Your donations helped us secure the services of one of Michigan’s top intellectual property attorneys, who also teaches at the University of Michigan Law School.

Our preference is to impress upon the potential plaintiff the frivolous character of the action, and have them back off. If we have to go to court, we will, and we now have the resources to defend IC, because of your generosity.

Longer term, I’d like to see Congress tweak the Digital Millennium Copyright Law to make it impossible for copyright trolls to try to shake down little web sites. I respect copyright and as an author, I benefit from it myself. But allowing predatory law firms to threaten people with massive penalties when they haven’t done anything wrong is just not right.

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Company Should Address Root Causes of Censorship of Palestine Content

( Human Rights Watch ) – Earlier this month, Meta’s Oversight Board found that three Facebook posts containing the phrase “From the River to the Sea” did not violate Meta’s content rules and should remain online.

The majority of the Oversight Board members concluded that the phrase, widely used at protests to show solidarity with Palestinians, is not inherently a violation of Meta’s policies on Hate Speech, Violence and Incitement, or Dangerous Organizations and Individuals (DOI). In line with Human Rights Watch’s submission, it affirmed that while the phrase can have different meanings, it amounts to protected speech under international human rights law and should not, on its own, be a basis for removal, enforcement, or review of content under Meta’s policies. Meta created the board as an external body to appeal moderation decisions and provide non-binding policy guidance.

A minority of board members recommended imposing a blanket ban on use of the phrase unless there are clear signals it does not constitute glorification of Hamas. Such a ban would be inconsistent with international human rights standards, amounting to an excessive restriction on protected speech.

The board’s decision upholds free expression, but Meta has a broader problem of censoring protected speech about Palestine on its platforms. A 2023 Human Rights Watch report found that Meta was systemically censoring Palestine content and that broad restrictions on content relating to groups that Meta puts on its DOI list often resulted in the censorship of protected speech. Meta has said that core human rights principles have guided its crisis response measures since October 7. But its heavy reliance on automated detection systems fails to accurately assess context, even when posts explicitly oppose violence.

Digital imagining of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024.

For instance, on July 19, Human Rights Watch posted a video on Instagram and Facebook with a caption in Arabic that read: “Hamas-led armed groups committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity against civilians during the October 7 assault on southern Israel.” Meta’s automated tools “incorrectly” removed the post for violating its DOI policy. Formal appeals were unsuccessful, and the content was only restored after informal intervention.

Meta should address the systemic issues at the heart of its wrongful removal of protected speech about Palestine. Amending its flawed policies, strengthening context-based review, and providing more access to data to facilitate independent research are essential to protecting free expression on its platforms.

Via Human Rights Watch

Middle East Council on Global Affairs: “Digital Deception: Disinformation, Elections, and Islamophobia

In 2007, the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. established the Brookings Doha Center (BDC). For fourteen years, BDC provided critical analysis on geopolitical and socioeconomic issues in the Middle East and North Africa and became recognized as a hub for high-quality independent research and policy analysis on the region. In 2021, with the support of its key stakeholders, BDC evolved into an independent policy research institution under the name of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.

Transcript:

Juan Cole:

Well, hello everybody. Good afternoon, Doha time. My name is Juan Cole. I’m a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and I’m moderating this panel on digital deception, disinformation, elections, and Islamophobia.

The webinar is organized by the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. For Arabic speakers who are more comfortable in that language, we do have Arabic translation available in Zoom. You have to switch to the Arabic channel for that.

The panel’s subject is a recent report on disinformation research by researchers Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza. This report revealed a multiplatform global influence campaign promoting anti-Muslim bias, sectarianism, and anti-Qatar propaganda. Jones and Dsouza’s report highlights the use of disinformation to spread a broad neoconservative agenda, including xenophobic, anti-immigration, and anti-Muslim propaganda and disinformation.

We’ll hear from the authors. Let me quickly introduce them.

Mark Owen Jones is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs and one of the co-authors of the Qatar plot. He is also an incoming associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, where he specializes in research and teaching on disinformation, digital authoritarianism, and political repression, on which he has a recent book. He has also applied his research to concrete situations, such as in Bahrain.

We are honored to be joined by Professor Sahar Aziz, a professor of law at Rutgers University. She is the Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar there. She is the founding director of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights. Her research explores the intersection of national security, race, religion, and civil rights. Her book, “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom,” is one you won’t look at the world the same after reading.

The other co-author of the report is Sohan Dsouza, a computational social scientist and open-source intelligence practitioner. He is interested in the intersection of disinformation, political polarization, and its effects. He also has experience as a software engineer, operations analyst, and research scientist at MIT.

We are very pleased to have this stellar assemblage of presenters. Let’s begin with each of them making a basic statement on the report. We’ll go for about eight minutes or so, and then we’ll have a panel discussion. Mark, would you begin, please?

Marc Owen Jones

Thank you very much, and thanks to my co-panelists and the Middle East Council for arranging this. I will endeavor to speak as slowly as I can, as I have a tendency to speak very quickly, just for the benefit of the translators. Since I’m talking first, it makes sense to summarize some key elements of the report. I imagine some of our listeners will have read it, but I want to give a bit more context about what it contains.

The report is called “The Qatar Plot,” a short name, but the longer subtitle, which is important, is “Unveiling a Multiplatform Influence Operation Using Anti-Muslim Propaganda to Attack Qatar in the EU, the US, and the UK.” The Qatar element is important, but in some ways, a bit of a red herring. If I were to summarize this report in simple terms, it is an unknown actor using Facebook and Meta’s ad platform to deliver anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim propaganda to a large audience. When I say a large audience, Soan and I documented that this campaign reached at least 41 million people, primarily on Meta’s platforms, specifically Facebook.

The campaign was also present on TikTok and Twitter (now X), and even in the real world. For instance, some of these campaigns appeared at CPAC, the conservative conference organized annually, and also on a giant digital billboard in Times Square.

I will talk mostly about the digital elements, and the other bits will come up. The people running this campaign, and I say people because us, the researchers, and even Facebook do not necessarily know who was behind it, spent at least $1.2 million in advertising money to spread this campaign. The campaign ran for approximately six months, starting at the beginning of 2024, towards the end of 2023. Ads were being run on Facebook targeting different parts of the world, including Lebanon, the US, the EU, and the UK. Within the EU, it targeted Belgium, France, Germany, Croatia, and Sweden, but primarily France.

When I say targeting, that’s where these ads were being delivered. This is a crucial period as it coincided with a number of European elections, including the UK elections. Recently, in the UK, we saw anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots. The timing of that is quite interesting.

The content of these ads typically featured pictures of Arab-looking men engaged in violence, taken out of context, with big lettering saying things like “There will be 60 million Muslims in Europe by 2030.” One part of the campaign was titled “Save Europe,” implying that Europe needed to be saved from a Muslim invasion. This rhetoric was very xenophobic and Islamophobic, designed to create the impression of a Muslim invasion of Europe.

Another aspect is where the Qatar bit comes in. The idea was that Qatar, as a country, was somehow orchestrating this Muslim invasion into Europe. This resembles the notion of the “great replacement theory,” a new type of conspiracy theory. In many conspiracy theories, there’s often a global elite at the top of it, like George Soros. In this conspiracy theory, Qatar takes that role, being framed as the orchestrator of the supposed Muslim invasion. This campaign used manipulative techniques on Facebook that Facebook struggled to combat.

What this campaign shows is that an unknown actor can spend over a million dollars on Facebook to have hate speech advertised through Facebook, reaching millions of people. Facebook’s algorithms are not efficient in combating this. In very few other contexts would anyone be allowed to take out this volume of hate speech in terms of advertising without the platform knowing the client. It’s a huge problem and a significant aspect of this campaign, especially given the violence we saw in the UK.

Thank you for your time. I’ll leave it there for now.

Thank you so much, Mark, for your concise and insightful remarks.

Before we move on to the next panelist, I want to remind the audience that you may submit questions for the panelists, and we will have a Q&A session with them later. You can submit questions through the Q&A portal in Zoom or in the chat. Our Middle East Council host has also put in the link to the report online.

Now, I’d like to move to Professor Aziz.

Sahar Aziz

Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here. This is such an important topic, one that is often overlooked as we study bias against various minority groups, whether it’s Muslims, Jewish communities, Black communities, or other immigrant communities. I appreciate the Middle East Council highlighting this topic and found the report fascinating.

What I will use my time for is to provide some context to show how this report is supported by previous reports. What we’re seeing is a really troubling trend that probably isn’t going to go anywhere unless we do something affirmative as a matter of policy and law in various countries.

So, I will use a PowerPoint just because it’s a little easier to show the data and the key points. Bear with me as I share my screen.

Okay, so you all should be able to see it. The first point I’d like to make, or the key takeaways, are as follows. I want to make three key takeaways or points.

The first is that digital Islamophobia spreads five common anti-Muslim racial tropes through social media explicitly and through mainstream media implicitly, at least in the United States. I admittedly focus more of my own research in the U.S. This happens without accountability or concern by government or private decision-makers. I’d like you to compare this digital Islamophobia with the responses against digital anti-Semitism because I think the stark contrast is obvious. I would argue that just as we take digital anti-Semitism very seriously, we should take digital Islamophobia equally seriously. We don’t tend to see the same level of response.

Digital Islamophobia threatens the safety, livelihoods, and equality of Muslims in America and also in Europe because Americans and Europeans are not educated in public schools to understand that these tropes are racist and harmful. There’s a huge education gap, so the public is very vulnerable to being manipulated by these fear tactics.

Finally, foreign governments and American politicians, as well as European politicians, intentionally stoke hate against Muslims and immigrants because it’s an effective political strategy, whether domestically or internationally, for sowing division among the electorate.

So, what are the five staple tropes? Many of them were highlighted in the report, but this is something to keep in mind as you learn about Islamophobia because you will see these tropes over and over. When someone says them explicitly or implicitly, or accuses a Muslim or a Muslim organization of these tropes, you should be on alert that it’s racist. It’s a trope. It’s the equivalent of accusing Jews of controlling the world or assuming that Jews aren’t loyal to their country, or assuming that Blacks are criminals, lazy, and thugs, and so on. We can come up with all sorts of racial tropes against different groups. It’s really important that you understand how absolutely insulting, harmful, and racist it is to assume that Muslims sympathize with terrorism or support terrorist groups.

This is particularly important today while we’re dealing with what I believe is a genocidal campaign by Israel, funded by the United States, against Palestinians in Gaza. The ability to even have that conversation always leads to Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians being accused of supporting a terrorist group. Other tropes include misogyny against women, Islam being anti-woman, the accusation that Muslims are invading the West rather than contributing to the economic and cultural development of European countries and the United States, the trope that Muslims’ presence is a threat to the safety of white women, a threat to liberalism and democracy, and a threat to the security of the nation. Finally, there is a racist trope that Muslims are presumptively anti-Semitic.

Now, I’m just going to show two report summaries that will corroborate the report we’re talking about today. One report, titled Failure to Protect: Social Media Companies Failing to Act on Muslim Hate Crimes, was published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2022. It analyzed 530 social media posts containing anti-Muslim hatred on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube in February and March 2022.

Here are the results: social media companies do not respond when complaints are filed about Islamophobic posts spreading hate and bias, which could also lead to physical violence and harassment against people in real life. Only 3% of the flagged tweets were removed from Twitter. Similarly, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter allowed hashtags like #IslamIsCancer and #Raghead to spread, garnering 1.3 million impressions. Four out of the ten most-cited domains in the Gab dataset—Gab being the right-wing version of social media—are focused on anti-Muslim hate. The second most-used hashtag was #BanIslam. In these right-wing ecosystems, there is a very robust, growing, and dangerous anti-Muslim ecosystem.

The second report I want to highlight is Islamophobia in the Digital Age: A Study of Anti-Muslim Tweets, published in 2022. The researchers analyzed 3.7 million Islamophobic tropes made between August 2019 and August 2021. One year later, 85% of those hateful Islamophobic tropes are still online. Nearly 86% of the geolocated anti-Muslim tropes originated in three places: India, the U.S., and the UK. Spikes in hate strongly correlated with newsworthy events related to Islam, particularly protests, terrorist attacks, and eruptions of conflict. This shows a pattern of guilt by association, where all Muslims are presumed responsible when one bad actor, who claims to be Muslim or claims to be acting in the name of Islam, commits a wrongdoing or a crime.

They each have to prove that they are innocent and that they don’t support that criminal act. We don’t do that to Christians. We don’t do that to Jews. We don’t do that to whites. Nor should we.

That’s another indication of racism: when you impose guilt or responsibility on an individual or a subgroup of an identity group for the wrongdoing of another individual who has the same identity.

Finally, I just want to quickly show the common hashtags of this report. As you can see, the five common tropes that I highlighted are on full display in these hashtags. If you see the most common ones, like “islamization,” “stop Islam,” and others like “save Europe,” “raghead,” some of them have very vulgar terminology which I won’t repeat. But “anti-Islam” is another hashtag, as well as “Islam is evil” and “Eurabia.” These are all hashtags that are growing across social media and effectively causing more and more people to internalize, mainstream, and normalize anti-Muslim hatred.

If you just look at this evidence, these common tropes are coming to light. I’m not simply pontificating or theorizing in the abstract—these five common Islamophobic tropes are real and they’re circulating widely.

Finally, this is my last slide. I just want to highlight that this really ties back into the report that foreign governments are actively using Islamophobia to wedge divisions within American society and within European society. I gave an example of Russia. There was an indictment brought down by the Mueller investigation in the U.S. in 2016 that shows $1.2 million spent every month. Included in the agenda was Islamophobia. For example, here’s one tweet that was intended to sabotage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump: “I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of Putin,” and “Support Hillary, save American Muslims rally” included in the sign above.

As you can see, of course, you have Trump and you have politicians in the U.S. who do exactly the same thing. I will just tell you to read two things. The first is Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism, which is a new co-edited book by me and John Esposito. Stay tuned for Punished for Participating, which will be coming out by the Center for Security, Race, and Rights in 2025, and will talk about the way in which politicians use Islamophobia to produce anti-Muslim hate in real life.

Okay, I have used up my time. Thank you very much for listening, and I look forward to your comments and hearing Sohan’s comments as well. Thank you.

Juan Cole:

Thank you, Professor Aziz.

Sohan, please.

Sohan Dsouza:

Thank you. Thank you, Juan. Thank you all for having me, and thank you, Mark, for the excellent overview of the Qatar plot report. I want to add some context to that. It’s actually paradoxical that we rail into Facebook mostly. I guess it’s appropriate, in a sense, because it was one of the places where, as far as we can tell, immense reach was available. Thanks in part to the powerful targeting features and algorithms of Facebook, the campaign was also active on X quite significantly.

They also attempted to vandalize Wikidata and Wikipedia pages. They successfully did so, actually, and stayed out for quite a while. Assets are still active on X, Telegram, TikTok, and YouTube at last check. At the time the Meta adversarial threat report was published, there was also a change.org petition that was eventually taken down. But on the other platforms—apart from Facebook, X, change.org, and Wikipedia—assets are still up, according to Meta’s threat report.

There’s also Instagram presence, although Instagram is famously opaque, so we weren’t able to find that at the time. All the same, the spend is very concerning because we don’t know who is behind it. The individuals we were able to identify, namely the Vietnam-based proxy for at least the Facebook part of the operation, as far as we can tell, are not talking or are deflecting. Other individuals we were able to identify as involved, at least in the IRL applications of the operation, are not talking either. That is very concerning. Someone is able to shunt $1.2 million through some content farm in Vietnam. Banks, accounts, and cards must have been involved at some point, and we still don’t know who it is.

We were able to connect the assets across different campaigns using the art and science of open-source intelligence. There were various burner and hacked assets involved, at least in the Facebook part of the campaign, and possibly even the Twitter/X part as well, including at least one hacked page that was apparently being prepared for being a public-facing page. Although most hacked assets were used for sponsoring ads, there were also networks of inauthentic engagement boosters on both Facebook and Twitter/X.

There were also some sophisticated and seemingly novel techniques used to evade countermeasures on many of the platforms, like cycling ad collections and using burner and boilerplate accounts on Facebook. One of the proxies was actually advertising on Facebook that they were able to bring back Facebook pages that had been suspended—and they proved it by actually bringing back Facebook pages that had been suspended in this campaign, in this operation. There were also distraction and coordination tactics used on Wikipedia, and specialized ad-running and engagement booster accounts on Twitter/X.

These were detailed in the report. But yeah, these were interesting and some very novel techniques as well. There was quite a bit of use of AI—not intended to look realistic, but all the same, used to produce propagandistic images of Big Ben bowing down to a caricature of a person. There was at least one incident of AI narration of a video, and at least one cheap fake of a fake audio track overlaid on a speech.

Somehow, all of this was organized, and we still don’t know who exactly is behind this. We’re looking at multiple messaging vectors spread across different platforms, putting security and espionage threats into the conversation, and making it somehow responsible for the “Islamization of Europe.” This harkens back to the whole “Great Replacement” and “Eurabia” tropes, attacking the royal family, and all sorts of things. Mainly, the Lebanon-targeted ones were portraying Qatar as a stooge of Iran.

There were some strange things that we noticed, like pivoting at one point from the ICRC president to targeting something else, which was a bit weird. There were fake organizations actually created by whoever is behind this, like the Euro Extremism Monitoring Project and Verbatim Citizens of Human Lives. This was not the only spelling and grammatical error, and there were quite a few of these. These might indicate that the people behind this may not be native English speakers.

At some point, the focus on more “milquetoast” things like secularism and concern for the hostages turned into overt xenophobia, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant bigotry. This shift drew especially on X and Telegram from the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim ecosystem, literally putting their stamp on it. They took watermarks of “Made in Qatar” and “Part of the Qatari plan” and imposed them over these videos that were already circulating around with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant TR groups.

This is also concerning given that these appear to have been timed with the election seasons of the UK, the EU, France’s surprise election, and certainly in a U.S. election year. All these places were targeted with these ads.

There is something to be said here about our issues with Facebook, as well as other platforms’ transparency. Most bafflingly, I think — and again, I’m going after Facebook for this because there were some features like crowd triangle that were very useful. There are also ad transparency features on Facebook, which is great. But somehow, most bafflingly, information would disappear from these. There would be specific pages or campaigns that we were tracking, and then when the page or the ad was taken down, the transparency information about the sponsor or other information was actually removed from that.

If an ad is violating standards, that’s especially when we need to know and be able to trace where it’s coming from or find out who’s behind it. To remove the information seems counterproductive.

I just want to say that open-source intelligence investigations involve a good deal of luck—waiting for people to slip up and make a mistake so we can find connections that way. But we got really lucky in many cases, and we shouldn’t have to be. There really should be more done in terms of transparency measures, and I really hope that all platforms—Facebook, X, especially—take more steps to ensure that there are such features that can aid open-source intelligence investigators.

Juan Cole:

Thank you. So, let’s move now to a more panel-based discussion. I thought that would give you all an opportunity to do another round of having the chance to maybe reply to some of the remarks that your colleagues made if you have something to weigh in on. We can switch it up. Professor Aziz, do you want to say anything further?

Sahar Aziz:

Yes. So, I would like to assume that both of you researched the other reports, whether they were the ones that I highlighted or much of the literature that is developing about digital Islamophobia. I am curious to know if you had an opportunity in your research to identify any correlation between the hate online and the hate in person and in real life.

Because there is the dignitary harm of feeling that it is normal, mainstreamed, and acceptable to insult a person’s religion, national origin, demean them, and tell people that one lives within society that your identity group is inferior or dangerous. That in itself is harmful. It’s hard to measure, but those of us who experience it know it’s palpable and real.

The other harm is when people act on it, whether at work, in public spaces, at school, or when participating in politics, like running for elected office. We’re seeing many Muslims being very aggressively attacked and accused of all sorts of things—terrorism, misogyny, etc. The most high-profile examples are Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, but it actually happens to almost every Muslim running for political office.

So, my question to you is: What insights have you been able to find in the literature about that correlation between online and the physical world? And what does that tell you about the need for future research?

Juan Cole

Marc, do you want to…?

Marc Owen Jones

Yeah, sure. Firstly, thanks again for the question. I mean, I’ve worked on Islamophobia in some form for a while, or on forms of hate speech. And of course, the reports you mentioned are vital reading.

Just as a caveat, the report we wrote is a very specific documentation of an influence campaign. The questions you’re asking are so important. Again, it’s the relationship between what happens online and offline. One of the things I will say is that people like to dismiss what happens online because they try to suggest it doesn’t have real-world impact.

If we actually look at the reality, for example, the ads we saw—Sohan and I downloaded a bunch of comments that were replies to some of these Islamophobic ads. We were interested in analyzing how people react to this content because you’re sort of seeing it in the wild, seeing if people are reacting to this. It does promote a level of antagonism and racist and Islamophobic comments as well. When people are exposed to content, they react to it at their keyboard. How much that translates into physical violence—these are questions we didn’t go into in the report. But I would say in the literature, there’s something very sinister and insidious going on here on a general level.

The scale of the campaign, the statistics you mentioned in the report—they indicate a normalization of hatred that is conducive to the kind of violence we saw in the UK. Once people start to operate in an atmosphere or climate that they think is permissive in terms of saying or doing things, saying first, then doing things—that’s really dangerous. This kind of hate speech allows for dehumanization, and as we know, dehumanization often comes before we see this real-world violence.

What this report shows, in addition to those other ones, is not only is the scale of this huge, but people are profiting off it. I just want to add another point: This is, as you’ve said, not happening in a vacuum. In the past year, we’ve seen anti-Semitism increase, we’ve seen Islamophobia increase, but as you noted, it does not get the same amount of attention.

I think this is true of campaigns like the one we documented. When it comes to hate speech or violence against Muslims, there is less interest in the press. This campaign we documented is probably one of the top five in terms of cost of all influence campaigns identified on Meta, yet it didn’t make a big splash as it would if we knew Russia was behind it or something like that. That’s significant. It’s not the first one this year. Let’s not forget that I worked on a similar investigation in February, where people in Canada, among others, were being targeted with Islamophobic hate speech.

That campaign was then tied back to Stoic, an Israeli PR company contracted by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs in Israel, which has been cozying up to the far-right in Europe. When we look at the discourse online, it’s also indicative of offline activities. Again, I don’t have the answers for the causal solutions, but I’ll say this proliferation of speech, which appears to be increasing without the necessary condemnation in the press or from social media companies, is dangerous and can contribute to real-world violence. I also think the speech itself is a form of violence in its own way.

Juan Cole

I just want to interject that Facebook, in particular, was widely blamed for allowing rampant islamophobic speech in Myanmar (or Burma) that became implicated in violence against Burmese Muslims. This indeed contributed to the crisis of the Rohingya refugee community. The real-world effects of this speech have already been, to some extent, documented, and they can be dire.

Sohan, would you like to weigh in here?

Sohan Dsouza

Yeah, thanks, Mark. And thank you for the question, Dr. Aiz. You used the word “ecosystem,” actually, and yeah, I’ve been using that a lot myself. This whole operation, this whole investigation of the operation, acquainted me with this far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim ecosystem primarily on X. But this also percolates outwards into other platforms. It’s just that X, for all practical purposes, is not really moderated nowadays, so that’s where it really festers. Thanks to the opacity of effects, like the lack of transparency with creating accounts and even boosting them using blue checks and stuff, the issue persists.

As I mentioned, some of the campaigns in this operation used a lot of the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim tropes and even the language, like “cultural enricher” and things like that—the euphemisms that were used by the ecosystem. Actually, the videos and images were just re-watermarked. It’s also interesting that in the recent UK riots, within a couple of hours after the attack, one of the accounts or one of the duo in that ecosystem was the first to specifically claim that the attacker was a “quote-unquote Muslim immigrant.” Barely a couple of hours later, that full fake profile emerged. About three hours after that, it was one of the first to also boost a troll post made by what appeared to be a Hindu Sikh nationalist, an anti-Muslim bigot, a troll post claiming it as a victory for Islam and things like that. It boosted that and further added to this whipping up of an anti-Muslim frenzy in the UK, which fed into focusing the riots on specific targets like mosques.

So, yeah, this ecosystem is something of great concern and will surely be used by other influence operations, given that it serves as a great testing ground for these influence operations on what’s the most effective anti-Muslim propaganda.

Sahar Aziz:

Can I just add one other thing that I think is important? The timing of our discussion is unique. We are currently, in the United States in particular -— I can’t speak as much to the experiences across the different European countries, which are very diverse—but right now, what we’re witnessing is heightened sensitivity, heightened scrutiny, and heightened opposition to anti-Semitism, which I believe is a good thing. However, in that regard, it is setting a gold standard. The way in which I have observed the sensitivity and the attention to anti-Semitism has convinced me just how completely lacking there is of any effort, policy, practice, or laws to combat islamophobia.

I think this is the time for us to use that as a gold standard. At the same time, we’re struggling, at least in the US, with wrestling with free speech and the freedom to assemble and protest. Unfortunately, some people are weaponizing anti-Semitism to quash those rights within the United States. Even if the motives are in good faith, meaning we really want to protect Jews, there is not the same sensitivity to Muslim students, Palestinian students, Muslim faculty, Palestinian faculty, or Arab faculty. I’m using higher education as an example because that is right now kind of the ground zero for these issues.

I would encourage attendees to do that comparison and see why certain groups—in this case, Muslims—are not taken seriously when they voice grievances. No one tries to stop the spread of islamophobia online, in stark contrast to combating anti-Semitism. We need to do the same for islamophobia and countering anti-Palestinian racism, which is a subset of islamophobia. If you look at the common racial tropes against Palestinians, they mirror those against Muslims. Everyone incorrectly assumes that all Palestinians are Muslims, when in fact, I think we have 15 to 20% who are actually Christian.

Juan Cole:

There’s a question already in the queue that we will come to later, but some people are demanding transparency from us. Mark and Sohan, with regard to the reports that you cited, Professor Aiz, they want to know who is behind this report that you did, who funded it, and should they be suspicious of that?

Marc Owen Jones:

I mean, happy to answer that—no one funded it. Sohan and I just did the research. Sohan served in AD, or he spotted it, and we just started working away at it. Myself, as an expert in digital authoritarianism and the region, and Sohan as an open-source researcher, we did it for the public good, right?

Sohan Dsouza:

Yep, absolutely. I wasn’t funded on this. I just did it because I was miffed, basically.

Sahar Aziz:

Well, that’s the way that academic research often works and should work. But I wanted to clear the air in this regard. Let me also state that I learned of this report when I was invited to comment on it and found it to be a very interesting set of conclusions and analysis. The reports I cited were reports that I found in my research. Admittedly, I read them for the first time as part of my preparation for this panel. I do not have any connection with the authors of those reports.

Another thing I find really fascinating is that every time I do my work on countering islamophobia, which is my research and what I do for a living as a law professor, I do get questioned about whether I’m getting funds from the government of X or Y, or foreign governments, which I don’t. But I do want to ask: do you ask that question of every researcher? Do you ask that question of white male American researchers? Do you ask it of white female American researchers, Christian American researchers, Jewish American researchers? If you do, then fine, that’s a fair question. But if you’re only asking it of people who have immigrant backgrounds, who are from the global North and the global South, or who are Black, then perhaps you should ask yourself whether you have internalized some of these biased, racist tropes.

Marc Owen Jones:

Yeah, I was sort of thinking along the same lines. It’s not a question everyone seems to get asked, but I’m used to being asked because, again, we’re dealing with this notion of a report exposing hate speech against Muslims, and the fact that Qatar is mentioned. I mean, you know, whoever created this campaign was mentioning Qatar, right? The question should be about who the hell is behind this campaign—$1.2 million spent, and we get asked about our funding?

It’s quite funny, but yeah, I think it’s just a question that comes with the territory in the nature of the work we do. It can be indicative of the kinds of prejudices that you get exposed to, particularly working, as I do, in Qatar and the global South. Often, I see it with journalists. They will ask questions of people that they wouldn’t necessarily ask someone else. In the world of disinformation, I still think this is relevant. If I were an American researcher researching a Russian disinformation campaign attacking Russia, I wouldn’t get asked, “Does my position as an American professor compromise my integrity?” But if I were doing research on people attacking Qatar, which happened in 2016 while I was living here, I would get asked if I’m being paid or sponsored. There is this huge bias, and it’s based on racism or embedded prejudice. It’s just something that you have to answer, unfortunately. I think it’s good that you added that addendum, because it’s unfortunate we have to deal with that when the real issue is: who the hell pays $1.2 million to spread hate speech?

Juan Cole:

Yes, people are always bringing up about Qatar that it’s involved in these negotiations with Hamas. Then, that involvement is used to tag it as pro-Hamas or supporting Hamas. I just would like to put it out there that these tropes are extremely unfair. The Obama Administration went to Qatar in 2014 and diplomatically pressured it to be a conduit for negotiations with Hamas. Since the United States has declared Hamas a terrorist organization, its diplomats can’t talk to Hamas directly and need an intermediary.

Qatar has often been reluctant about this role and publicly so. In 2018, it was revealed in the Israeli press that Qatar’s government had come to the end of its rope with Hamas due to its obstreperousness and was going to relinquish the role. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, then sent the head of Mossad to Qatar to plead with them not to give up this role.

Part of the agreement was that Qatar and Egypt provided funds for Gaza because Israel had put Gaza under an economic blockade. There was a danger of people starving to death if nothing was done. So, Qatar and Egypt provided funds for Gaza, not for Hamas in particular. These funds were actually deposited in Israeli bank accounts, and it was Netanyahu’s government that moved the funds to Gaza. If anyone was funding Hamas in that way, it was Netanyahu himself, not Qatar.

I think if the international community wants Qatar to play this role of intermediary, it’s extremely unfair to attempt to tag it as somehow supportive of Hamas, for which there is no evidence at all.

Sahar Aziz:

Can I also just add, Professor Cole, the irony that, again, the timing matters? It’s September 2nd, 2024, and it’s been almost 11 months now of the Israelis just destroying Gaza and killing over 50,000 Palestinians, injuring over 100,000, and 2.4 million are starving to death, among other atrocious humanitarian problems and crises.

Yet, when we engage in a political debate that criticizes Israel, the Israeli military, the US government, or Congress, especially if you disagree, you are accused of being anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, people can go and criticize Qatar all they want, and no one will call them Islamophobic. I don’t think criticizing a nation-state makes someone racist against the majority religion unless one explicitly states so. But again, the double standard is that Qatar cannot be a nation like any other, engaged in negotiations, without being completely attacked as having an ulterior agenda. Yet, if someone criticizes Israel, they can’t do that.

We need to be cognizant of these double standards. Criticize Israel if you want; criticize Qatar if you want. The way you do it matters. It could expose that you are just using that as a pretext to be Islamophobic or anti-Semitic. On its face, criticizing either is not Islamophobic or anti-Semitic. What’s interesting about this report is that it shows it’s not simply criticizing Qatar for its role, which is legitimate, like criticizing the US, Egypt, or Israel. It’s the way it’s criticized, the hashtags used, and the narratives. They are blatantly Islamophobic, rather than being a geopolitical analysis, a human rights analysis, or an international law analysis.

These are just part of those fear-based tactics that cause real harm to Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. Sorry, Sohan, you go ahead.

Sohan Dsouza:

Yeah, I agree. You can criticize any government, administration, faction, or the tenets of any religion, really. But with the participation or negligence of platforms, if you are inauthentically yanking everyone’s cranks, that’s fraudulent. We should expect better. In some cases, without violating anyone’s freedom of expression, we should be able to legislate better as well.

Definitely, with some of the feedback we’ve gotten online on social media, a lot of it has been very focused on posting something in response about Qatar’s politics or human rights record, or about Islam. They are missing the whole point—that someone is able to put this huge amount of money into inauthentically reaching people with their message, hiding behind it, and thereby escalating things. As I mentioned, this operation got more and more xenophobic as time went by. Perhaps, in the beginning, it was testing the waters to see if they’d be discovered. But as their identities weren’t discovered, they got bolder. By the end of it, it became almost indistinguishable from the rest of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant ecosystem.

If they’re able to get away with it, the worse they’ll get. We should definitely be concerned. As long as they can hide their identities and there isn’t transparency, and the cooperation of the platforms doesn’t come in, they will just get bolder. If they hire proxies to do this, adding a further layer of deniability, the situation will only get worse in terms of messaging.

Juan Cole:

I’d like to observe that, in light of these good comments from our panelists, it is not merely an issue of Islamophobia. Any Sikh group that got involved in these kinds of campaigns should have their heads examined because, in the United States at least, an anti-Muslim sentiment and irrational hatred of Muslims very frequently spills over onto other ethnic groups. Americans can’t distinguish between Sikhs and Muslims for the most part, and they have this odd idea that since Sikhs often wear turbans, Muslims must wear turbans, and therefore they attack Sikhs.

Beyond that, it plays into a general anti-immigrant sentiment which can blow back on Hindus and indeed on Eastern Orthodox Christians. We’ve had, in the previous big era of immigration in the United States in the early 20th century, anti-Greek and anti-Eastern Orthodox Christian riots in some cities in the United States. Getting people used to the idea that it’s alright to single out an ethnic group, especially one tagged as immigrant, although many American and European Muslims are second, third, or fourth generation —

Sohan Dsouza:

and people can always convert to Islam —

Juan Cole:

There are converts, but tagging them as immigrants or an invasion as a minority spills over onto others, including onto Jews. Many of the tropes, as Professor Aziz pointed out, used against Muslims are old anti-Semitic tropes. Promoting that way of thinking can’t possibly be good for the Jewish minority.

One last question I’ll broach to you all is this: you weren’t able to find out who was behind this. Almost certainly, it was not the Vietnamese government, although one of the actors was based there. There is a lot of conflict inside the Muslim world over issues in political Islam. The government of Egypt has crushed the Muslim Brotherhood and overthrew an elected Muslim Brotherhood government. Qatar itself was the target of a boycott by four nations. To what extent are these internal conflicts possibly spilling over onto Europe and the United States so that there is promotion of Islamophobia sometimes by Muslim-majority countries?

Marc Owen Jones:

I can go ahead, thank you. I discussed this in my books somewhat, especially from 2016. An important parallel between political Islam and what we saw with this Qatar plot report is sometimes the attempt or the deliberate attempt to conflate political Islam with Islam in general. We saw a lot of anti-Muslim rhetoric coming out of countries like the United Arab Emirates, which were paying a lot of money to create these anti-political Islam campaigns across Europe. However, people don’t necessarily interpret this subtly as anti-political Islam; it just gets interpreted as anti-Muslim sentiment.

One thing about this report, and why I mentioned early on why it’s a bit of a red herring, is that the mention of Qatar almost allows people to dismiss it by saying, “Oh, this is about Qatar.” Moreover, Qatar is being used as a metaphor for Muslims, a bypass of sorts, to talk about Islam. The campaign is fundamentally Islamophobic, and Qatar is a sideshow. This relates to the situation in Rohingya with the genocide there, but we must bear in mind that Qatar, in this report, is a synonym for Muslims. This ties in with how political Islam has been attacked and the consequences of that contribute to Islamophobia in Europe.

One more thing I want to say about the report that Facebook issued about this campaign. It mentioned that it had targeted Lebanon and Qatar but did not mention Islamophobia, even though that is the thrust of the campaign. Facebook thus provides justification for not addressing the most problematic element, which is hate speech against a large group of people.

Yes, Sohan, did you want to come in on this? You’re muted, sorry.

Sohan Dsouza:

I was concerned that Meta did not mention this in their report, as well as generally downplaying the targeting of specific countries, like not mentioning Belgium. Towards the end, especially by the Belgium phase, the pages’ names turned into things like “Save Europe” and “Europe First,” and the messaging switched to more xenophobic content. It seems that phase of it somehow escaped everyone’s attention when making the adversarial threat report. That did need mention.

Those of us who have been studying Islamophobia at least since 9/11 have noticed that it’s a blank IOU: fill in the blank of your Muslim-majority country to use as the pretext for perpetuating the five common anti-Muslim racial tropes. Remember when it was Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and now it’s also Iran, Qatar, Afghanistan. It’s based on geopolitics and who is the designated foreign state enemy of the United States, which then represents 1.8 billion Muslims. Meanwhile, nobody has a problem with that, but if we criticize Israel, we’re accused of being anti-Semitic. We need to parse this conversation and identify when discourse is about geopolitical debate versus a ruse for hatred towards a religious or racial group.

I approach political Islam the way that I approach Zionism. Both are political ideologies, diverse and complicated. There are people who argue that religion should inform law and public policy and that there should not be a separation between religion and state. Zionists, political Islamists, and similar Evangelical Christians in the US believe this. It is legitimate to debate these ideologies and their tensions with liberalism, multiculturalism, and religious plurality.

The problem is that you cannot talk about Zionism as a political ideology and problematize it as an academic, yet you can assume all Muslims are the most extreme political Islamists, like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. This contradiction shows the differential treatment, which in legal fields is evidence of discrimination and bias.

We must discern whether someone is genuinely criticizing some tenet of a religion or state based on their consistency. If they look away when it comes to other religions or states, but focus on one, that’s really suspect.

Juan Cole:

We just have time maybe to tweet one more question from the audience. One of the questioners brought up, quite rightly, the influence of the rising right in Europe and the United States in this matter. We know Islamophobia is very frequently a trope of the MAGA branch of the Republican party.

We just had elections in Eastern Germany where the AfD did disturbingly well, and anti-Muslim sentiment is a keynote of the AfD in Germany. To what extent is this campaign wrapped up with the rising Western right? We just have five minutes.

Sohan Dsouza:

It’s definitely trying to ride this as a vector for its messaging. We’ve seen them drawing on the same ecosystem and very current on ongoing events, celebrating what they see as the victories of the far right. The problem is, many campaign assets have still not been taken down on X and are still active, promoting and boosting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Unfortunately, the less moderated platforms make it harder for these masterminds to be exposed due to a lack of transparency features, letting them get away with this kind of messaging.

Juan Cole:

“X” is an example of a hostile takeover by the far right. Twitter was, in fact, moderated, and some of these campaigns were being disallowed. Elon Musk bought it with Russian and Saudi partners, I think partly to combat climate change science, but also now Musk has turned it to the amplification of far-right and Islamophobic tropes. He himself is a major purveyor of some of this disinformation.

Marc Owen Jones:

That’s an important point to emphasize. I’m glad we brought Musk in because the report focused a lot on Facebook. Elon Musk is promoting Islamophobia and personally promoting some of the most prolific Islamophobic accounts that are also fake accounts. The whole report we documented was an influence operation where someone was hiding who they were to spread a massive anti-Muslim campaign. For example, if you go onto X and look for the account “Europe Invasion” with two n’s, you will find an account with hundreds of thousands of followers getting millions of engagements, farming engagements, which means it’s probably amplified. This is a hacked and hijacked account with no information on who is behind it, but Elon Musk is promoting this account. He was doing so during the anti-Muslim riots in the UK, fanning those flames directly at a time of huge violence against immigrants and Muslims in the UK.

We need to consider not just the rise of the far right but the facilitators like Elon Musk using their platforms to not only fan the flames but also prevent people from tackling the issue of Islamophobia. Again, this goes back to what Facebook did and hasn’t done, which is to take these campaigns seriously and set a gold standard for tackling Islamophobia. Right now, it’s not just about people not doing enough; it’s about well-known people saying things that, in any other context, would not be okay.

It’s kind of an absurd state of affairs, to be honest.

Juan Cole:

I think we have to leave it there.

Sahar Aziz:

Can I just make one comment?

Juan Cole:

You’ll be cut off in about 30 seconds, but yes.

Sahar Aziz:

I just want to put a pitch in for Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism the book we just published, me and John Esposito, which will be in Europe and is focused on Europe. I just want to highlight that fear is profitable and wins votes. There is a very practical, pragmatic reason why this will continue. When you add to it white supremacy and the great replacement theory—all these fears that White society is being destroyed—there is every financial, political, and economic incentive for Islamophobia to continue online.

We need to be very proactive in trying to figure out how to stop it rather than waiting for it to disappear.

Juan Cole:

Well, thank you very much to all of our panelists for your excellent interventions. I think we have to leave it there. Thanks to the audience for joining us, and all the best. Thank you.

The fight against censorship on social media is a fight for the future of democratic debate itself.

Written byWalid El Houri

Read this post in Malagasy, українська, عربي, English, Ελληνικά

( Globalvoices.org ) – The ongoing suppression of Palestinian voices on social media platforms has sparked significant concerns about freedom of expression and the integrity of democratic debate. Organizations like SMEX and 7amleh have been at the forefront of documenting these digital rights violations, revealing the extent to which platforms like Meta (the owner of Facebook and Instagram) are complicit in silencing Palestinian content.

In October 2023, a collective of human rights and civil society organizations, including Oxfam, Access Now, and others, urged “tech companies to immediately take strict measures to protect their users from harm in light of the escalating events in the region.” The collective accused platforms like Meta of consistently over-moderating Arabic content, misinterpreting it as violent, even when it merely critiques Israeli policies. Meanwhile, Hebrew content that incites violence against Palestinians frequently escapes scrutiny, exposing a glaring double standard in content moderation practices.

In a July campaign, 7amleh stated, “Meta and Facebook have not adequately protected Palestinians from hate speech in the last decade, which has manifested in millions of conversations inciting violence and genocidal rhetoric during the last nine months of the Israeli war on Gaza.”

In 2021, Human Rights Watch accused Facebook of suppressing Palestinian voices calling for more transparency in how content is evaluated and deleted. In 2022, SMEX described how social media companies, under pressure from governments, disproportionately target Palestinian narratives and how Israeli authorities often request the removal of content they find unfavorable, and platforms tend to comply without transparency or due process.

“Censoring Palestine,” Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v3, 2024.

Broader implications

This issue extends beyond digital spaces, with real-world consequences. In February 2024, a coalition of human and digital rights organizations warned that Meta’s policies prevent Palestinians from sharing their experiences, and hinder efforts to combat real antisemitism. The petition titled “Meta: We Need to Talk about Genocide,” and signed by over 52,000 people reads:

The powerful voices of Palestinians and allies on social media have been a lifeline during the Israeli government’s genocidal war on Gaza — and often the only way for Palestinians to tell their stories, document human rights abuses, and seek international solidarity during this time of utter horror.

As Palestinians in Gaza face plausible genocide (according to the International Court of Justice) it is disturbing that Meta is choosing this moment to consider a policy that would further silence criticism of the Israeli military, Israeli government, and Zionism by shutting down conversations involving the term “Zionist.” Meta is proposing to treat “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew” or “Jewish” — but this won’t make any of us safer. Instead, it will undermine efforts to dismantle real antisemitism and all forms of racism and bigotry.

Palestinians should be able to name the political ideology that impacts their survival without fearing reprisals. Anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews should be able to criticize the ideology that claims to represent them. And human rights defenders should be able to hold the Israeli military and government accountable — now, more than ever.

This censorship has broader implications for democratic debate. As social media platforms have become modern public squares, they are essential for the exchange of ideas and the shaping of public opinion. When these platforms selectively silence certain viewpoints, they distort the democratic process and hinder the free exchange of ideas. Critics argue that this censorship not only affects Palestinians but also has a chilling effect on discussions about human rights and social justice, as activists and journalists fear repercussions and begin self-censoring.

In the case of Palestine it is also part of a larger crackdown, especially in Europe and the US, on protest and Palestine solidarity, one that has been documented by human rights organizations.

The role of tech companies

The censorship of pro-Palestinian voices on social media is more than just a localized issue; it is part of a broader problem concerning the role of digital platforms in regulating speech and shaping public discourse. As these platforms continue to grow in influence, the need for transparency and accountability in their content moderation processes becomes increasingly urgent.

The tech sector, in general, has been complicit in discriminatory policies against Palestinians for years, a trend that has intensified since the onset of the war on Gaza. Microsoft, for example, has faced criticism for its decision to block Palestinian accounts, cutting them off from crucial online services. In July 2023, the BBC reported that “Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning — cutting them off from crucial online services.”

In response, 7amleh’s campaign highlighted the impact of these actions: “By blocking its services, Microsoft is effectively cutting Palestinians off from social, professional, and financial opportunities during a time of immense suffering and devastation.” Microsoft’s decision to restrict its services has further compounded digital rights violations, especially in the context of telecommunications blackouts in Gaza, which are often imposed by Israeli authorities.

The broader trend of censorship extends to other platforms as well including X (formerly Twitter) which has recently faced criticism for platforming far-right accounts and LinkedIn, typically seen as a platform for professional networking, which has been accused of censoring pro-Palestinian content, and restricting or removing accounts that advocate for Palestinian rights.

Indeed, one of the most troubling aspects of this censorship is the inconsistency in how social media platforms handle content moderation. While pro-Palestinian accounts are frequently targeted, far-right and racist content often remains visible and thrives on the same platforms.

Organizations like Access Now, 7amleh, and SMEX are leading the call for change, urging social media companies to adopt fair and transparent policies that do not disproportionately target marginalized communities, ensuring that digital spaces remain open and accessible.

The fight against censorship on social media is a fight for the future of democratic debate itself. Without a commitment to protecting free expression, the very foundations of democracy are at risk.

This post is part of Advox, a Global Voices project dedicated to protecting freedom of expression online. All Posts

Written byWalid El Houri

Via Globalvoices.org

Although Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK) did not officially state the reason for the ban, the move came after Fahrettin Altun, the Presidential Communications Director, criticized Instagram for preventing users from sharing content related to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas and a close ally of President Erdoğan.

Altun said on X: “I strongly condemn the social media platform Instagram for blocking people from posting condolence messages regarding Haniyeh’s martyrdom without providing any justification. This is an apparent and obvious attempt at censorship.”

In a similar incident, Meta, Instagram’s parent company, removed social media posts by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim expressing condolences for Haniyeh. Meta designates Hamas as a “dangerous organization” and prohibits content that praises the group.

Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran on July 31, where he had been attending the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Historical Context of Social Media Bans in Turkey

Under Erdoğan, Turkey has previously blocked several social media platforms, including YouTube, Threads, EksiSozluk, Wikipedia, and X (formerly Twitter).

YouTube was first banned in Turkey in 2007 and again between 2008 and 2010, due to videos insulting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Republic of Turkey. The platform was briefly banned again in 2014 and 2015.

X (formerly Twitter) was banned in 2014 following the circulation of alleged leaked recordings implicating government officials in corruption.

Wikipedia was banned in Turkey from 2017 to 2020 due to entries that accused the country of having links to terrorist organizations.

Additionally, the government has imposed bans on social media and broadcasting in response to disasters, terrorist attacks, and social unrest.

In 2024, the number of blocked web pages in Turkey surpassed one million. Meanwhile, Hüseyin Yayman, head of the Turkish Parliament’s Digital Media Commission, claimed that many Turkish people want TikTok to be banned. “People who see me on the street say, ‘If you shut down TikTok, you will go to heaven,’” Yayman added.

Impact of the Instagram Ban

Following the Instagram ban in Turkey, online searches for VPN services surged. In response, pro-government media began publishing articles warning people about the risks associated with free VPN services.

Professor Yaman Akdeniz, co-founder of the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD) and a law professor, said: “This ban must have been requested by either the presidency or a ministry. The BTK is required to obtain approval from a criminal court.”

Akdeniz added, “The censorship imposed on Instagram is arbitrary and cannot be explained or justified. No judge should approve such a request.”

Human Rights Watch and İFÖD stated that the block on Instagram violates the rights to freedom of expression and access to information for millions of users. With 57.1 million users, Turkey ranks fifth worldwide in the number of Instagram users.

The ban had a significant impact on the Turkish economy, as Instagram plays a crucial role in Turkey’s e-commerce landscape, with approximately 10% of the nation’s total online sales being conducted through social media platforms.

According to Buğra Gökçe, head of the Istanbul Planning Agency (IPA), the ban also disrupted the service sector, including tourism, hospitality, and restaurants in reaching customers. The IPA projects that the ban could lead to a weekly economic loss of approximately USD 396 million.

On August 5, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan criticized opponents of the ban and used a racial slur to describe them. He claimed they care more about Western interests than Turkey’s sovereignty, stating: “The only purpose of the existence of ‘house negroes,’ who are both opportunists and losers, is to please their owners.”

Less than a week after the Instagram ban, Turkish authorities also prohibited access to the online video game platform Roblox. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Mayor of Istanbul and a prominent opposition figure criticized the bans on Instagram and Roblox, stating: “Those who made this decision are ignorant of the new world, the economy, and technology.”

Israeli Response to Turkey’s Instagram Ban

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz criticized Erdoğan, accusing him of turning Turkey into a dictatorship by blocking Instagram. Katz also tagged İmamoğlu in his comments, seemingly attempting to exploit the political polarization in Turkey to his advantage.

İmamoğlu responded by saying: “We have no need to receive lessons on democracy and law from those responsible for the suffering and deaths of countless innocents, including children.”

Katz’s attempt backfired, as despite the political polarization in Turkey, both sides of the spectrum largely voice support for Palestine, though in different ways—Islamists tend to back Hamas, while secularists in Turkey are more aligned with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or other left-wing Palestinian groups.

How Was the Ban Lifted?

On Saturday, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu announced that Instagram had accepted Turkey’s conditions. The ban on Instagram was lifted after Meta reportedly agreed to comply with Turkish law and remove content related to certain crimes or terrorist propaganda.

The independent news website YetkinReport noted that Meta had already been publishing transparency reports indicating that Instagram was implementing these measures even before the ban. The latest report was published on July 31, just two days before the platform was blocked.

The nine-day ban was Turkey’s longest on a major social media platform in recent years. Since Instagram still continues to ban pro-Hamas content, it appears that little has changed. It remains unclear why Instagram was banned in Turkey in the first place, why the ban was lifted, and what problem, if any, was resolved by imposing the ban.

—–

France 24 Video: “Turkish president slams social media ‘fascism’ amid Instagram battle • FRANCE 24 English ”

More than three quarters of the 99 journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed in Gaza

( Globalvoices.org ) – On July 31, Al Jazeera journalists Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi were killed by Israel in the Shati refugee camp in the north of Gaza while reporting on the assassination of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyya in Iran.

The Israeli army admitted to killing al-Ghoul and al-Rifi, accusing them of being members of Al Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, and of participating in the October 7 attack. This dangerous accusation — thoroughly refuted by the channel — has been used repeatedly by the Israeli side to justify killing journalists, which risks normalizing the targeting of journalists with unfounded accusations.

Al Jazeera said that Al Ghoul, who had previously reported on the Israeli raids of Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, was detained by Israeli forces in March and released 12 hours later, disproving the claims of his affiliation with Hamas or other organizations.

Nicola Perugini, associate professor of politics and international relations at the University of Edinburgh, warned on X about using such accusations against journalists:

A disturbing pattern

According to preliminary figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 113 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began on October 7, 2023, with three confirmed to have been targeted and 10 more under investigation. The Gaza government media office put the number at 165 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed. 

According to Reporters without Borders (RSF), “29 of [the 120 journalists reported killed by [RSF] have been killed in circumstances that point to intentional targeting, in violation of international law.” Three complaints have been filed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) by the press freedom organization urging independent investigations of these war crimes.

The Al Jazeera Network — banned by Israel since May 2023 — has been heavily targeted, with five of its journalists killed in Gaza since the war began. Hamza al-Dahdouh, son of Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, and Moustafa Thuraya were killed in a January airstrike. The Israeli army also alleged the two men were “members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations,” which was equally refuted by the channel and others.

In February, a drone strike injured Wael al-Dahdouh and killed cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa. Wael’s wife, seven-year-old daughter, and 15-year-old son were also killed in an Israeli airstrike on October 28, 2023.

“These deadly attacks on Al Jazeera personnel coincided with a defamation campaign by Israeli authorities,” according to RSF, warning that “conflating journalism with ‘terrorism’ endangers reporters and threatens the right to information.”

“The killing of al-Ghoul and al-Rifi is the latest example of the risks of documenting the war in Gaza, the deadliest conflict for journalists the organization has documented in 30 years,” Jodie Ginsberg, CPJ’s CEO told Al Jazeera, emphasizing that the killing of journalists by Israel has been a disturbing pattern over the past 20 years. “This appears to be part of a broader [Israeli] strategy to stifle the information coming out of Gaza,” she explained, adding that the ban on Al Jazeera from reporting in Israel is part of this trend.

Trauma and exhaustion

Since October 7, Israel has not allowed any foreign journalists to enter the Gaza strip to report on the ongoing war except if embedded with the Israeli army. This complete ban has meant that local journalists are the ones to bear the brunt of coverage at great personal risk.

The immense trauma and exhaustion experienced by these local journalists, who remain vulnerable despite taking all possible safety measures, was best expressed in a poignant quote from Al Jazeera English journalist Hind Khoudary that went viral after the killing of her colleagues.

Another colleague,  Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Jerusalem, Najwan Simri wrote in a tribute to her colleague Ismail:

It was enough to look into his eyes, and contemplate his features, to feel the depth of Gaza’s sadness and reproach towards us. I always felt that he reproached us with excessive politeness.. and great hope, as if he had not lost hope in us for a moment.

– Najwan Simri (@SimriNajwan) 31 July, 2024

Meanwhile, local journalists in Gaza protested and held a vigil in response to al-Ghoul’s killing expressing their outrage at the perilous conditions they navigate daily and the lack of accountability and protection. Al Jazeera Arabic staff held a silent protest live in their studio.

An emotional video of the moment Al Jazeera Arabic presenter received and shared the news of the killing of Ismail Al Ghoul and Rami Al Rifi, went viral.

Bayan Abusultan, a feminist Palestinian journalist in Gaza tweeted:

They want to silence us.
They threaten all journalists who are still in Gaza city, and the north.

Covering the news here = Being targeted by the israeli forces.

Remember to keep talking about #Gaza even if they got every last one of us.

A history of impunity

Israel has a history of targeting journalists with impunity, as evidenced by the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by the Israeli army while reporting in Jennin in the West Bank on May 11, 2022. Abu Akleh’s killing highlights the dangers faced by Palestinian media professionals due to a lack of accountability.

Carlos Martínez de la Serna of thr CPJ criticized Israel for refusing to cooperate with the FBI and blocking potential ICC investigations into her killing, calling for an end to Israel’s impunity in journalist killings, which have only increased during the ongoing Gaza war.

In 2022, Abu Akleh’s family and Al Jazeera requested the ICC to investigate her killing, but Israel’s leaders, including former prime minister Yair Lapid, resisted any interrogation of IDF soldiers and declined to open a criminal investigation into the killing.

The scale of journalist killing by Israel during this war is best seen when comparing it to the global number. More than three quarters of the 99 journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed in the Gaza war according to the CPJ. This alarming number emphasizes the urgent need for accountability and the enhancement of protection measures for journalists everywhere, ensuring the safety and protection of all the journalists who courageously report from the front lines of conflicts.

This post is part of Advox, a Global Voices project dedicated to protecting freedom of expression online. All Posts

 

Written byWalid El Houri

Via Globalvoices.org

——
Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

AJ+ “Journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul wrote about bearing witness in #Gaza before his killing”

Even if the decision to name Gaza’s journalists as laureates of its prestigious award was partly motivated by the courage of these journalists, the truth is that no one in the world deserved such recognition as those covering the genocidal war in Gaza.

“As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression,” Mauricio Weibel, Chair of the International Jury of Media Professionals, which made the recommendation for the award, truthfully described the courage of Gaza’s journalists.

Courage is an admirable quality, especially when many journalists in Gaza knew that Israel was seeking to kill them, often along with their families, to ensure that the horror of the war remains hidden from view, at worst, or contested as if a matter of opinion, at best.

Between 7 October, 2023, and 11 May, 2024, 143 Palestinian journalists in Gaza were killed by Israel. It is higher than the total number of journalists killed in World War II and the Vietnam wars combined.

This number does not include many bloggers, intellectuals and writers who did not have professional media credentials, and also excludes the many family members who were often killed along with the targeted journalists.

But there is more to Gaza’s journalists than bravery.

Whenever Israel launches a war on Gaza, it almost always denies access to international media professionals from entering the Strip. This go-to strategy is meant to ensure the story of the crimes that the Israeli army is about to commit goes unreported.

The strategy paid dividends in the so-called Cast Lead Operation in 2008-9. The true degree of the atrocities carried out in Gaza during that war, which resulted in the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians, was largely known when the war was over. By then, Israel had concluded its major military operation, and corporate mainstream western media had done a splendid job in ensuring the dominance of the Israeli political discourse regarding the war.

Israel’s behaviour since that war remained unchanged: barring international journalists, placing a gag order on Israeli journalists and killing Palestinian journalists who dared cover the story.

The August 2014 war on Gaza was one of the bloodiest for journalists. It lasted for 18 days and cost the lives of 17 journalists. Palestinian journalists, however, remained committed to their story. When one fell, ten seemed to take his place.

Occupied Palestine has always been one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist. The Palestinian Journalists’ Union reported that between 2000 – the start of the Second Palestinian Uprising – and 11 May, 2022 – the day of the Israeli murder of the iconic Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, 55 journalists were killed at the hands of the Israeli army.

The number might not seem too high if compared to the latest onslaught in Gaza, but, per international standards, it was a terrifying figure, based on an equally disturbing logic: killing the storyteller as the quickest way of killing the story itself.

For decades, Israel, an occupying power, has managed to depict itself as a victim in a state of self-defence. Without any critical voices in mainstream media, many around the world believed Israel’s deceiving discourse on terrorism, security and self-defence.

The only obstacle that stood between the actual truth and Israel’s engineered version of the truth are honest journalists – thus, the ongoing war on the media.

What Israel did not anticipate, however, is that by blocking international media access to Gaza, it would inadvertently empower Palestinian journalists to take charge of their own narrative.

“Interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place,” late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, wrote in ‘Covering Islam’.

Like any other form of intellectual interpretation, journalism becomes subjected to the same rule of positionality in academia, as in the relationship between the identity of the researcher and the social or political context of the subject matter.

Journalist deaths in Gaza: A ‘reckoning’ to come when war is over • FRANCE 24 English Video

Palestinian journalists in Gaza are themselves the story and the storytellers. Their success or failure to convey the story with all its factual and emotional details could make the difference between the continuation or the end of the Israeli genocide.

Though the war is yet to end, the Gaza journalists have already proven to be deserving of all the honours and accolades, not only because of their courage, but because of what we actually know about the war, despite the numerous and seemingly insurmountable obstacles created by Israel and its allies.

Most people all over the world want the war to end. But how did they acquire the needed information that made them realise the extent of horror in Gaza? Certainly not through Israel’s cheerleaders in mainstream media, but through Palestinian journalists on the ground who are using every means and every channel available to them to tell the story.

These journalists include self-taught youngsters, like 9-year-old Lama Jamous, who wore a press vest and conveyed the details of life in displacement camps in southern Gaza, reporting from Nasser Hospital and many other places with poise and elegance.

As for the accuracy of information provided by these journalists, they were certainly professional enough to be verified by numerous human rights groups, medical and legal associations and millions of people around the world who used them to build a case against the Israeli war. Indeed, all we know about the war – the death toll, the degree of destruction, the daily human suffering, the mass graves, the famine and much more – is possible because of these Gaza-based reporters.

The success, and the sacrifices of Gaza journalists should serve as a model for journalists and journalism around the world, as an example of how news about war crimes, sieges and human suffering in all its forms should be conveyed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor .

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

( Tomdispatch.com When wildfires began erupting in the Texas Panhandle in February, Laurie Ezzell Brown, the editor and publisher of the Canadian Record, was in Houston on a panel discussing ways in which losing local newspapers represents a danger to democracy. Running the once-a-week Record from the Panhandle town of Canadian, she certainly knew something about the rise of “news deserts” in this country. While she was meeting with other journalists concerned about disappearing local newspapers, Brown kept an eye on reports about ignitions sparking wildfires west of her town and posted updates from afar so that her readers would remain informed.

“Those fires never stay in the next county,” Brown said grimly. And indeed, as the flames galloped through fallow fields and approached her hometown, she began a desperate drive back to Canadian with a friend. In and out of cell coverage, traveling through black-ash smoke, she saw distinctly apocalyptic scenes of torched trees and powerlines dangling from still-burning poles. As she went, she posted every scrap of information she could get for the scattered and distraught readers of her paper. How else would they know about the houses that were being torched ever closer to their own homes?

In the days that followed, as that historic nightmare of a blaze just grew and grew, finally burning through more than a million acres of the Texas Panhandle, Brown continued to keep Canadian Record readers informed about crucial matters like how to apply for financial assistance, where to take fire debris, and when the next embattled town meeting would be held. It was part of what she’s been doing since 1993: keeping an eye on Canadian’s Hemphill County commissioners, investigating economic salvation schemes, and posting high school sports scores as well as local obituaries.

“There’s no one else to do this and people need to know what’s happening. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done,” she told me.

It’s what I do, too. Like Canadian, my adopted hometown of Greenville in Plumas County, California, was hit by a climate-driven wildfire in 2021 that devastated 800 homes and left the downtown smoldering on its Gold Rush-era dirt foundations. Two years into rebuilding, the only local online publication announced that it was shuttering. So, I set aside my freelance journalism career, joined a team of like-minded citizens, and launched The Plumas Sun.

Like Brown and hundreds of journalists across the country, we’re reporting from the intersection of news deserts and climate disasters. As floods, fires, and tornadoes surge, and daily as well as weekly publications collapse, local journalism maintains an all-too-slender lifeline in devastated rural communities like mine. Local journalists remain after the Klieg lights go dark and the national media flee our mud-strewn, burned-out Main Streets. We continue to report as our friends and neighbors face the challenge of rebuilding (or not).

Somehow, along with flattened towns and shattered lives, disaster sometimes even breeds innovation. Among the ruins left by walls of water and towering flames, bootstrapped publications like mine do their best to keep the news alive in communities now struggling just to survive.

Nowhere Will Be Spared

If there’s one overarching message from the Fifth National Climate Assessment, released in November 2023, it’s that, in this era of climate change, nowhere will be spared disaster. As the burning of fossil fuels warms the world ever more radically, conditions are created that only exacerbate a Pandora’s box of extreme weather events. Scientists predict more intense hurricanes and the storm surges they generate, more frequent and intense wildfires throughout the calendar year, an elevated risk for flooding, and so much else in the new era of global warming.

Still, as the climate scientists report, the impacts of such disasters aren’t landing equitably. Blacks, Indigenous Americans, and other people of color are bearing the brunt of them along with the rural poor. They are “disproportionately exposed to environmental risks and have fewer resources to address them,” as the assessment puts it.

For Laurie Ezzell Brown and her newspaper, that bureaucratese translates all too simply into hardship. The town of Canadian, perched on the high plains near the Oklahoma border, had suffered an economic hit to both its ranching and its oil and gas industries even before the panhandle fires. The Canadian Record was struggling. Launched in 1893, the weekly newspaper that Brown now owns spent half its life in her family’s hands. Ben and Nancy Ezzell, her parents, became its publishers in 1947. Brown took over in 1993. In March 2023, 30 years later, unable to find a buyer for it, she suspended publication of the Canadian Record.

Buy the Book

It didn’t go well. Brown, who has lived in Canadian most of her life, got an earful. And she took it personally. “I had to see all these people who I’d let down every day. And hear them tell me how much they missed the paper, how much they needed it, how they didn’t know what was going on. I guess it just got to me.” She and a skeleton staff are, however, maintaining an online version of the paper while she continues to hunt for a buyer.

It’s a tough sell. After all, most disaster-struck rural towns are already on the economic edge. Lacking the resources that might shield them from some of the impacts, they now face the Herculean task of rebuilding from scratch with scratch. After a town is demolished, said Mary Henkel Judson, editor of the Port Aransas South Jetty, people leave and many simply never come back.

Judson faced disaster in 2017 when Hurricane Harvey blew the roofs off homes and tore businesses from their foundations in that island community off the Texas coast near Corpus Christi. Compared to Canadian, Port Aransas is affluent. The South Jetty enjoys the support of second-home owners and tourists, many of them birders visiting the island’s five sites on the Great Texas Birding Trail. So Port Aransas did rebuild.

It’s a simple fact that the majority of the newspapers that have folded nationwide are in economically disadvantaged areas. In Texas, they are also in the least populous areas, Judson said. Canadian is among them. When businesses are struggling to make ends meet, paying for advertising is an expense that can be postponed. That makes it rough on publications like the Canadian Record.

“Laurie Brown is one of the best journalists in the world as far as I’m concerned. And one of the hardest-working. That community knows what she does for them and supports her as best they can, but it’s tough,” Judson told me.

She knows what can happen without a newspaper — and not just in times of disaster. City councils, school boards, and special government districts meet regularly. Most elected officials are honorable, she adds, “but you’re looking at the opportunity for corruption to raise its ugly head. You put a kid in a candy store when nobody’s watching and things happen.”

Teaching Disaster Communities to Do Journalism

Local reporters and paper owners like Brown and Judson are now an increasingly vanishing breed. Since 2005, in fact, 2,900 American newspapers, mainly smaller weeklies and local dailies, have ceased publication, according to the State of Local News Project 2023 (produced by researchers at Northwestern University’s Medill School). One-third of them were in small counties. Today 195 of those mostly rural counties have no local newspaper at all or any other source of local news. An additional 1,387 counties have only one local news source.

As in so many other economic sectors, the trend is toward consolidation. Fewer and fewer corporations now own more and more publications. Brown describes it as “gobbling up all the newspapers, spitting them out, and firing the real writers.” The result leaves nearly 200 communities without a reliable source of information for everything from political scams to cribbage tournaments. And there’s more bad news ahead. Based on the higher-than-average poverty rates and the population size of those mostly rural counties, the 2023 report determined that an additional 33 communities are at elevated risk of losing their sole remaining source of news.

When Lyndsey Gilpin started Southerly in 2016, her goal was to fill a growing gap in reporting in Southern states. She was particularly interested in providing a regional outlet to cover environmental justice and climate issues. The decline in newspapers in the rural South is worse than anywhere else in the country. After all, 108 counties were already without a local newspaper in 2020. Yes, reporters from the national media sometimes “parachute” in to cover special events like fierce storms or raging tornadoes, but they tend to leave as quickly as they come.

Gilpin wanted to cover climate and energy issues in a more consistent way. Local news institutions are trusted sources of information in a community, often the only source. “We wanted to build deeper relationships with local news outlets, residents and community members who were living this day to day and doing the work to get information out,” she told me.

Southerly’s inaugural year coincided with a startling series of natural disasters. The United States suffered 15 devastating weather and climate events, each causing at least a billion dollars in damage, the second-highest number ever recorded. The South, in particular, was hit with tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, and three different major floods. Over the next five years, Southerly became increasingly focused on just such climate disasters.

Gilpin soon discovered personally what the assessment scientists asserted in their 2023 document: Disasters do not inflict damage equally. And adding insult to literal injury, the most ill-equipped communities when it comes to climate disasters are almost always ones without newspapers. “Folks were already struggling and now they don’t know where to turn, who to talk to,” she said. “That leaves a huge, huge hole for industries or politicians or other players to feed them misinformation or accidentally give inaccurate information.”

In response to the growing prevalence of climate-driven disasters, Southerly began developing tools that would help communities do their own disaster coverage. Gilpin built templates that outlined how to apply for aid and navigate paperwork, processes that are nearly the same for hurricanes, floods, or fires. “We morphed into a place that could train people to learn how to do journalism — to do storytelling in more creative ways,” she told me.

As those journalists began to focus on recovery efforts in places repeatedly hit by hurricanes like southern Louisiana, they reported on the effects of such disasters ranging from the disabling of the voting process to damaging disruptions in education. They also tracked disparities in disaster funding by neighborhood, economic class, and race.

As Gilpin put it to me: “The way journalism can do the most good is by making sure people are equipped to do that work. By understanding the process, they can feel confident about knowing what’s happening around them.”

Sadly, however, Southerly ended operations in May 2023, thanks to a lack of funding and fundraising exhaustion. As Gilpin summarized the situation: “The nicest way I can put it is the nonprofit journalism world is difficult. It’s not fair that all the money goes to a few places and not to other places.”

Covering Recovery

Even as the larger newspaper world is suffering blow after blow, the situation could be changing if ever so slightly for local papers. Growing public attention to America’s news deserts has, in recent years, been attracting at least some philanthropic funding. Press Forward and the American Journalism Project are among the efforts to rebuild local news platforms. The State of Local News Report celebrates 17 new local outlets at least five years old and identifies 164 others that are just getting started. All are providing their communities with reporting essential to democracy while searching for stable, sustainable business models.

It was certainly not the lure of foundation funding that gave life to The Plumas Sun. The driver was utter fear of living without a newspaper in a community in the throes of disaster recovery. The local century-old newspaper in my area, The Feather River Bulletin, had folded early in the Covid pandemic, even though it continued to maintain an online presence until July 2023. When it announced it was shutting down, shock reverberated through the small mountain towns in California’s northern Sierra Nevada where I live.

We had already lost so much: Our timber-dependent economy was declining and the spread of Covid had only exacerbated our isolation. But the most profound blow was the devastating 2021 Dixie fire, a climate-change-induced nightmare that scorched an area of the West the size of Rhode Island. It quite literally incinerated most of my town of Greenville and three other local communities. Nearly a million acres of the conifer forests that had once drawn so many of us to this rural outpost were reduced to charred specters. Now, we were losing the only source of local news that had kept us from feeling utterly disconnected from the rest of America and one another during such traumatic times.

The Plumas Sun was conceived in that hapless moment. One urgent phone call led to another until we had mustered a core team of seven with the skills to mount an online news publication. Just days before we launched it, we still didn’t have a name for it.

The two-year mark after a disaster event is a pivotal moment for community recovery, says Sue Weber, an ex-nun who served as coordinator of the Dixie Fire Collaborative, formed after that fire as a voice for the community. State and federal money starts to disappear. Victims begin to move on. That’s when local newspapers play a critical role in keeping places like Greenville invigorated and part of the rebuilding process. “For communities,” Weber told me, “it’s all about where we go from here. Nobody else is paying attention.”

Disaster trauma often shows up in ways that seem unrelated to the torching of entire towns. In the first months of covering county government, The Plumas Sun reported on a sheriff’s dispatcher charged with embezzling from a needy children’s Christmas fund and a county official filing a hostile work environment complaint against the district attorney. It has also posted news on local community suppers and library book giveaways, while offering kudos to people around the county doing extraordinary work. And, of course, obituaries.

“Connecting people is healing,” Weber points out. “Newspapers do that, too.”

Laurie Brown and Canadian are still in the early trauma stage in the scorched Texas Panhandle. Whether her Canadian Record or The Plumas Sun or any of the startups nurtured by Southerly survive depends not just on the whims of funding but on the grit and guts of local reporters. Brown, who is living on Social Security, shows no signs of quitting, despite all too many misgivings about the future.

“I’ve seen good things that didn’t happen because they weren’t encouraged. I’ve seen bad things that didn’t happen because they were exposed,” she says. “And I just keep thinking, you know, you can make a difference. And that still seems worth doing to me.”

Copyright 2024 Jane Braxton Little