concurrent with the escalation of offline violence in East Jerusalem, the mixed Israeli cities, the West Bank, and Gaza — 7amleh and the Palestinian and Arabic-language public observed a sudden, sustained, and asymmetric surge in social-media platforms' removal of Palestinian political speech and visual documentation, paired with a documented failure of the same platforms to act on Hebrew-language hate speech and incitement to violence against Palestinians and Arabs. The report's release post frames the period as the trigger for a broader systemic question — under what authority, with what oversight, and on what record do major platforms remove Palestinian political content while preserving Hebrew-language content inciting violence against Palestinians? — that the BSR human-rights impact assessment Meta commissioned in 2022 ultimately scoped and that the post-October 2023 7amleh campaign continues to press against the same platforms.

Documented violations and platform breakdown

The report documents more than 500 reports of digital-rights violations over the 6-19 May window, gathered with public and civil-society support through a six-language Google Form documentation system 7amleh assembled at the start of the escalation. The carried-forward total in the 7amleh 2021 Mid-Year Report revised the figure to 668 documented cases of censorship and incitement submitted to platforms through the period. The platform breakdown 7amleh reports — Instagram (50%), Facebook (35%), Twitter (11%), and TikTok (1%) — names Meta-owned platforms as carrying 85% of the documented violations. The named violations include content removals, account suspensions and restrictions, hashtag suppression, and deletion of archived content, with the report noting that platforms in most cases failed to explain deletion or suspension reasons. Alongside the platform-removals register, the report carries 40 separate reports of hate speech and incitement to violence against Palestinians and Arabs in Hebrew — including documentation of Israeli extremist groups organising lynch mobs on WhatsApp and Telegram, which the report identifies as a concurrent failure mode where the same platforms removing Palestinian political speech were leaving Hebrew-language calls to violence in place. The 2021 Mid-Year Report subsequently established a 15-fold increase in violent speech in the same May 2021 window compared to the same calendar weeks in 2020.

Israeli Cyber Unit and government-platform coordination

The report's load-bearing structural finding is that the documented surge cannot be analysed only as platform under-investment or moderation error: it traces a substantial share of the removals to direct coordination between the Israeli Ministry of Justice's Cyber Unit and the major platforms. The report names the Cyber Unit as having submitted tens of thousands of content-removal requests over preceding years "without any legal basis" — informal demands processed through platforms' trust-and-safety channels rather than through judicial process, and lacking the procedural protections that would attach to a court order or comparable legal instrument. The framing reaches beyond Palestine-specific advocacy into the wider platform-accountability register that has come to centre on the question of state-platform direct coordination on speech-removal — a register the BSR HRIA process eventually took up institutionally and that the post-October 2023 7amleh research line on Meta's algorithmic discrimination against Arabic-language content has continued to extend.

Beyond social platforms

The report extends the documentation register to adjacent digital infrastructure outside the major social platforms. Google hosted a video by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs on YouTube intended to justify the attacks on the Gaza Strip, and Google Maps was found to have blurred the Gaza Strip and lowered its imagery resolution, impeding the ability of human-rights organisations and journalists to document destruction and demolitions on the ground. Venmo, the financial-payments platform, prevented users from donating to Palestinian organisations during the escalation — extending the platform-restriction register from speech into financial-infrastructure exclusion. The report's framing of these adjacent-infrastructure findings is that the major social platforms are one layer of a wider digital-infrastructure asymmetry whose civil-society documentation has to track all of it together rather than treating social-media content moderation as a separable category.

Methodology and documentation infrastructure

The report's methodology is documentary: 7amleh assembled a six-language Google Form at the start of the escalation through which public users and civil-society organisations could report platform violations against Palestinian content; the resulting cases were verified, classified by platform and violation type, and aggregated into the report's headline figures. The improvised Google Form was the immediate-response operational anchor of the documentation work; the 7or Platform — the Palestinian Digital Rights Observatory — was launched by 7amleh in November 2021 as the open-source successor infrastructure to carry the methodology forward. The 7or platform is the documentation backbone of the multi-year Hashtag Palestine annual reports the May 2021 report opened the campaign for, and it remains the operational artefact behind the post-October 2023 7amleh research line on AI-mediated platform-content-moderation of Palestinian content.

Advocacy uptake and the BSR pathway

The report's advocacy uptake was immediate and sustained. On 18 May 2021 — three days before the report's release — 7amleh Local Advocacy Manager Mona Shtaya joined Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh in a video meeting with Facebook Head of Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg to press the company on Palestinian-content removals during the escalation. 7amleh published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg calling on the company to "stop the censorship of Palestinian content" and joined the MENA Content Moderation Coalition in a coordinated regional statement on Arabic-language content moderation. On the international-journalism side, the International Federation of Journalists, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, and 7amleh issued a joint press release framing the documented violations as a serious attack on freedom of information and expression, with IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger calling on platforms to "explain in detail all decisions to block freedom of information in their networks". The sustained advocacy register the report opened culminated in the Meta Oversight Board's recommendation for an independent human-rights impact assessment of Meta's policies during the May 2021 escalation, Meta's commissioning of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), and the September 2022 publication of BSR's 21 recommendations — which independently confirmed the documented over-enforcement of Arabic-language content compared to Hebrew-language content the 7amleh report had first surfaced from the civil-society side. 7amleh's September 2022 statement on the BSR HRIA, jointly with Human Rights Watch, Article 19, and other regional partners, completed the institutional arc the May 2021 report had opened.

Posture within the corpus

Within the corpus, The Attacks on Palestinian Digital Rights is the first Palestinian publication anchor, the second West Asia and North Africa regional anchor on the publications slate after the SMEX-led AI Investments in the Gulf, and the foundational documentary artefact of the multi-year 7amleh campaign on platform content moderation of Palestinian content that has continued through the Hashtag Palestine annual-report series, the BSR HRIA institutional pathway, and the post-October 2023 AI-mediated-content-moderation register that the 7amleh org-side body documents in depth. Where the SMEX report installs the Arabic-language WANA evidence base on Gulf AI-investment political economy, the 7amleh report installs the Arabic-language WANA evidence base on platform content moderation under wartime conditions — two structurally adjacent civil-society analytics on the same regional shape but at different layers of the AI-and-rights stack.

The report's substantive contribution to the corpus's make-AI-good frame is that it surfaces, from the earliest plausible documentation moment, the asymmetric outcomes of automated content-moderation systems on Arabic-language vs Hebrew-language content during armed conflict — a finding the post-October 2023 7amleh research line has subsequently quantified into 4,400 digital-rights violations in 2023 (69% after 7 October), the 2.5 million harmful Hebrew posts the Violence Indicator AI tool detected across 2024, and the standing 7amleh framing of asymmetric platform enforcement as "systematic racial discrimination in content governance". The May 2021 report is the artefact in which that argument is first made publicly with civil-society documentation behind it; the 2022 BSR HRIA is the artefact in which Meta itself accepted the substantive finding institutionally; and the post-October 2023 reports are the artefacts in which the documented asymmetry has been carried into the AI-and-armed-conflict register the corpus's 7amleh entry anchors. The report is referenced from the 7amleh org body's Meta content moderation and the BSR engagement section as the originating documentary artefact of the multi-year campaign, and the framing it installs — that Arabic-language vs Hebrew-language asymmetry in platform content moderation cannot be analysed apart from the political and wartime context in which it operates — is the standing reference posture the corpus carries on 7amleh's content-moderation analytic line.