Crushing Dissent During India’s Lockdown

Now that my Toward Freedom guest editorship has come to an end, I am reflecting back on the stories we ran for the past 6+ months and the writers who wrote them.

The scenes coming out of Modi’s India and its pandemic nightmare have been particularly horrific, causing me to inquire about the health of Toward Freedom contributor Sanket Jain. Sanket is a freelance journalist based in western India. TF ran two of his stories in December and February about how India’s poorest citizens were barely coping with Covid. He emailed me back: “Fortunately, I am safe. For the past few weeks, I have been on the field documenting the disaster that’s unfolding in remote villages of India. Last week, I was shooting photos at the crematorium to see how many people have died of COVID because the Government is hiding official numbers. It’s a nightmare to see a human disaster unfolding at such a massive scale. From lack of oxygen, improper vaccination policy, COVID patients facing ostracism in the village, to frontline healthcare workers facing verbal abuse and even physical assault, India is witnessing a humanitarian crisis. I hope we come out of this disaster soon.”

Stay safe, Sanket, and keep sending us your stories.

Another writer who moved me deeply is Charles Wachira. His recent story on what’s happening in Uganda opened my eyes to what’s happening throughout much of Africa; the maintenance of dictatorial rule [e.g through the (truly) rigged election of President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda] to ensure “stability” for resource extraction by foreign corporations. With remarkable patience in responding to my queries, Charles produced evidence that the Great Game for Oil is now on steroids in East Africa (much of which lies opposite the Red Sea – and Saudi Arabia.)

Fascinatingly, a similar situation is playing out in West Africa, as explained by Eric Agnero in his story on how President Alassane Ouattara was able to extend his unconstitutional rule over Cote d’Ivoire, aided and abetted by France and the United States.

I admit: I came into this job with a geopolitical perspective, one which is followed by most world powers as they survey entire regions for riches. I discovered it during decades of researching my new book on endless wars. You’ll find a geopolitical analysis reflected in my article on Afghanistan: If you want to understand the many wars that have swept through the Middle East, Central Asia, and now Africa, you need only to follow the pipelines and the oil schemes taking place right now. All this, despite promises by Big Oil to invest in alternative energy to slow down climate change.

 

Trend Lines in the TF Stories

Looking back, it was a privilege to be able to choose stories that reflected extraordinary, indeed history-making events between October 2020 and early May. Below, I will highlight some of those stories, as certain trends begin to emerge. Call them patterns of history. Ten years from now, you may want to look back on them as if they were diary entries of an unforgettable period in your life, featuring Covid 19, Trump’s defeat, the January 6 assault on the capitol; the re-invigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd; the rise of the right wing in the United States based on claims of voter fraud, the similar tactics used by Trump’s fascist allies abroad. Democracy v Racist Authoritarianism is one overriding theme. Look for others:

In October 2020, Toward Freedom ran stories on two historic elections. Olivia Arigho-Stiles’s article on the elections in Bolivia, which returned the MAS party to power, gave us some hope that massive turnouts could turn the table on authoritarian regimes. Meanwhile, in the leadup to the November elections in the United States, Harvey Wasserman and Greg Palast sounded warnings that voter fraud mechanisms were in place in Florida and Wisconsin. Who could have guessed that Secretary of State Raffensperger (or, as Palast calls him, Raffens-purger) would later emerge as a hero for upholding the integrity of Georgia’s vote for Biden, when in 2020 he was responsible for purging 198,000 names from the voter roles!

The big news in November 2020, was the defeat of Donald Trump thanks to the commitment of black and brown voters, who ensured “the largest turnout ever by U.S. voters in a presidential election.” We were so hopeful, I wrote back then. noting that Trump’s “multiple lawsuits claiming ‘voter fraud’ have been rejected so far by U.S. courts for lack of evidence.” As It turned out, Trump continued to use voter fraud to enrage his base…even against fellow Republicans. The fight against a fascist movement in America is far from over.

We also witnessed through the reporting of Serbian journalist Nicolas Micovec some tense super-power standoffs. In Belarus, a proxy battle by “the Western-backed Belarusian opposition” failed to topple President Alexander Lukashenko, who is still firmly supported by Russia.” In Nagorno-Karabakh, more deadly proxy battles were raging between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces, where “the conflict is being carefully watched for two reasons: 1) its potential to spread beyond its borders, and 2) an underlying energy war between Russia, the US, and the European Union.”

In December 2020, we began to take stock of what the world would soon face with the new Biden administration. Climate change was high on the agenda, especially since the Trump administration in November officially withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement. Rashika Pardikar, an Indian journalist, wrote of the “responsibility to both undo the damage done by the Trump administration and do more to address climate vulnerability concerns, especially in the developing world.’ Especially, she notes, because “the US is responsible for 25% of global emissions.” And what could provide better evidence of the dangers of climate change than two horrific Category 4 hurricanes which slammed into Nicaragua and Honduras in November, two weeks apart? Toward Freedom contacted Dan Higgins of the Burlington-Puerto Cabezas Sister City program. His and others’ reporting helped raise aid for the people of Puerto Cabezas, where roughly 2,000 homes were destroyed, and another 9,000 properties were damaged. The article turned into a good opportunity for Higgins to reflect on the history of “Port,” whose “peoples, languages, culture and history [on the Atlantic Coast} are very different from the Spanish-speaking side of Nicaragua.” He writes that the issue of autonomy “continues to be a flash point in Nicaraguan politics, with differing interpretations of what autonomy means.”

Elections in Venezuela, another hot point in international affairs (due in large part to the Trump administration’s economic sanctions to bring about regime change), came into focus as CodePink sent reporter Teri Mattison to observe the country’s December 6 legislative elections. “The sanctions imposed on Venezuela are a form of economic warfare… meant to create hardship and unrest,” Teri reported. (The elections resulted in a victory for President Nicolas Maduro and his allies. The opposition, which boycotted the elections, claimed “election fraud!” Thanks to reporting from Peter Lacowski, “Cries of election fraud by Donald Trump and his followers are familiar to Venezuelans; their right-wing opposition has been doing the same thing for years.”

In January 2021, we focused on Trump’s lies about a “stolen election,” which triggered the right wing assault on the Capitol on January 6, causing TF to immediately probe for details. Jonathan Ben Menachem provided some shocking details in “Cops at the Capitol,” which revealed, “at least 26 sworn members of U.S. law enforcement agencies from at least 11 states have been identified by law enforcement agencies and local reporting as attendees of the Jan. 6 rally.” Alexander Hinton, in his evaluation of the raid, warned us –correctly as it turned out – not to underestimate far right extremists in the US.

The other big news of January, of course, was the Inauguration of Joe Biden, and “Why Poet Amanda Gorman Stole the Inaugural Show” with her reading of her newest poem, “The Hill We Climb.” We published her poem in full, noting that Gorman was about halfway through the poem on Jan. 6, when pro-Trump rioters stormed into the halls of Congress, some bearing weapons and Confederate flags. She stayed awake late into the night and finished the poem, adding verses about the apocalyptic scene that unfolded at the Capitol that day.” Her eloquent performance was a source of pride for the Black Lives Matter movement and its supporters.

By February 2021, Toward Freedom reported that Trump’s voter fraud allegations seem to have found a receptive audience with generals in Myanmar. Emily Blumenthal observed “glaring similarities between the attempted coup in the US and the successful coup in Myanmar.” She quotes from the rightwing US group QAnon, which supported the coup: “The Burmese military has arrested the country’s leaders after credible evidence of widespread voter fraud became impossible to ignore…Sounds like the controlled media and Biden admin are scared this might happen here. “ An expert on Myanmar concluded, “Trump has given despots across the world fresh rhetorical ammunition to justify their authoritarian actions.”

If this weren’t unsettling news in the post-Trump era, our apprehension about Biden’s foreign policy turned to alarm after US forces bombed Syria in February. In their piece, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies remind us that “the airstrikes were supposedly authorized by the 20-year-old, post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), legislation that Rep. Barbara Lee has been trying for years to repeal since it has been misused,  ‘to justify waging war in at least seven different countries, against a continuously expanding list of targetable adversaries.’

In March 2021, Toward Freedom observed the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring with disturbing reportage about the least known revolts in Bahrain. Finian Cunningham reveals that “Western powers played a nefarious role to ensure that the Arab Spring was kneecapped in order to cripple any progressive potential.” In Tunisia, where popular revolts launched the Arab Spring, Alessandra Bajek provides an in-depth report, noting that “Tunisia has failed to make any substantial progress in the daily lives of its citizens as the country’s democratization is not accompanied by a socio-economic transition. Nor should we forget that it was the Obama-Biden administration that oversaw the Arab Spring, as well as the regime change in Libya, which devolved into a disastrous civil (read proxy) war, killing thousands with many more displaced. According to Mathew Cole, Blackwater mercenaries poured into Libya, portraying themselves as “unarmed logistical personnel being sent in to support oil and gas companies.”

In April 2021, Toward Freedom reported on escalated tensions between Israel and Iran, after Israel bombed Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Kim Zeter reports, “The sabotage seemed timed to send a message — both to Iran and to the U.S. and Europe. It occurred just days after talks began in Vienna to revive the Obama-instigated 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran to control its uranium enrichment production.” Fortunately, cooler heads once again prevailed, and the negotiations are continuing. There is even talk that Saudi Arabia and Iran have been holding secret talks.

The situation in Yemen, as revealed by William Boardman, is not as rosy as the Biden administration would have us believe. “Biden,” he writes, “promised that the US would be ‘ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen.’ Biden gave no specific details. The six-year bombing continues. The six-year naval blockade of Yemen continues. The humanitarian crisis continues, with the threat of famine looming. In effect, Biden has participated in war crimes since January 20, with no policy in sight to end the killing.” Long-time activist Kathy Kelley, worried that the American people were becoming desensitized to the killings in Yemen, reporting on a hunger strike taking place in Washington, DC. demanding an end to the war in Yemen.

 

Concluding Thoughts: The pandemic brought us many challenges. I, for one, was fortunate to have a job that allowed me to connect with writers from around the world from the safety of my own home.

Now that the pandemic is gradually lifting, I hope to spend more time promoting my book, which suffered greatly from being published during the lockdown. I wish all readers well as they hopefully recalibrate their lives toward a better future. Maybe a new Renaissance will be born out of COVID-19, just as the Renaissance emerged out of Italy’s Black Death in the 15th century. Let history—and science—be our guide, and may today’s movements –for democracy, justice and true equality—be our inspiration!

Narayan Gaikwad knew something was wrong. 

For eight days in August, he was given intravenous drips of electrolytes and saline solution, twice a day. By the time he realized he was being treated by a quack, it was too late. Fatigue had grappled him, and in no time, he collapsed in his house in the village of Jambhali in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

His family feared COVID-19 had caused his symptoms. They rushed 73-year-old Gaikwad to a makeshift public COVID center—10 miles from home. “There were at least 500 patients, while the facility had some 100 beds,” recalls his son, Bhagat. Next, they traveled another eight miles to a private hospital. “The doctor wouldn’t admit him because he didn’t have a COVID report,” recalls Bhagat.

“The entire system was saturated because many private doctors refused to treat COVID patients,” he says. Speedily, they rushed him to a local village doctor, who prescribed a few injections. “I did come to my senses, but my cough and cold didn’t go away,” remembers Gaikwad. All he wanted was a COVID test, which was hard to come by because the system was overwhelmed and unprepared. After that, he spent ₹5,000 (Indian rupees or $70 USD) and got a computed tomography (CT) scan. “We then rushed to a medical doctor, who prescribed week-long medicines and injections. It cost me another ₹13,000 ($180).” This was 10 days into his trek for proper healthcare and Gaikwad still couldn’t get a COVID test. “I was breathless.” To get tested, his family took him to a private university that had been converted to a COVID center—12 miles away. As anticipated, he tested positive. “I was put on oxygen, and within three days, I started feeling better,” he says with a sigh of relief.

Meanwhile, the nine members of the Gaikwad family tested positive for stigma. “People started circulating that my entire family tested positive,” says Narayan, a low-income farmer. None of them were allowed to step out of the house for a month. “We had to throw away 2,000 kilograms of harvested tomatoes worth $275,” says Bhagat. Gaikwad never anticipated this would cost them a season’s earnings.

After he tested negative, Bhagat posted a screenshot of this report on his WhatsApp status, with the caption ‘Negative’. “It was necessary. Otherwise, we would have died of hunger, as people wouldn’t let us step outside,” says Gaikwad. In India, as in many parts of the world, ordinary people rely on groups created inside the WhatsApp messaging application on their smartphones to communicate with wide swaths of people, like their neighbors, coworkers and political allies.

It didn’t take long for the second wave to devastate India. On May 14, India reported 414,182 infections in 24 hours—the highest single day spike in the world. India’s far-right prime minister, Narendra Modi, prematurely declared a victory against COVID in January 2021. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of which Modi is a member, started addressing election rallies in four eastern and southern Indian states—drawing several thousand people without masks. At one event, Modi proudly said, “I’ve witnessed such a rally for the first time.”

On the same day, India reported over 234,000 infections. With an oversaturated healthcare system, India ran out of oxygen, hospital beds, ventilators and essential medicines. Soon, people took to social media, making SOS calls for healthcare facilities. Hospitals started petitioning high courts for the lack of oxygen supply as several people died. As of May 30, India reported over 28 million cases with 329,000 people succumbing to the virus. A New York Times analysis reveals a more likely scenario could be 539 million cases with 1.6 million estimated deaths. 

But Gaikwad couldn’t find a bed in the first wave. 

“For poor people like us, the system collapsed long ago,” he says.

 

Three Decades of Austerity

In 1991, India “liberalized” its economy, which meant opening it to international markets, leading to a mass-scale privatization of public services and goods. In 1993, the World Bank released its World Development Report, which focused on healthcare. Ravi Duggal, health researcher and activist writes, “This report basically is directed at third-world governments to reorient public health spending for selective health programs for targeted populations wherein it clearly implies that curative care, the bulk of health care, should be left to the private sector.”

The World Bank report said investments in specialized health facilities should be diverted to the private sector by reducing public subsidies. It encouraged “social or private insurance” for clinical services. The result: 85.9 percent of people in rural India have no medical insurance.

To encourage privatization, the government reduced the customs duty on imported medical equipment from 40 percent in the 1980s to 15 percent in the early 2000s. As of 2016, it was down to 7.5 percent. From 1986-87, India spent 1.47 percent of its GDP on healthcare. Now it has been investing a little more than 1 percent of its GDP. Meanwhile, it has 43,487 private hospitals and a mere 25,778 public hospitals. Yet, a 2019 World Health Organization report pointed out average global healthcare spending was 6.6 percent of GDP.

 

Frontline Health Care Workers Bear the Burden

In March 2020, India’s Health Ministry tasked the Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers to contain COVID across 600,000 villages. For this, they survey households, find suspected COVID cases, and monitor oxygen levels and body temperature. ASHAs also support COVID patients who are home-bound and act as a liaison to people who are able to get treatment outside the village. This is in addition to over 50 responsibilities that include universal immunization, ensuring proper pre- and post-natal care, spreading awareness about contraception, hygiene, and maintaining health records.

For every 1,000 people, an ASHA worker—normally a woman from within a village—is appointed under India’s National Rural Health Mission. Swati Nandavdekar, 40, from the village of Mendholi in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district, is one of 970,676 ASHAs. “We are tired,” says Nandavdekar, who has worked without leave for 410 days. “People abuse me verbally and don’t answer my survey questions.”

In avoiding her, people are bypassing the ostracism that follows if they test positive, as in the case of Narayan. “In the previous lockdown, everyone lost their livelihood, and now they can’t afford an isolation of 14 days,” she elaborates. This is in contrast to last year, when ASHAs like Nandavdekar were able to successfully contact-trace COVID patients.

Dr. Sangita Gurav, the only public doctor for 15 villages that Kolhapur’s Bhuye Public Health Centre serves, commented on the rising fatality rate. “People consult us only after a week from testing positive,” she says. “By this time, their symptoms become severe, and oxygen levels start dipping.”

Sandhya Jadhav, an ASHA supervisor from Kolhapur, who oversees the work of 24 ASHAs, says, “Every day I get calls from ASHAs who talk of mental stress and the instances of verbal abuse.” ASHAs receive “performance-based incentive.” In Maharashtra, they average a meager monthly income of ₹3,000-4,000 ($41-55). But it comes down to $25 for ASHA workers like Nandavdekar, who is from a smaller village. “Most of them haven’t received PPE kits, masks, hand sanitizers and gloves for surveying even in the containment zones,” says Jadhav.

On May 24, ASHA workers across India had gone on a 1-day strike demanding legal status of permanent workers, adequate health safety gear, insurance and a hike in their wages. Last year, over 600,000 ASHA workers protested with similar demands.

For 833 million people, India has a mere 155,404 sub-health centers (which are the first point of contact for rural communities of 5,000 people), 5,183 community health centers, 24,918 public health centers and 810 district hospitals. That’s 1 district hospital for every 1 million people. With such a poor infrastructure, it’s the ASHAs who remain in direct contact with the villages. “We have been working since 2009 and have saved countless lives, which even the government knows,” Nandavdekar says. “But they won’t even treat us with respect.” 

Last year, the Indian government announced an insurance program of $69,000 (USD) for frontline healthcare workers. “If there was insurance, why weren’t we informed of the company and other details?” Jadhav says. “They took our signature on a blank paper.”

As cases continue to rise, the job of ASHA workers is far from over. 

“We are dying daily,” Nandavdekar says. “The only difference is that it’s not called death.” 

Sanket Jain is an independent journalist based in the Kolhapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He was a 2019 People’s Archive of Rural India fellow, for which he documented vanishing art forms in the Indian countryside. He has written for Baffler, Progressive Magazine, Counterpunch, Byline Times, The National, Popula, Media Co-op, Indian Express and several other publications.

On May 6 and 7, Instagram users in India noticed that some of their posts were starting to vanish. Gone were their COVID-19-related posts that demanded improved conditions for overworked crematorium workers, publicized volunteer-led relief efforts, and linked coronavirus deaths in the country to “abject callousness” of the government. Stranger still was the removal of private chats on the matter.

“There is a growing trend of internet shutdowns, takedown of social media content, particularly around political speech in India over the last few years,” said Vidushi Marda, global AI research and advocacy lead at ARTICLE 19, an international freedom of expression organization that has been tracking the deleted content.

In India right now, whether or not people have access to COVID-19 information on social media is a matter of life and death. Such censorship, however, is not unique to the country. Over the past month, activists and researchers have also collected numerous examples of suppressed content related to unrest in Palestine and Colombia, as well as posts related to the National Day of Awareness of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in the U.S. and Canada.

On May 7, Instagram said that “this is a widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic” and that the issue had been “fixed.”

But the following day, the company acknowledged that there were issues with posts relating to unrest in Colombia and Palestine.

“We are so sorry this happened,” Instagram noted in a statement. “Especially to those in Colombia, East Jerusalem, and Indigenous communities who felt this was an intentional suppression of their voices and stories — that was not our intent whatsoever.”

But Instagram failed to acknowledge reports of censorship in India.

A representative of Facebook, which owns Instagram, wrote in response to questions about why dissent in India, Colombia, and Palestine seemed to have been disproportionately impacted: “This was a widespread global technical issue that affected users around the world, regardless of the topic of their Stories. We fixed it as fast as we could so users around the world could continue expressing themselves and connecting with each other through Stories.”

Despite the company’s claims that the takedowns were automatic and universal, Marda said there was “overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent.”

In India, she noted that ARTICLE 19 observed “significant overlap between posts about activism, COVID-19 relief and government critique.” All of this, she said, points to “a significantly larger problem than just a single automation tool,” and noted “the opacity of content moderation practices” means that there are gaps in accountability.

Such digital suppression isn’t simply a matter of being able to speak freely. In each of these countries, thanks to government failures and limited media coverage, people have come to rely on social media to share information, track resources, and protect themselves from violence.

Part of the problem is automated content moderation, which uses machine learning to filter content. The systems are blunt instruments that often misunderstand context and remove too much or too little content, noted a report by the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. These developments, adds the report, can negatively impact minority groups because these tools are often trained on English-language datasets, so they have trouble properly parsing dialects and rarely-used languages.

“[There is] overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent,” said Marda. “[This is] precisely why… human rights organizations and defenders around the world have pointed to the dangers of automated content moderation for years.”

 

India’s History Of Digital Censorship

Because of the Indian government’s monumental failure in tackling the coronavirus, people in the country have come to rely on social media to seek and provide COVID-related help like oxygen supplies and vaccinations. Many people have also used social media to collate lists of supplies into a larger, searchable database.

Silicon Valley-driven censorship in India, therefore, has become a matter of survival, despite the fact that Instagram has yet to acknowledge it.

“Despite documented instances of censorship [in India] and Instagram users highlighting them very prominently, there was a complete lack of recognition [by Instagram] of what’s happening in India,” said Apar Gupta, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based organization that seeks to ensure that technology respects fundamental rights.

Digital suppression in the country isn’t new, despite the fact that the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech and expression.

In 2020, India had the highest number of government-instigated internet shutdowns in the world. The digital crackdowns were one of the reasons Reporters Without Borders recently ranked India 142 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedoms.

On April 28, Facebook temporarily hid posts critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that included the hashtag #ResignModi for “violating its community standards.” A Facebook spokesperson later said that the posts were hidden “by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to.”

“Silicon Valley platforms have a very natural interest in keeping governments happy in the regions that they operate,” Gupta said, pointing to the fact that India is Facebook’s biggest market.

The lack of institutionalized free speech protections is further compounded by laws and regulations in India that allow the Ministry of Electronics and Information to not disclose censorship orders sent to social media companies, said Gupta.

Users are therefore often given no official explanation why their posts were suppressed.

 

Content Moderation In Colombia

There have also been numerous reports of censorship related to ongoing protests in Colombia over proposed tax increases and the resulting police crackdowns.

“We identified a specific problem with Instagram,” said Carolina Botero Cabrera, a researcher with Karisma, a Bogotá based civil society organization that works on technology and human rights. “We have over 1,000 reports of censorship, around 90 percent of it was by Instagram and the content was overwhelmingly about the [ongoing] protests,” she added.

Deleted posts reportedly related to the national unrest, unemployment numbers in the country, and the death of a protester.

For Colombia, a country with a long-lasting civil war, such automated content moderation is all the more contentious because journalists and human rights activists often find that their content is removed, their reach is diminished, or their accounts are blocked because their content is deemed too violent.

Jesus Abad Colorado, an experienced Colombian photojournalist, recently had his Twitter account blocked after he posted photographs of an armed dispute in the Chocó Department in Western Colombia. A few days later, when an independent media outlet livestreamed an interview with Colorado about the dispute, their account was blocked, too.

Another challenge, said Botero, is that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People’s Army (FARC), the longtime leftist guerilla group that disarmed and became a political party in 2017, “was flagged as a terrorist organization [by social media companies at the time] even though they were in peace negotiations.”

The peace process spanned about four years, culminating in a peace agreement in 2016. “Any research about the peace process will have to deal with important problems to [understand] FARC’s position, actions, and voice,” said Botero, noting that blocked social media accounts and deleted content hamper documentation of the process.

 

Suppressing Palestinian Voices

As tensions escalated in Israel and Palestine, digital suppression in the region also appeared to increase.

“We have over 100 reports of censorship on Instagram,” said Alison Carmel Ramer, a researcher at 7amleh, a Haifa-based digital rights organization based in Haifa, Israel.

Ramer’s research and other reports found that most of the censored content was related to Israeli forces storming Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. Other censored content was related to the eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Muslim, a media publication, also documented blocks on Instagram livestreams related to Palestine.

According to ِRamer, Facebook told 7amleh that a majority of the Instagram takedowns were mistakes because they did not violate community standards and that they have restored the content.

“This means there is a problem in the way content is moderated,” said Ramer. “Why is content which is not against community standards being taken down? [Facebook] also did not tell users under which policy the content was taken down.”

In general, Palestinian content is “over-moderated” Ramer added, noting posts are often suppressed either because they are considered hate speech, or the posts appear to be connected to terrorist organizations. Many Palestinian leaders are designed as terrorists by the United States, meaning Facebook censors content related to them. Ramer also explained how hate speech in the region written in Hebrew is not censored to the same extent as hate speech in Arabic.

A March 2021 report by 7amleh which analysed 574,000 social media conversations in 2020 showed that one out of every 10 Israeli posts about Palestinians and Arabs contained violent speech, a 16 percent increase compared to 2019. “We have sent reports like this one to Facebook for several years and every year, [but] we find that this content just remains online,” Ramer said, adding that Facebook has not informed them of what, if any, actions it intends to take.

A recent report in The Intercept also noted how Facebook censors the word “Zionist.”

“Zionism is a political ideology,” Ramer said. “Political speech must be protected. Words like ‘Zionist’ and ‘shahid’ [martyr in Arabic] should be protected.” Censorship in the region is especially concerning because of the longstanding lack of transparency around Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, political activist Noam Chomsky told The Daily Poster.

“Israel’s brutal repression of Palestinians for many years, with strong support from the U.S. particularly, is a shocking crime in itself and has ominous international repercussions as well,” said Chomsky. “There have been extensive efforts to block efforts to bring the facts and their significance to the general public. These efforts amount to direct participation in the crimes.”

When asked about social media companies’ ability to freely censor content, Chomsky replied, “Their enormous power should not be tolerated.”

 

The Path Ahead

At ARTICLE 19, Marda said that in order to align itself with international human rights standards, Facebook “must publicly and transparently acknowledge the reasons for recent takedowns” and “provide information for the substantive and legal reasons for takedown.”

Marda added that Facebook should also “restore all blocked content” and “publicly commit to not bowing to governmental or judicial pressure that requires it to act in violation of international human rights standards and jurisdiction-specific standards on freedom of expression.”

This article was originally published in The Daily Poster.

Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India.