Censorship practices against Palestine on social media: Restriction of Palestinian content on Facebook

This study aimed to uncover attempts to restrict Palestinian content in order to market the Israeli narrative of occupation and distort the Palestinian narrative within the framework of electronic social media policies, especially Facebook, which contribute to limiting audience access to Palestinian pages and accounts while supporting Israeli accounts. The researcher conducted the research by analyzing content using a qualitative approach for research purposes and issues. The study focused on the analysis of content, specifically two Israeli pages - the page of the Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee and the page "Israel speaks Arabic," as well as a Palestinian page called "Wafa." The researcher tracked the posts on these pages for a period of three months from December 2023 to March 1, 2024. The key findings of the content analysis study can be summarized as follows: From the results in the table above, we see that Facebook deleted 19.4% of posts related to events in Gaza. In the second month, around 24.2% of posts were deleted, and in the third month, about 12% were deleted. This indicates a significant bias by Facebook towards posts on Palestinian national pages, where a large percentage of posts showing Israeli attacks on Palestinians, destruction of homes and hospitals, and killing of civilians were deleted. The results also showed bias by Facebook in promoting Israeli propaganda portraying Israel as a country of coexistence and peace, while depicting Palestinians as terrorists and uncivilized.