BDS, WhoProfits, and Mapping Digital Platform Complicity

In this article:

• What Is WhoProfits and How Does Its Research Methodology Work
• What Has WhoProfits Documentation Produced in Practice
• What Is Tech for Palestine Building Beyond the Documentation
• How Does the WhoProfits Methodology Transfer to Extractive SaaS
• Frequently Asked Questions
• What does WhoProfits research and how is it used?
• How does WhoProfits methodology apply to extractive SaaS platforms?
• What is the relationship between WhoProfits and Tech for Palestine?
• References

Two organizations are doing the most specific, documented work on corporate complicity in extractive systems right now. WhoProfits maps which corporations profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, through what mechanisms, and with what evidence. Tech for Palestine maps which platforms suppress Palestinian content, how they do it, and what the organizational alternative looks like. Neither is doing abstract advocacy. Both are producing the kind of specific, evidenced, actionable documentation that makes collective response possible rather than merely symbolic.

The methodological connection between them is the more interesting observation. Both organizations are asking the same structural question from different positions in the same problem space: which entities profit from systems of harm, what are the specific mechanisms, and what does withdrawal from those mechanisms look like at scale? That question, asked with enough rigor and specificity, is what converts moral objection into organized action.

WhoProfits was established in 2007 by the Coalition of Women for Peace. It operates as an independent research center documenting the involvement of Israeli and international companies in the occupation of Palestinian territory. The methodology is specific: identify corporate activities that enable or benefit from the occupation, verify those activities through publicly available evidence including contracts, filings, satellite documentation, and on-the-ground research, and publish that documentation in formats that advocacy organizations and institutional decision-makers can use.

The output is a corporate database that allows pension fund managers, university administrators, city procurement officers, and individual consumers to identify which companies their money reaches and what those companies do with it. The database is not a list of companies WhoProfits dislikes. It is a documented map of corporate activities connected to specific violations of international law. That distinction matters. It is what makes WhoProfits documentation credible enough to withstand legal challenge, which it has faced repeatedly from the companies it documents.

The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, has used documentation of this type in making exclusion decisions about companies operating in occupied territories. The Presbyterian Church USA cited similar research in its 2014 divestment vote. These are not symbolic outcomes. They represent the mobilization of institutional capital in response to documented evidence of corporate complicity, which is precisely what the WhoProfits methodology is designed to enable.

Tech for Palestine applies a related methodology to digital platform complicity. The organization documents how major platforms, specifically Meta, Google, TikTok, and Twitter, apply content moderation in ways that systematically suppress Palestinian content, Arabic-language speech, and coverage of events in occupied territories. This documentation is supported by 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, which has published systematic research on patterns of account suspension, hashtag restriction, and reduced algorithmic distribution affecting Palestinian users at rates that do not apply to comparable content from other political contexts.

The documentation is the map. Tech for Palestine also builds the territory: more than twenty projects since its founding, providing tools, platforms, and infrastructure that Palestinian communities and solidarity organizations can use without depending on the platforms whose complicity the documentation describes. UpScrolled is the clearest example: a decentralized social platform built as a direct alternative to Meta and TikTok, designed specifically for communities that the existing platforms have demonstrated they will suppress when suppression serves their interests.

The combination of documentation and alternative is what makes the work actionable. Documentation without alternative produces informed helplessness: you know the platform is complicit and you have nowhere else to go. Alternative without documentation produces uninformed voluntarism: you use the alternative without understanding why the mainstream platform requires an alternative in the first place. Together, they produce the conditions for organized withdrawal: you know what you are withdrawing from, why withdrawal is warranted, and where you are going.

The WhoProfits and Tech for Palestine methodologies are transferable to any system where corporate complicity in harm needs to be documented and alternative infrastructure needs to be built. The question is always the same: which entities profit from this system, through what mechanisms, with what evidence, and what does the alternative look like for the people who need to exit?

Applied to the extractive SaaS stack: which platforms engage in behavioral data extraction beyond what their stated product function requires? Which are owned by private equity firms that acquired them specifically to monetize existing lock-in rather than to improve the product? Which have demonstrated willingness to suppress political speech or apply terms of service selectively based on content that threatens their commercial interests? These questions have specific, evidenced answers for specific platforms. Assembling those answers with WhoProfits-level rigor would produce the research infrastructure that targeted exit campaigns require.

The construction side is already underway. The self-hosted alternatives, the open source tooling, the decentralized communication infrastructure, the cooperative platform models: these exist and are operational. The gap is the documentation that connects the specific extractive practices of specific platforms to specific communities of users who have both the motivation to exit and the alternatives to exit toward. That documentation is the missing layer that would convert individual exit decisions into coordinated collective withdrawal.

The connection between WhoProfits, Tech for Palestine, and the broader project of resisting extractive platform capitalism is not analogical. It is structural. The same corporations that operate surveillance capitalist advertising businesses also operate the content moderation systems that suppress Palestinian voices. Meta's behavioral extraction architecture and Meta's political censorship architecture are the same architecture serving different commercial and political functions. The platform that surveils your business workflows and the platform that suppresses Palestinian journalism are the same platform.

Recognizing that connection does not require treating the two harms as equivalent. The suppression of Palestinian voices in the context of an ongoing occupation is a human rights violation with documented consequences for real people in a specific place. The extraction of behavioral surplus from business workflows is an economic harm with consequences for business owners and practitioners. These are not the same. They are, however, produced by the same infrastructure, governed by the same incentive structures, and resistant to the same forms of organized collective response.

The most useful contribution either of these methodologies makes to the other is the clarity of the documentation model. WhoProfits proved that specific, evidenced documentation of corporate complicity is more powerful than general moral critique. Tech for Palestine proved that building the alternative in parallel with documenting the problem is more effective than documentation alone. Both lessons apply directly to the project of organizing exit from extractive SaaS, which currently has neither the documentation nor the coordinated alternative construction that either organization provides in its own context.

WhoProfits maps corporate involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory using a specific methodology: identify corporate activities that enable or profit from the occupation, document those activities with publicly verifiable evidence, and publish the documentation in formats usable by institutional decision-makers. The research has been cited in divestment decisions by sovereign wealth funds, universities, and religious organizations.

The WhoProfits question, which corporations profit from this system of harm and through what mechanisms, is directly transferable. Applied to extractive SaaS: which platforms engage in data extraction beyond their stated product function, which are owned by entities whose incentive structures guarantee enshittification, and which have demonstrated willingness to suppress political speech. how to apply the BDS divestment framework to your specific SaaS stack.

WhoProfits documents the problem with specific evidence. Tech for Palestine builds the alternative. Together they demonstrate that the most effective resistance combines documented accountability with functional alternatives. Documentation without alternatives produces guilt without recourse. Alternatives without documentation produce uninformed exits.

WhoProfits. whoprofits.org.

Tech for Palestine. techforpalestine.org.

7amleh. 7amleh.org.

BDS Movement. bdsmovement.net.

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. uscpr.org.