Digital Apartheid in Gaza: Unjust Content Moderation at the Request of Israel’s Cyber Unit

This is part one of an ongoing series. 

Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of pro-Palestinian content—sometimes at the request of the Israeli government—and a simultaneous failure to remove hate speech towards Palestinians. More specifically, social media platforms have worked with the Israeli Cyber Unit—a government office set up to issue takedown requests to platforms—to remove content considered as incitement to violence and terrorism, as well as any promotion of groups widely designated as terrorists. 

Many of these relationships predate the current conflict, but have proliferated in the period since. Between October 7 and November 14, a total of 9,500 takedown requests were sent from the Israeli authorities to social media platforms, of which 60 percent went to Meta with a reported 94% compliance rate. 

This is not new. The Cyber Unit has long boasted that its takedown requests result in high compliance rates of up to 90 percent across all social media platforms. They have unfairly targeted Palestinian rights activists, news organizations, and civil society; one such incident prompted Meta’s Oversight Board to recommend that the company “Formalize a transparent process on how it receives and responds to all government requests for content removal, and ensure that they are included in transparency reporting.”

When a platform edits its content at the behest of government agencies, it can leave the platform inherently biased in favor of that government’s favored positions. That cooperation gives government agencies outsized influence over content moderation systems for their own political goals—to control public dialogue, suppress dissent, silence political opponents, or blunt social movements. And once such systems are established, it is easy for the government to use the systems to coerce and pressure platforms to moderate speech they may not otherwise have chosen to moderate.

Alongside government takedown requests, free expression in Gaza has been further restricted by platforms unjustly removing pro-Palestinian content and accounts—interfering with the dissemination of news and silencing voices expressing concern for Palestinians. At the same time, X has been criticized for failing to remove hate speech and has disabled features that allow users to report certain types of misinformation. TikTok has implemented lackluster strategies to monitor the nature of content on their services. Meta has admitted to suppressing certain comments containing the Palestinian flag in certain “offensive c