Facebook ‘Deliberately Targeting’ Palestinian Accounts, Rights Groups Say
A new report from a Palestinian rights organization has found that the number of incidents in which people - including many journalists - have been arrested for social media posts has drastically increased in the last year, leading to worries over an Israeli crackdown on the right to freedom of expression, the Independent reported.
"Social media sites are… an efficient window to empower journalists and Palestinians in general to express their opinions freely,” Mousa Rimawi, author of the report and Director of the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (Mada) said.
"[But] systematic surveillance and observation by Israeli Occupation Authorities [have become] an open platform for persecution and oppression relating to users’ opinions.”
In addition, Israeli authorities are also pressuring social media companies to do more to remove posts which "could incite violence", including drafting laws - which digital rights groups say would be unworkable - to compel platforms to take down content that could incite violence.
A delegation from Facebook met with the Zionist regime officials in September for what were described as "successful” talks by Israeli Interior Minister Gilad Erdan's office. "Online extremism can only be tackled with a strong partnership between policymakers, civil society, academia and companies, and this is true everywhere," a representative for Facebook said.
This week, the activist collective Palestinian Information Center (PIC) reported that at least 10 of their administrators’ accounts for their Arabic and English Facebook pages - followed by more than two million people - have been suspended, seven of them permanently, which they say is a result of new measures put in place in the wake of Facebook’s meeting with Israel.
Since 2014, 61 Palestinian journalists and nine Israeli journalists have been prosecuted for online posts, the new report from Mada found.
In August, five journalists at Hebron start-up Sanabel Radio were also arrested in a dawn raid during what an Israeli army spokesperson said was an "ongoing effort against incitement.”
Last month, several senior journalists from Shehab and Quds news agencies in the West Bank reported their Facebook accounts - used to update professional pages which reach millions of people - had been temporarily suspended, in a move Facebook later said had been an error.
