Journalist Azmat Khan from The New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for her research into civilian deaths in American airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, shared an Instagram story about the war in Gaza this weekend. But she noticed that the message was viewed much less often than usual. Her followers no longer saw the story in their timeline, but had to go to her profile to see it.
Khan concluded that she was the victim of so-called shadow banning – a means by which social media platforms limit the reach of messages and accounts, without informing the user of the account. “Many colleagues and journalist friends have reported the same thing,” she wrote on X. “This is an enormous threat to the provision of information and credible journalism.”
She wasn’t the only one who suffered from this. In recent days, a growing group of Instagram users have accused the platform of limiting the visibility of pro-Palestinian content. Often users with a Muslim background. Such as the Moroccan-Dutch footballer Noussair Mazraoui, who plays for Bayern Munich. A video in which he wished the Palestinians victory in the battle with Israel was only visible to people who visited his profile. He said the same applied to Hakim Ziyech and Zakaria Aboukhlal, two other Dutch-Moroccan footballers. “They are trying to silence us,” he told ANP. “It’s literally us against the world.”
No bloody images
Oumaima Abalhaj, NRC correspondent in Spain and Morocco, had one similar experience after she shared a video on Instagram showing the consequences of the Israeli bombing of Gaza. “No bloody images, but aerial shots of destroyed buildings,” says Abalhaj on the phone from Madrid. “After I shared it, my profile started acting strange. Not only did the video have fewer views than normal. But if you searched for my name, my profile no longer appeared. Now that I have changed my name, I am happy to be found again. But I did receive a contradictory message that I was in danger of losing access to my profile, even though I followed the guidelines.”
For Khan, Mazraoui and Abalhaj, the conclusion is clear: this is censorship. Yet it is difficult to determine exactly what is going on. Because there can be many reasons why a story on Instagram is less visible. Algorithms do not excel in transparency, nor do the tech companies that use them. A Dutch spokesperson for Meta, the company behind Instagram, did not respond to questions from NRC. Meta has always denied accusations of shadow banning in the past. An American spokesperson is aware of the recent problems a global bug in the software which caused technical problems. He wrote to X that it has now been resolved.
But there is more to it. This is not the first time that US tech companies have been accused of stifling pro-Palestinian voices. Every time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares up and dominates international news, online censorship on platforms like Instragram, Facebook and TikTok increases, says Jalal Abukhater of 7amleh, a Palestinian organization that stands up for digital human rights. 7amleh encourages people to report reports of alleged censorship in an online database. Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 7amleh has received 500 reports from people who were told they had violated the platforms’ so-called community guidelines. 270 of them indicated that they had been censored in one or more ways.
Increase
“We are seeing a sharp increase in censorship, especially on Meta’s platforms,” Abukhater said on the phone from Ramallah, a city in the occupied West Bank where 7amleh’s office is located. “This includes warning users, suspending accounts, reducing visibility, and not publishing or removing content. If these restrictions are due to a violation of the guidelines, users should be notified. That does not happen with shadow banning. But Meta and other tech companies do not think shadow banning is a good term to describe their policy.”
Each platform has its own guidelines that users must adhere to. For example, distributing extreme, explicit images on Instagram is not permitted. Meta announced temporary measures last week to more quickly suppress such images from Israel and Gaza, also known as ‘borderline content’. What exactly that is remained unclear.
But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously expressed his support for Israel and said content that appears to glorify Hamas will be flagged. Abukhater says that certain Arabic hashtags are banned on Meta, while their Israeli equivalents are allowed because they are pushed by a state.
7amleh has been in regular contact with Meta in an attempt to limit the alleged censorship, especially in recent weeks. “Their employees work 24 hours a day to respond to all matters we raise,” says Abukhater. “We ask Meta not to restrict certain accounts because their content is newsworthy or provides context. But our efforts are just a drop in the ocean. The result is a situation in which Palestinians feel disproportionately censored. At a time when the mainstream media is not providing enough context, and Israel is waging a propaganda war to undermine the Palestinian narrative, all these restrictions are very frustrating.”
News organization
MondoWeiss can speak to that. Last Monday, the TikTok account of the left-progressive Israeli news site temporarily suspended, and a day later the same thing happened to the Instagram account. “We are a news organization that shares images of news events,” said Yumna Patel, news manager of MondoWeiss. “Sometimes there are explicit images, but we try to follow the guidelines. So we blur some images, and we don’t show any fighting. Yet our content on TikTok is regularly censored. Our account was blocked outright twice, without warning that we had violated the guidelines.”
The first time was in January, when MondoWeiss posted a video on TikTok about the Israeli army’s attack on the Palestinian refugee camp Jenin, which killed ten Palestinians. “The next day our account was deleted without warning,” says Patel. “That led to some media attention. With the help of 7amleh, we filed an appeal and our account was restored. And the second time was last week. When we tried to log in, we got a message that our account had been permanently deleted. Again without warning or previous violations of the guidelines. Once again, 7amleh mediated successfully.”
Platforms’ decisions are often difficult to understand, and their parent companies are closed strongholds. That, according to Patel, is the problem. Several years ago, MondoWeiss’ videos and posts on Facebook were viewed tens of thousands of times. “Now we are happy if we have a few dozen views. How this could have happened has always remained a mystery. The decision-making at Facebook is very opaque. In all these years we have never received a satisfactory answer to our questions. Shadow banning is shrouded in the same secrecy. But judging by stories from colleagues and friends, it happens often, especially with Instagram stories.”
Due to the problems on Instagram, many people who support the Palestinian cause have turned to other platforms to spread their messages. LinkedIn, which is mainly used for professional networking, has seen a wave of critical posts about Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip. But there too, some users encountered censorship. So became an article removed that The Rights Forum, a knowledge center on Israel and Palestine, shared on LinkedIn. “The only thing I can think of is that the photo of the injured child that stood there was too gruesome,” says director Gerard Jonker. “But LinkedIn said there was hate speech.”
In the meantime, people who have stayed on Instagram are sharing tips with each other to avoid a shadow ban. Some hashtags are avoided. #FreePalestine is being replaced by #VisitIsrael by some. Words like ‘Palestine’ and ‘Gaza’ are deliberately misspelled. And to fool the algorithm, photos of festive cakes or cute animals are first shared before messages about the conflict appear. But it is unclear whether such tricks actually throw sand in the algorithm’s eyes and thus prevent shadow banning.