When it comes to uniting factors between political parties in the U.S., there may be few that come to mind, especially on social media. However, since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, censorship has been a concern for a variety of Americans— Democrats, Republicans, and everything in between.
Amna Alian is a pro-Palestine activist and social media user who has been very vocal in support of Palestine and against Israel on platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
“Many times on Facebook, I’ve lost my account for like a month. Multiple times, I’ve been censored on Twitter,” Alian shared. “If I speak honestly, this is hate speech.”
In 2020, the Pew Research Center reported that 73% of U.S. adults believe that social media sites likely censor political views.
While Republicans have historically been more concerned with social media censorship, the Israel-Hamas war has sparked a large amount of concern among pro-Palestine social media users as well.
In Instagram’s announcement about this most recent update, they confirmed that it will
automatically set your account to a setting titled, “Limit political content from people you don’t follow,” instead of a setting titled, “Don’t limit political content from people you don’t follow.”
Victor De Real is a student at Palm Beach Atlantic University who is active on several social media platforms. He is concerned with Instagram’s newest approach to political content on their platform.
“In the most recent update, they added a new one for political content, which, if you don’t know exists, it’s automatically turned on in your settings,” De Real said about a political content setting on Instagram. “If you don’t know that the new setting exists, your content is being censored and filtered when it comes to political content.”
However, Meta has attempted to justify their content regulation changes, claiming that they are responding to user wishes.
“People have told us they want to see less political content, so we have spent the last few years refining our approach on Facebook to reduce the amount of political content,” said Meta, the multinational technology conglomerate that owns Instagram. “We aim to avoid making recommendations that could be about politics or political issues, in line with our approach of not recommending certain types of content to those who don’t wish to see it.”
However, many users have increasing concerns with their approach to censorship. These concerns have been heightened in light of the Israel-Hamas war.
Shaun King is a pro-Palestine human rights activist, who, until Dec. 24, had 6 million followers on Instagram. In December, Meta deactivated his account because it included entities in violation for our policies.” Their Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy states that they do not allow any content that supports violence, terrorism, or hate crimes.
“I refuse to betray my values and principles by staying silent about this genocide and the war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank,” King said in a response statement. “You can NEVER mince words about genocide. You can never mince words about war crimes. You MUST speak truth to power every way you know how.”
The fight against censorship has not just taken place through individuals online, but also in the state of Florida, whose leadership embraces more conservative values. In the Supreme Court brief of the Jan. 2024 case, Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court assessed whether Florida’s Senate Bill 7072, which requires social media platforms to “notify users of their content-moderation standards and apply them consistently,” complied with the First Amendment.
The bill itself states that “social media platforms have unfairly censored, shadow-banned, deplatformed, and applied post-prioritization algorithms to Floridians.”
Shadow-banning is a term commonly used when describing online censorship. Jillian York, the director for International Freedom of Expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, defined it as, “a really opaque method of hiding users from search, from the algorithm, and from other areas where their profiles might show up.”
Pro-Palestine users have accused platforms of shadowbanning their content, as they claim to have seen declining engagement with their posts that reference the war. The Arab Center for Social Media Advancements is a digital rights group that tracks rights violations on Instagram and confronts this shift in post-user engagement. Meta, however, blamed the post visibility issues to be a global bug above anything else.
In Florida’s legal case, the Florida Solicitor General Henry Whitaker stated that social media platforms, “do not have a First Amendment right to apply their censorship policies in an inconsistent manner and to censor and de-platform certain users.”
Responding to this accusation, Paul Clement, who represents the trade groups on behalf of the social media platform said, “Given the vast amount of material on the Internet in general and on these websites in particular, exercising editorial discretion is absolutely necessary to make websites useful for users and advertisers.”
While censorship seems to be a concern among American social media users, particularly those who support Palestine, Israel’s Cyber Unit has reportedly worked to get certain social media posts censored and taken down.
The Human Rights Watch reported on Nov. 14 that platforms including Israel’s Cyber Unit and Meta had 9,500 content takedown requests since the Oct. 7 attack, and 60% of those requests were sent to Meta. They also reported a 94-percent compliance rate with such requests, according to an Israeli official at IRU.
Meta has defended itself by arguing that their policies have everything to do with protecting their users against mental health, particularly when it comes to hate speech and graphic war content. Meta’s takedowns comply with their Community Standards, which include the previous statements on hate speech and dangerous organizations.
“We believe that people use their voice and connect more freely when they don’t feel attacked on the basis of who they are. That is why we don’t allow hate speech on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads,” the Meta Hate Speech policy states. “It creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases may promote offline violence.”
Anna Lesnik is a neuroscience student at Palm Beach Atlantic University and claims that she has seen a tremendous amount of hate speech on social media, particularly against Israel.
“In any other posts that I see that aren’t even taking a side, people are commenting
‘pro-Palestine,’ things addressing the war,” Lesnik said, claiming that she rarely sees pro-Israel content on Instagram. “The one pro-Israel thing that I’ve seen, the comments are outrageous. Like so much hate.”
Annabel Mowbray has her B.A. in psychology and is an employee at Future Recovery Health, a mental health addiction and rehab center and emphasizes the tremendous effects war content has on social media users. She argued that trigger warnings are absolutely necessary.
“Children should not see graphic war content. Middle schoolers should not see graphic war content. It normalizes our brains to those things and numbs us to the actual weight of what’s happening,” Mowbray said. “I definitely think that there needs to be trigger warnings. There needs to be better things that are put into place for people that suffer from PTSD.”
Mowbray also spoke on the terrible effects of online hate speech when it comes to mental health.
“I think that politics can cause a lot of mental distress because it is such a divisive thing,” Mowbray said.
While all hate speech is a concern regarding social media, antisemitism has been particularly concerning during the Israel-Hamas war. The UK Community Security Trust reported 600 antisemitic incidents, which is a 641% increase from the same time frame in 2022. 185 of these recorded incidents took place online.
Jack Hasson, a Jewish and half-Israeli student at Palm Beach Atlantic University, shared his experience with antisemitic hate speech on social media.
“They say Zionists, but they want to say Jews. They call us pigs. They call us animals,” Hasson said when describing the hate speech he has witnessed online. He pointed out that, in the online hate he was seeing, the lines were blurred between being angry with Israel, and hating Jewish people. “A lot of these people don’t care about evidence. And that’s why it can be very hard to distinguish when someone is antisemitic or just anti-Israel.”
Misinformation has also been a major factor in Meta's censorship policies. In 2020, Meta r a statement titled “Combating Misinformation,” stating that they will remove content that violates their policies to stop the spread of misinformation.
On Nov. 9, 2023, the Anti-Defamation League recorded that 70% of Americans said they had seen at least “one of several examples of misinformation or hate related to the conflict on social media.”
Despite Meta’s arguments for their censorship policies and the risks of antisemitism, some users still feel as if their free speech rights are threatened by such policies. While some argue for censorship in the hope of decreasing social media’s negative mental health effects, a 2022 study done by Change Minds argues that censorship and de-platforming political accounts promote radical and violent extremism in the real world, rather than suppressing it.
“Social media is great, but it’s suffering from censorship. This censorship is harmful to humanity, not just to the issue of the Palestinian cause. It’s harmful to all of us,” Alian said. “If we have censorship, then you’re gonna hear some sides, especially the one with the power, the money, and the influence.”
By Grace Mackey
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