Media, Big Tech suppress Palestine stories

ISLAMABAD: From the ‘shadow-banning’ of Palestinian content on all major social media platforms to the suspension of Muslim journalists, Western media has displayed an open bias in favour of Israel in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.

American TV news channel MSNBC temporarily off-screened Mehdi Hassan, Ayman Mohieddine and Ali Velshi and BBC has suspended six reporters for posting or just liking Palestinian-affiliated content.

Meanwhile, British newspaper ‘Guardian’ has also sacked its veteran cartoonist Steve Bell, after a cartoon featuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pulled for being ‘anti-Semitic’.

Further, TikTok told The Washington Post that Gaza/Hamas is banned from its platform. ‘X’, formerly known as Twitter, said last week that it had taken down hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts.

Social media users have complained that posts and accounts have been suspended or banned due to their pro-Palestinian content in the wake of Israel’s intense bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Aya Omar, an artificial intelligence engineer, told The New York Times that she was unable to see Palestinian media accounts she regularly reads because Meta and Instagram were blocking those accounts. She said that people were seeing a sanitized version of the events occurring in Gaza.

The Hampton Institute, an American think tank in, tweeted/posted that: “Instagram and Facebook are actively blocking posts about the factual history of Israel/Palestine, sometimes cloaking it as ‘technical difficulty’”.

Even the New York Times has reported that thousands of Palestinian supporters say their posts have been suppressed or removed from Facebook and Instagram, even if the messages do not break the platforms’ rules. The European Commission has opened an investigation into X after warnings about misinformation linked to Hamas and Israel while

TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew was given 24 hours by the European Commission on Thursday to show how his company was protecting teenagers from violent content and misinformation on Israel and Hamas. Instagram users have shared screenshots of low view counts for their posts on the app’s Stories feature, alleging that the dip in viewers of their content is due to shadow bans enforced because of pro-Palestine content. Meanwhile, creators on TikTok have alleged that videos containing content supportive of Palestine have been taken down.

Allegations of shadow-banning come after Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said it was taking “specific steps” to monitor its content amid the war.

Meta refutes any claims of censorship based on taking sides or silencing Palestinian voices. A Meta spokesperson told Arab News: “The suggestion that we’re trying to suppress a particular community or point of view is categorically untrue.

There is a lot of uncertainty over what happens next, but commentators have said that the mood of the Western media is very similar to what had happened post-9/11. A Western media organization reported a comment that said that this situation has unfortunately now gone beyond political views and is targeting anchors of a particular faith.