Jerusalem-based journalist Faten Elwan has more than 300,000 followers on Instagram, where she regularly covers events in Palestine and documents the Israeli occupation. But now her posts typically get just a few hundred views.
In April 2026, Elwan was on a hike when she discovered her account had been unexpectedly reactivated after a two-month suspension, something she believes was due to her pro-Palestine content. Her first story back reached 30,000 views, but within an hour, later stories dropped to a few hundred.
She is one of many pro-Palestinian account holders who believe they have been “shadow-banned” by Meta, a technique allegedly used to restrict visibility without notification. “People tell me: if we don’t specifically search for you and type your name, ‘Faten Elwan’, together, we can’t find you. I no longer exist,” she told Al Jazeera.
Elwan’s account was first suspended in late 2023, shortly after Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began, and has been taken down eight times during the war. In May 2025, she met Meta representatives to flag her silencing, but said their response appeared dismissive and noncommittal.
“During my meeting with Meta, they heard my statement, and there was no reaction whatsoever. I gave my statement and provided examples of what happened to me, how I’m technically just a shadow on social media,” she said. She compared Meta to a “school principal” punishing bad students on a global scale.
Elwan’s case is one of many documented in a report investigating how Meta has allegedly suppressed Palestinian voices over the past five years. The Platformicide of Palestine 2021–2025, published by 7amleh and Utrecht University, analyzed more than 3,500 verified cases of digital rights violations.
The report coins “platformicide” to describe “the structural and intentional erasure of Palestinian digital presence, visibility, and participation across social media platforms.” Lead researcher Fabio Cristiano said: “This is an approach, a structural and intentional approach, which goes beyond content moderation alone.”
Of the cases documented between January 2021 and December 2025, only 32.5% had an identifiable policy violation. Most Palestinian users received no explanation. Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals (DOI) policy was applied in 57.2% of identifiable cases, rising to 71.1% among journalists.
For journalists in Gaza, social media is a lifeline to the outside world. Meta’s suspensions and restrictions on livestreaming have severely hampered their work. Elwan was banned from livestreaming for 360 consecutive days three years ago, with automatic renewals since then.
The report also found that shadowbanning rose from near-zero to 3.5% of enforcement cases after October 7, 2023. Maisoon Zoubi from I’lam described a chilling effect: “A state of tension has been prevalent ever since we learned about cases of investigations, arrests, and page bans against journalists. This makes me strengthen my own self-censorship.”
Yousef Abu Watfa, editor-in-chief of Quds News Network, said Meta has systematically restricted their content since 2015, with enforcement escalating sharply after the war began. QNN’s Facebook page was taken down, and only the Arabic Instagram account remains.
In response, a Meta spokesperson pointed to independent due diligence reports and said the company had introduced a system to route flagged content to moderators who understand Arabic dialects, and revised its DOI policy to allow more social and political discourse.
7amleh submitted 2,828 appeals to Meta over five years but received no response for nearly half, despite being a Trusted Partner. Advocacy manager Lama Nazeeh said: “Independent reviews show the partners who get real responses are those with private contacts inside the company, not those using the official channel.”
Experts argue that deleted content from Gaza, including videos of airstrikes and survivor testimonies, hampers evidence gathering for future accountability. The UN-adopted Berkeley Protocol treats such material as potential evidence of war crimes.
“We preserve the fragments we can reach. Meta holds the entire archive of evidence and treats it as disposable,” Nazeeh said. “A people’s right to document its own existence during a genocide is too important to leave to the discretion of a single company. The remedy is a change of framework: from voluntary commitments to binding obligations.”
Source: www.aljazeera.com