Arab activists improvise workarounds to sustain their content on social media platforms

AMMAN — Despite the ceasefire in Gaza and the cessation of Israeli aggression against Palestinians, social media activists have urged the public to maintain the momentum on raising awareness and support for the Palestinian cause.

Many families continue to be under the threat of forceful displacement from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah and Selwan neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. 

As many social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, are censoring content related to the Palestinian cause, many social media activists have found workarounds to keep their viewership and avoid having their accounts blocked or suspended.

Mariam Al Haj Hasan, a social media content specialist, was taken by surprise when the reach of her content was significantly reduced once she started posting about the Palestinian cause. 

“Views of my content dropped by 80 per cent when I started using #savesheikhjarrah in my posts,” Haj Hasan told The Jordan Times. “The decrease was unjustified since I am quite certain that I did not violate any of the policies in the user agreement of the platform given that I am a content moderator in one of the social media platforms myself,” Haj Hasan said.

“Both my knowledge of social media policies and my experiments on the various platforms came in handy. For example, I started using fewer hashtags and focusing on the visual content,” Haj Hasan noted. 

She explained how she refrained from reposting pictures or videos with blood or dead bodies and instead converted them to stories from the victims’ families or videos that tell the same stories but less graphically in order to avoid her content be flagged as inappropriate, she added.

One savvy technique that activists used was to play with the standard Arabic text. Many Arabic letters include dots, but for Arabic natives or those proficient in the language the text can still be understood even if the dots were removed from the letters. As such, some activists found that Palestinian content could evade censorship by removing the dots from flagged words that decrease viewership.

“This turned out to be an effective tool, but platforms update their algorithms constantly so we are not sure how long this is going to last,” Haj Hasan said.

Ahmad Alawneh, a social media activist, told The Jordan Times about another trick that he used when posting content related to the Palestinian cause especially during the most recent aggressions in Gaza and Jerusalem. 

“I would add extra spaces between the letters of word, which would make it escape search algorithms,” he said.

Eyad Al Allan, also a social media activist, who was banned upon posting pictures and names of Palestinian victims on a social media platform, said that after this incident he started inserting special characters into written text like slashes and brackets “to fool the platforms’ search algorithms”. 

“It feels like a tug-of-war,” Allan told The Jordan Times.

Khaled Al Ahmad, another social media specialist and consultant, said: “We have to be aware of Facebook’s community standards. Users should abide by such policies and avoid content that implies hate speech, bullying, violence, graphic and sensitive visuals.”

However, many users still expressed their discontent with what they perceived as the social media platforms’ attempt to restrict their freedom of expression. 

Many users also chose to rate the platforms’ applications poorly on the App Store and Google Play as a comeback.

Some social media platforms on their part decided to respond and address the growing impression of discrimination against pro-Palestinian content and content providers. 

Facebook, for example, is starting a dialogue with Arab officials and influencers on the issue. They also announced that they will establish a new Arab team to help with moderation, according to Ahmad.

He reiterated the importance of using social media platforms responsibly and wisely. 

“We should tell our story in a way that is suitable for all nationalities and ideologies,” Ahmad said.