Digital Apartheid in Gaza: Unjust Content Moderation (2-part series)

This EFF series examines content moderation practices affecting Palestinian speech on major platforms, particularly Meta, in the aftermath of October 7, synthesizing prior reporting, documented government takedown requests, and platform compliance data rather than presenting new primary research. It finds that Israeli authorities issued roughly 9,500 takedown requests between October 7 and mid-November, about 60% of them directed at Meta, which reportedly complied at a rate near 94%, consistent with historical compliance rates as high as 90% across platforms more broadly.

The authors argue this dynamic produced a pattern of disproportionate removal of pro-Palestinian content alongside inadequate action against anti-Palestinian hate speech, giving a single government outsized influence over global content moderation outcomes.

They characterize this as a form of 'digital apartheid' and call on platforms to adopt greater transparency, involve local and Palestinian stakeholders in policy decisions, resist state pressure to over-remove content, and provide users with clearer notice and appeal mechanisms when content is taken down.