Occupied Palestine (The Inside Palestine) A new report has revealed that violations against Palestinian content on social media have increased by 32.7 percent over last year.

Sada Social Center, which monitors social media violations of Palestinian content, said in its annual report that it has documented 1,593 violations against Palestinian content in 2021, 44 percent of which were against pages for media, journalists, and activists, Palestine official Wafa news agency reported on Monday.

“2021 was a space in which indications of violation of users’ digital rights have escalated and tendencies to impose coercive powers on people’s practices in this space increased,” it said in its report.

It added, “This goes beyond violating digital rights to violating basic human rights and turns cyberspace into a space full of threats.”

The local social media watch group further indicated that “muting the Palestinian voice, deleting pages that document the crimes of the (Israeli) occupation and the memory of the Palestinians, and threatening users and content creators regarding Palestine, were accompanied by silence on the crimes of incitement and hatred and threats practiced by the occupation through the space of these platforms during this year.”
“Despite the recognition of many representatives of social media sites of this bias and promises to review and reform policies, what actually happened is more persistence in violations, bias and punitive policies against Palestinian content,” it added.

Facebook had the highest number of violations against Palestinian content with 853 violations, the report said, followed by Twitter which had 445 and Instagram with 174 violations. WhatsApp, YouTube, and Skype had 22, 16 and 2 violations respectively.
Anti-Palestinian racism and incitement by Israelis on social media have increased over the past years.

Palestinian activists say there is a double standard regarding the enforcement of social media platforms’ policies.

Sada Social was launched by three Palestinian journalists in September 2017 to document “violations against Palestinian content” on social networks such as Facebook and YouTube, and to communicate with its executives to restore some of the pages and accounts that have been shut down.

According to 7amleh – The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, which monitors and documents racist and discriminatory speech online, the Israeli regime has more than 200 criminal files against Arab and Palestinian activists, charging them with incitement on the internet, while “almost not a single case” has been opened against Israeli instigators.

Source: Press Tv

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