In the weeks since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israeli civilians, and during the bombardment and invasion of Gaza that followed, people across social media have complained about posts in support of Palestinians being restricted or removed. There have been some high-profile examples: Facebook took down the English and Arabic pages of Quds News Network, known for sharing graphic crowdsourced videos. Press outlets have also reported on individual accounts sharing relatively innocuous material—a Palestinian-flag emoji, for instance—getting dinged as “potentially offensive.” Al Jazeera, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Intercept all found that posts and accounts have been taken down or seen their reach limited. Whether that amounts to a coordinated attempt at silencing has been difficult to prove. Nadim Nashif—the director of 7amleh (pronounced hamleh, as in Arabic for “campaign”), a nonprofit that promotes Palestinian digital rights—has been following excessive moderation for years. Nashif, who is fifty, monitors social networks from his office in Haifa, a mixed Palestinian and Jewish port city on Israel’s northern coast. In 2020, 7amleh published a report, “Systematic Efforts to Silence Palestinian Content on Social Media.”

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