“On a personal level, I experienced this problem multiple times on different social media platforms. And the problem always was that my posts were being restricted from reaching others,” El Sayed, who subsequently left Gaza for Egypt with her family, told Detektor.

“If a group of people is allowed to post whatever they want about their story freely, or about their side of the story, or their point of view, while other people are not, then that’s just not fair,” she said.

Due to these restrictions, El Sayed now avoids using Facebook.

“I encode many of the words that I know might actually lead to shadowing. But the problem isn’t solved when I’m trying to post a picture or a video,” she explained.

Journalists around the world have resorted to concealment tactics and wordplay when publishing posts on social media, so the algorithms don’t flag them as problematic. Among those is Al Jazeera Balkans journalist Adnan Rondic, who is in constant communication with journalists in Gaza and posts information from the Palestinian conflict on his personal account as well.

He and his colleagues break up words such as ‘Gaza’ into syllables in order to fool the algorithms.

“Although I’m totally averse to conspiracy theories, I’ve become convinced by examples that censorship of information about the war in Gaza on social media existed, particularly in the initial weeks, and still exists,” Rondic said.

“Not only was the visibility of [journalists’] posts reduced, but the media content disappeared. Their posts didn’t even contain value judgments. They only contained information,” he added.

Detektor contacted Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to ask for a comment, but no response was received by the time this article was published.

Deborah Brown, the author of a piece of research for Human Rights Watch entitled ‘Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook’, confirmed that the recent wave of censorship began, mostly on Facebook and Instagram, right after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

“We found that this censorship was systemic and global, because we documented cases from every region of the world, over 60 countries, and the evidence showed, pointing to this type of censorship or restriction, that it wasn’t erroneous or one-case specific, but that patterns emerged,” Brown explained.

Jalal Abu Khater of the 7amleh organisation from Haifa in Israel, which deals with digital rights, told Detektor that the issue was not just the suppression of information about the suffering of civilians, but that there has also been a noticeable problem with the spread of hate speech.

“It is especially evident in the context of it being used to justify collective punishment of and violence against Palestinians. In a time when there is the potential for genocide taking place in Gaza, we’re worried that those [social media] platforms are not upholding their responsibility,” said Abu Khater.

According to the Human Rights Watch research, Meta flagged activism for the ceasefire in Gaza as spam on Facebook and Instagram, Brown said.

“A lot of this content was taken down, not because it was seen as incitement to violence or praising a terrorist group, but under Meta’s spam policy,” she explained.

“The fact is that people posting a hashtag or posting activism on their platforms at a critical global moment triggers the spam filter, and they haven’t figured the way around that,” she added, arguing that this type of censorship made people feel they were screaming into a void.

Fedja Kulenovic, an information specialist and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy at Sarajevo University, argues that social media platforms’ rules are not entirely clear when it comes to censorship of posts about the war in Gaza.

“Sometimes the rules are clear in terms of what the community or the platform that laid down the respective rules has introduced, but on some occasions we have no clue,” said Kulenovic.

“There’s a series of cases in which Meta in particular has had a preference for one side or the other, in the context of American politics, in the context of everything that’s been going on – obviously in order to reduce the reach [of the posts]. However, it takes tough and exhaustive research to get evidence that it’s really happening,” he added.

According to Kulenovic, people often face the issue of having to convince a social media platform that removing their content was a mistake, but most people have no time for such battles.

He recalled that social media companies made an exception when it came to sensitive content and the war in Ukraine, so there’s a question why such an exception hasn’t also been made in the case of Gaza, and why the public’s interest what is happening there is not being taken into account.

“Facebook didn’t think it would become so big and that it would have to take into account having responsibility for the public interest,” he said.

“OK, none of us are going to promote terrorism, but then we get into a situation that we’re watching videos of innocent victims being removed or the media being punished after their post about events in Gaza because they mentioned the name of an organisation that’s on the American list of terrorist organisations,” he added.

Rondic from Al Jazeera Balkans, who reported on the Hamas attack on October 7, said that events should be presented as they are, not concealed.

Abu Khater warned that the situation with Gaza could become a precedent for social media companies.

“This issue is in the interest of all organisations globally to address, because the digital rights violating happening here in Gaza could soon happen anywhere else in the world,” Abu Khater said.