‘Platformicide’ of Palestine: Activists struggle to be heard on Meta | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
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Faten Elwan says she believes she has been shadow-banned on Instagram because of her pro-Palestinian advocacy [File: Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters]
By Heba Habib
Published On 12 Aug 202612 Aug 2026
Jerusalem-based journalist Faten Elwan has more than 300,000 followers on her Instagram account, a page which regularly covers events in Palestine and documents the Israeli occupation, but now her posts typically get just a few hundred views.<br>In April 2026, Elwan was on a hike when she discovered her account had been unexpectedly reactivated after a two-month suspension, something she believes was due to her pro-Palestine content.<br>Recommended Stories<br>list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3Gaza sports community pledges to continue legacy of killed goalkeeper<br>list 2 of 3Election wins prove pro-Palestine US campus protests didn’t fail: Activists<br>list 3 of 3Seven pro-Palestine protesters convicted of misdemeanour charges in US<br>end of list<br>Her first story back on the platform was of her walk along the sea and reached 30,000 views. Within an hour, the number for later stories had dropped to a few hundred.<br>She is one of many pro-Palestinian account holders who believe they have been “shadow-banned” by Meta, a technique allegedly used by social media companies to restrict the visibility of certain accounts, consequently limiting the number of people who can see their content.<br>“People tell me: if we don’t specifically search for you and type your name, ‘Faten Elwan’, together, we can’t find you. I no longer exist,” she told Al Jazeera.<br>Elwan’s account was suspended for the first time in late 2023, shortly after the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and her account has been taken down eight times during the war. In May 2025, Elwan managed to meet representatives of Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, to flag her silencing on their platforms, but she said their response to her complaint appeared dismissive and noncommitted.<br>“During my meeting with Meta, they heard my statement, and there was no reaction whatsoever. I gave my statement and provided examples of what happened to me, how I’m technically just a shadow on social media,” she said.<br>Advertisement
“We all used to have a school principal. The principal would punish the bad student and shut him up. Meta is simply playing that same role, but on a global scale.”<br>Shadow banning<br>Elwan’s case is one of many documented in a report investigating how Meta has allegedly suppressed Palestinian voices over the past five years, including during successive Israeli assaults on Gaza.<br>The Platformicide of Palestine 2021–2025, a report published by 7amleh, the Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media, in partnership with an academic research team at Utrecht University, analysed more than 3,500 verified cases of digital rights violations logged by users through 7amleh’s own observatory, 7or.<br>The report coined the term “platformicide” to describe “the structural and intentional erasure of Palestinian digital presence, visibility, and participation across social media platforms”.<br>Fabio Cristiano, who led the report’s research and analysis at Utrecht University, said the report’s findings clearly show that the trend cannot be dismissed as a series of errors.<br>“This is an approach, a structural and intentional approach, which goes beyond content moderation alone. Meta’s erasure of Palestine operates through a broader architecture of exceptional governance, combining overbroad policy application, disproportionate enforcement, ad hoc policy revisions, algorithmic suppression, delayed restoration of content, and opaque or absent communication with users,” Cristiano told Al Jazeera.<br>“Platformicide is not simply about removing content. It is about denying a population access to the infrastructures through which they can claim their existence online.”
‘Dangerous Organizations and Individuals’<br>While the report does not assert that Meta is deliberately censoring users, it argues that the patterns of restrictions and deactivations of pro-Palestine accounts cannot be explained by error alone, and are structural – therefore meeting the authors’ definition of platformicide.<br>Of the cases documented between January 2021 and December 2025, only 32.5 percent had an identifiable policy violation attached to them. The majority of Palestinian users whose content was removed, restricted, or suppressed received no explanation they could point to.<br>The reasons given to users for their accounts being suspended follow a similar pattern: violation of Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, known internally as DOI, which was...