In January, dozens of Palestinian journalists have staged a demonstration outside the UN office in Gaza City before Land Day to protest Facebook's practice of blocking Palestinian Facebook accounts.
Demonstrators held banners saying "Facebook is complicit in [Israel's] crimes" and "Facebook favours the [Israeli] occupation."
Speaking at the demonstration, organized by the Journalists Support Committee, a Palestinian NGO, Salama Maarouf, a spokesman for Hamas, described the popular social media platform as "a major violator of freedom of opinion and expression.
"Facebook blocked roughly 200 Palestinian accounts last year - and 100 more since the start of 2018 - on phony pretexts."
He asserted that some 20 percent of Israeli Facebook accounts "openly incite violence against Palestinians" without facing any threat of closure.
In late 2016, Facebook signed an agreement with Israel's Justice Ministry in which it promised to "monitor" content on Palestinian accounts.
In March 2017, Facebook briefly shut down the page of Fatah, the party which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA), after it published an old photograph of late leader Yasser Arafat holding a rifle.
A political satire page, Mish Eek, critical of both Israel and the PA, has been shut down and reopened several times.
Social media platforms do not take down content for overtly political reasons, but they do take down what they consider "hate speech" or incitement to violence, and other forms of online abuse that anyone reports to the administrators.
But Palestinian journalists and activists say there is a double standard regarding the enforcement of the platform's policies.
In late 2016, Facebook signed an agreement with Israel's Justice Ministry in which it promised to "monitor" content on Palestinian accounts.
In March 2017, Facebook briefly shut down the page of Fatah, the party which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA), after it published an old photograph of late leader Yasser Arafat holding a rifle.
A political satire page, Mish Eek, critical of both Israel and the PA, has been shut down and reopened several times.
Social media platforms do not take down content for overtly political reasons, but they do take down what they consider "hate speech" or incitement to violence, and other forms of online abuse that anyone reports to the administrators.
But Palestinian journalists and activists say there is a double standard regarding the enforcement of the platform's policies.
Palestinians journalists and activists have created their own social media watch group, Sada Social media, launched in September 2017 by three Palestinian journalists with the aim of documenting "violations against Palestinian content" on social networks such as Facebook and YouTube, and to liaise with their executives to restore some of the pages and accounts that have been shut down.
Palestinians journalists and activists have created their own social media watch group, Sada Social media, launched in September 2017 by three Palestinian journalists with the aim of documenting "violations against Palestinian content" on social networks such as Facebook and YouTube, and to liaise with their executives to restore some of the pages and accounts that have been shut down.
Iyad Alrefaie, cofounder of Sada Social, earlier this year said "there is a very big gap between Palestinians and Israelis. [Nothing happens] to Israelis who publish a status calling for killing Palestinians. But if Palestinians post any news about something happening on the ground or done by an Israeli soldier, Facebook [may] close the account or the page, or delete the post." 
Later on, in March, Facebook has shut down the page of a major Palestinian news outlet, in what appears to be a blatant instance of pro-Israel censorship.
The Safa Palestinian Press Agency reported that on Saturday its page, which had more than 1.3 million followers, was shut down without warning.
Later on, in March, Facebook has shut down the page of a major Palestinian news outlet, in what appears to be a blatant instance of pro-Israel censorship.The Safa Palestinian Press Agency reported that on Saturday its page, which had more than 1.3 million followers, was shut down without warning.
According to Safa, the next day its website was hijacked and replaced with threatening statements, before the publication’s technologists managed to restore control of their site.
On Monday, Safa reported that its page on the photo sharing network Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, had also been shut down without any warning. The account had more than 70,000 followers.
This appears to be an escalation of Facebook’s persistent blocking of the accounts of Palestinian journalists and publications.
Safa reports a mix of local and international news typical of other news organizations and asserts it has done nothing to violate Facebook’s rules.
According to Safa, Facebook has in recent days shut down about 100 accounts belonging to Palestinian media and activists.
In a statement in March, Safa managers condemned Facebook’s action as a continuation of Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people and an attempt to silence reporting about reality.
The publication urged local and international press freedom defenders to speak out against the censorship, and called on Facebook to restore Safa’s accounts.
Earlier this month, journalists in Gaza held a demonstration to protest censorship by Facebook.
A request for comment has been sent to Facebook.
In 2016, Israel made an agreement with Facebook to collaborate in monitoring what Israel claims to be “incitement” by Palestinians.
That year, Facebook apologized for disabling the accounts of several Palestinian journalists, claiming it had been a mistake.
But with the shuttering of Safa’s accounts, it appears that the targeting of Palestinian journalists continues.
The European Union also appears to be supporting Israel’s social media censorship as part of the 28-member bloc’s deepening commitment to silencing support for Palestinian rights.
Last week, three EU justice ministers signed a joint declaration with their Israeli counterpart Ayelet Shaked on “combating online incitement” and anti-Semitism.
In recent years, Israel has been pushing to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism – which simply means bigotry against Jews as Jews – to include criticism of Israel and its state ideology, Zionism.
While Facebook colludes with governments to crack down on Palestinians, violent and racist incitement by Israelis continues unabated.
More than 10 percent of Facebook posts written about Palestinians include denigrating language or calls for violence, according to a recent study by 7amleh by 7amleh an advocacy group for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
One of the most notorious examples of online incitement against Palestinians was posted by none other than justice minister Ayelet Shaked.
On the eve of the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza that left more than 550 Palestinian children dead, Shaked promoted a call for genocidal violence, including the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”
Shaked’s call received thousands of “likes” before she removed it, embarrassed by the global exposure it gained after The Electronic Intifada translated it into English. Shaked claimed that “terror groups” – the Israeli government’s catch-all term for Palestinian political parties and resistance organizations – were switching to Twitter, because so far that social network has been less willing to comply with government censorship than Facebook.
This indicates that after Facebook’s capitulation, other social media networks will be in Israel’s crosshairs.
The current events of The Great Return March 2018 are being the best human rights test for social media zionists bosses who support the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The current events of The Great Return March 2018 are being the best human rights test for social media zionists bosses who support the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
VICE on HBO: How Israel rules the world of cyber security
Facebook defended its decision to shut down the page of a major Palestinian news outlet, describing the action as a move against “hate speech.”
On March, the social media giant closed without warning the page of the Safa Palestinian Press Agency, which had 1.3 million followers, as well as Safa’s account on the photo sharing site Instagram.
The Palestinian Media Association condemned Facebook’s widening assault on the free speech of Palestinian journalists, calling it “clear submission to the policies and dictates of the Israeli occupation which is pursuing Palestinian activists on the basis of their political views and intellectual positions and issuing prison sentences against them.”
But Facebook justified the removal of Safa’s account. “This page was correctly removed for violating our community standards. There is no room for hate speech or incitement of violence on our platform.”
The spokesperson provided no evidence to back up the company’s accusations against Safa, but asserted, “We care about the voices, opinion and rights of all the different communities on Facebook; however, keeping our community safe is our priority.”
By referring to “hate speech” and “incitement” as justifications to silence journalists, Facebook has adopted the framework of Israel, which routinely uses such broad and ill-defined terms to describe virtually all criticism of its violent military occupation over Palestinians or of its state ideology, Zionism.
The company did not respond to a question about whether it had taken the action against Safa based on a request from Israel.
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald has previously written and spoken about Facebook’s collusion with Israel and the United States to silence voices they don’t like. “Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness – at times bordering on eagerness – to curry favor with powerful governments by deleting content that they dislike,” said Glenn.
“One of the countries to which Facebook has proven itself most subservient is the Israeli government, and as a result, it has engaged in a year-long censorship spree against Palestinians whose crime is that they express views and engage in activism that Israeli officials dislike.”
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Facebook’s latest crackdown on Palestinian journalists and activists began early this year, after Israeli occupation forces extrajudicially executed Ahmad Nasser Jarrar, a man Israel accused of being involved in the shooting death of an Israeli settler in early January.
Israeli lawmakers also discussed how to suppress online content, including getting Facebook to take down images of Jarrar.
Since the beginning of the year, Haaretz says, citing an unnamed Palestinian activist who monitors the issue, about 500 Facebook pages of Palestinian activists and journalists have been closed by the company.
According to Haaretz, Safa has been operating for a decade as a “Hamas-affiliated” counterpart to Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency that is controlled by the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah faction led by Mahmoud Abbas.
But Safa’s website shows that its reporting is fairly typical of a wide range of Palestinian media outlets, covering violence by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinians, local, regional and international politics, and human interest stories.
The outlet carries reports on the activities of all political factions. On Tuesday, for instance, one of its lead stories was on a cabinet meeting led by Rami Hamdallah, the PA prime minister, in which Hamdallah asserted that his government “will not abandon our people in Gaza.”
Hamas and the PA remain bitter rivals over who should run Gaza.
The report includes the PA’s claims about the achievements of its efforts in Gaza, such as bringing together 55 countries at a donors conference last week to fund a $565 million water desalination plant in the Israeli-blockaded coastal territory.
Another report Tuesday carries a statement by Abbas’ official spokesperson describing recent US decisions to cut aid to the PA as “a war on our people.” Given their life long emprisonement in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians are avid users of Facebook and it is often a primary source of information about what is happening in their communities.
But social media has made it hard for Israel’s censors to control information flowing from and to Palestinians under their military rule.
Four months ago, an Israeli military court sentenced Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi to eight months in prison for slapping a heavily armed occupation soldier in the West Bank.
It also sentenced her mother Nariman for filming the incident and streaming it on Facebook.
Israel’s persecution of the Tamimi family over the incident has become an international rallying point for Palestine solidarity.
But for now, Israel appears to have solved its Facebook problem by leaning on the company to submit to its commands.
According to Glenn Greenwald, “Facebook has empowered Israeli officials to control its content by obeying their censorship dictates in almost all cases.”
Digital Occupation
Every so often his posts turn to contemplations that address his Palestinian and Arab followers.
"How would you like to be remembered by people, as respected and successful or as troublemaking terrorists?" he posted last month. "The successful Mohamad Salah and Mostafa al-Agha or the cowardly terrorist Ahmad Jarrar? Think twice."
The references to Saleh, a popular Egyptian football player, and Agha, a Syrian presenter of a sports programme on the Saudi-owned MBC channel, are used as an ideal model of what an Arab man should be like.
In contrast there is Jarrar, a Palestinian man who was suspected of being behind the killing of a Jewish settler near the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank in January. Jarrar was killed after a month-long manhunt by the Israeli forces last February.
Adraee's Twitter and Facebook pages are among several mushrooming social media accounts in Arabic by Israeli military and government officials that target Arab citizens. They have one unified objective, which is to penetrate the ranks of Arabic-speaking world to distill hasbara (propaganda).
By conversing with them in their mother tongue, these Israeli officials are opening communication channels, and disseminate lies and propaganda with the aim to normalise the Israeli occupation and to whitewash the image of the Zionist entity.
Israel is portrayed as the only democracy in the Middle East, a progressive humane state, and the victim of violence and terrorism, thus whitewashing a whole history of colonisation, murder and forced displacement.
One example is of Adraee tweeting about the Land Day protests that took place near the Gaza Strip's eastern border last week, in which 17 Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces: "Sending 30,000 troublemakers to fight at the security fence only points to Hamas's terrorism and their attempt to exploit the citizens of Gaza," he said.
Nadim Nashif, the executive director of 7amleh, the Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement, said that the Israeli accounts in Arabic have become more popular among Palestinian social media users in the last year. "This constitutes the first time Palestinian citizens have direct online contact with high ranking Israeli officials, given that [most] Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip don't speak or read Hebrew."
The accounts also provide practical information to Palestinians, such as the opening and closing hours of checkpoints and how to obtain military-issued permits for travel or medical purposes. That is, Israel is therefore capitalising on the needs the occupation creates on Palestinians to attract attention and engagement in order to serve the purpose of their political agenda.
Following the Arab uprisings in 2011, Arab usage of social media platforms increased, representing an alternative to traditional media outlets that are mostly seen as mouthpieces of Arab regimes.
It is not a coincidence, Zaanin said, that the social media accounts of Adraee and Ofir Gendelman, the spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, were set up in the same year. And it is not surprising that the Israeli army added new units of Arabic-speaking pages to its arsenal of various weapons,.
In 2016, an account was also set up for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a unit of the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank. Other pages on Facebook include Israel Speaks in Arabic, which has 1.4 million followers, and pages belonging to Israeli embassies in Egypt and Jordan.
This open communication channel is set up to extract information from Palestinians and other Arabs, intimidate Palestinians from carrying out individual attacks against Israelis, and to vilify any form of Palestinian resistance.
COGAT also exploits the bad situation in the Gaza Strip by blackmailing residents by promising them medical or travel permits or financial help to poor families, in exchange for providing them with information required by intelligence agents. They then drop them and extort them as a form of recruitment.
Human Rights NGOs are calling this phenomenon "digital occupation" through which Israel is expanding its control, surveillance and oppression of Palestinians from reality to the virtual sphere.
One page, called Bidna Na'eesh in Arabic (We want to live), provides a telephone number for Palestinians to report information on wanted individuals and "perpetrators of attacks" against Israelis.
"Inform us, and you will benefit," the banner's page says, showing a picture of a wad of 100 dollar bills above a cartoon of a hand shake with an Israeli flag.
"This is extremely dangerous as it forms part of Israel's militarisation of the digital sphere, as there are tens of pages that have been created by military forces and secret services," says a Gazan ativist.
Arab and Palestinian interaction with these Israeli accounts largely stems from ignorance and an underestimation of the effect that these interactions have in the short and long term.
Far from using firebrand rhetoric, Israeli accounts in Arabic cushion their propaganda in inoffensive, seemingly reasonable language, peppered with Arab proverbs and Quranic verses. They also present themselves as being concerned with the wellbeing of the Arab citizen, and the dangers of being led astray by "terrorists" or any resistance to the Israeli state and occupation.
There's also the possibility that a large number of followers of the accounts, whether on Facebook or Twitter, are Israelis aiming to trick Arab citizen to interact positively with them to break the barrier of fear, as there are no official statistics about the followers' details.
The reason for the proliferation of Arabic-language Israeli accounts is the absence of any form of grassroot tactics, including raising awareness about the dangers these pages pose to Arab social media users, such as potential extortion.
One way to backfire Israeli hasbara is to boycott the pages, and to raise awareness about their real motives. For ironically, Arabs are providing Israelis with a free service. They unwittingly provide Israeli intelligence officers with information, which is then used to infiltrate the accounts of Arab users. It's like handing over the keys to your home to your enemy.
Palestinians wished to confront the Israeli accounts in Arabic by setting up accounts that refute Israeli propaganda. However, social networking sites such as Facebook actively fight Palestinian content and delete such accounts, as we have seen it above. The collaboration between Israeli surveillance and Facebook is not new. According to 7amleh's annual Palestinian Digital Activism Report published on Tuesday, the cyber unit of the Israeli government officially stated that Facebook accepted 85 percent of the government's requests to delete content, accounts and pages of Palestinians in the year 2017.
"This kind of Israeli monitoring and control of Palestinian digital content on social media has become a tool for mass arrests and gross human rights and digital rights violations," the report stated.
In fact, more than 300 Palestinians from the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, were arrested by Israeli forces and tried in military courts because of social media posts, 7amleh said.
"These accounts are nothing more than a different combat unit," Zaanin said, "which is why it is very dangerous to interact with them at all."
Glenn Greenwald explains Facebook ill behaviour, on Democracy Now
What Google and Facebook know about you
"Want to freak yourself out?," wrote Dylan Curran. "I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it."
Here is a selection of points from Curran's list:
. Google stores your location (if you have it turned on) every time you turn on your phone, and you can see a timeline from the first day you started using Google on your phone. https://www.google.com/maps/timeline.
. Google stores search history across all your devices on a separate database, so even if you delete your search history and phone history, Google still stores everything until you go in and delete everything, and you have to do this on all devices. https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity..
. Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lbs in one day?) and income. https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated.
. Google stores information on every app and extension you use, how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with (who do you talk to on facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep at). https://myaccount.google.com/permissions?pli=1 .
. Google stores all of your YouTube history, so they know whether you're going to be a parent soon, if you're a conservative, if you're a progressive, if you're Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you're feeling depressed or suicidal, if you're anorexic. https://www.youtube.com/feed/history/search_history.
. Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you, "I've requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly three million Word documents. google.com/takeout".
. Facebook offers a similar option to download all your information, mine was roughly 600mb, which is roughly 400,000 Word documents.
. This includes every message you've ever sent or been sent, every file you've ever sent or been sent, all the contacts in your phone, and all the audio messages you've ever sent or been sent.
. Facebook also stores what it thinks you might be interested in based off the things you've liked and what you and your friends talk about.
. Somewhat pointlessly, they also store all the stickers you've ever sent on Facebook.
. They also store every time you log into Facebook, where you logged in from, what time, and from what device.
. And they store all the applications you've ever had connected to your Facebook account, "so they can guess I'm interested in politics and web and graphic design, that I was single between X and Y period with the installation of Tinder, and I got a HTC phone in November".
. Side-note, if you have Windows 10 installed, this is a picture of just the privacy options with 16 different sub-menus, which have all of the options enabled by default when you install Windows 10.
. This includes tracking where you are, what applications you have installed, when you use them, what you use them for, access to your webcam and microphone at any time, your contacts, your e-mails, your calendar, your call history, the messages you send and receive.
. This includes tracking where you are, what applications you have installed, when you use them, what you use them for, access to your webcam and microphone at any time, your contacts, your e-mails, your calendar, your call history, the messages you send and receive.
. The files you download, the games you play, your photos and videos, your music, your search history, your browsing history, even what radio stations you listen to.
. This is one of the craziest things about the modern age, we would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us, but we just went ahead and did it ourselves because f**k it I want to watch cute dog videos.
. Here's the search history document, which has 90,000 different entries, even showing the images I downloaded and the websites I accessed (I showed ThePirateBay section to show much damage this information can do).
. "Here's my Google Calendar broken down, showing all the events I've ever added, whether I actually attended them, and what time I attended them at (this part is what I went for an interview for a Marketing job, and what time I arrived at)."
. "This is my Google Drive, which includes files I explicitly deleted including my resume, my monthly budget, and all the code, files, and websites I've ever made, and even my PGP private key, which I deleted, which I use to encrypt e-mails."
. "This is my Google Fit, which shows all of the steps I've ever taken, any time I walked anywhere, and all the times I've recorded any meditation/yoga/workouts I've done (I deleted this information and revoked Google Fit's permissions)."
. "This is all the photos ever taken with my phone, broken down by year, and includes metadata of when and where I took the photos."
. "And now my Google Activity, this has thousands of files, so I'll just do a short summary of what they have."
. "Firstly every Google Ad I've ever viewed or clicked on, every app I've ever launched or used and when I did it, every website I've ever visited and what time I did it at, and every app I've ever installed or searched for".
. "Every image I've ever searched for and saved, every location I've ever searched for or clicked on, every news article I've ever searched for or read, and every single Google search I've made since 2009".
. "And then finally, every YouTube video I've ever searched for or viewed, since 2008".
BRASIL
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