The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) today called on the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) to intervene and put pressure on social media platforms to stop censoring and blocking Palestinian content.
The PJS Freedoms Committee said in a statement that the frequency of censoring Palestinian content in social media has been on the rise, especially in the Facebook platform, which has a clear relationship with Israel and operates with its directions in censoring the Palestinian narrative and covering up the Israeli occupation’s crimes against the Palestinian people.
It pointed out that hundreds of violations were monitored against-Palestinian news agencies, websites and pages for media institutions and individuals, the most recent of which was censorship of the Palestine News Network page, followed by about 250,000 people, and blocked by Facebook.
The Freedoms Committee pointed out that the Palestine News Network, before its deletion, was subjected to censorship and hacking on its Arabic and English websites to the point of blocking it to followers on Facebook, in addition to the hacking of its website about three weeks ago.
Ma’an News Agency website was also blocked for hours as a result of hacking, while its main page on the Facebook platform, with about 2.25 million followers, is still subject to penalties due to a series of restrictions, while previously pages with millions of followers were blocked.
The statement said the targeting of Palestinian content is not limited to the Facebook platform, but also other platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Tik Tok.
PJS called on the IFJ to pressure all relevant parties, even international ones, to bring a halt to these violations by social media platforms against Palestinian content and narrative.
Source: Palestine News and Information Agency