Surveillance Capitalism and the Censorship of Palestinian Voices

In this article:

• What Has 7amleh Documented About Platform Suppression of Palestinian Content
• How Is the Surveillance Architecture and the Censorship Architecture the Same System
• What Does Platform Suppression Mean for Business Infrastructure Decisions
• Frequently Asked Questions
• What is 7amleh and what has it documented about platform censorship?
• How does Meta's advertising surveillance connect to its suppression of Palestinian content?
• Should agencies stop using Meta and Google tools because of Palestinian content suppression?
• References

Surveillance capitalism is not politically neutral. The same platform architecture that collects behavioral data from businesses to optimize advertising revenue is the architecture that decides which political speech is visible and which is suppressed. These are not separate systems. They are the same system serving different functions for the same owners.

7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, has systematically documented the suppression of Palestinian voices across major platforms. Meta, Google, TikTok, and Twitter have each been shown to apply content moderation policies in ways that disproportionately restrict Palestinian content, Arabic-language speech, and coverage of events in occupied territories.

The documentation is not anecdotal. 7amleh's research covers systematic patterns of account suspension, content removal, hashtag restriction, and reduced algorithmic distribution that affect Palestinian users, journalists, and human rights organizations at rates that do not apply to comparable content from other political contexts.

The behavioral surveillance architecture that tracks which features businesses use, which integrations they run, and when they are likely to churn is built on the same infrastructure that decides which political content gets distributed and which gets suppressed. The algorithm that optimizes advertising revenue is the algorithm that controls political visibility.

This is not a coincidence of technical architecture. It is the logical consequence of building public communication infrastructure as a private surveillance capitalist enterprise. The platform that owns the infrastructure makes the decisions about whose speech amplifies and whose diminishes.

A business owner who objects to the suppression of Palestinian voices and continues to build their operational stack on Meta, Google, and TikTok infrastructure is participating in the system they object to. This is not an argument for individual purity. It is an observation about what the infrastructure relationship means.

The surveillance capitalism architecture that extracts value from business workflows is the same architecture that makes political censorship at scale possible and profitable. Recognizing the connection between those two things is the first step toward making different infrastructure decisions for different reasons.

7amleh is the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. It has documented systematic suppression of Palestinian content across Meta, Google, TikTok, and Twitter: account suspensions, content removal, hashtag restriction, and reduced algorithmic distribution affecting Palestinian users and human rights organizations at rates that do not apply to comparable content in other political contexts.

Both functions run on the same infrastructure. The algorithm that optimizes advertising revenue by tracking behavioral data is the algorithm that controls content distribution. These are not separate systems. how Tech for Palestine is building the infrastructure alternative.

That is a decision each practitioner makes based on their own values and context. What is worth naming clearly is that the surveillance capitalism architecture that extracts value from business workflows and the architecture that suppresses Palestinian voices are the same infrastructure governed by the same incentive structures.

7amleh. 7amleh.org.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. eff.org.