On Friday, April 15th the Bella Hadid took to her account addressing that the visual social media outlet shadowbanned her pro-Palestinian content which she posted hours after the Israeli raid and assault on the worshipper in Al-Aqsa mosque
“My Instagram has disabled me from posting on my story – pretty much only when it is Palestine based I’m going to assume,” Hadid wrote on her Instagram Story on Friday.
She added saying that whenever she posts about Palestine her visibility gets immediately affected saying, “almost 1 million less of you see my stories and posts.” As she addressed her followers in a story posted on her Instagram story.
In a later post, Hadid posted a screenshot of what appeared to be an attempt to re-post a video of an Israeli officer assaulting an elderly Palestinian man, which she captioned, “Won’t let me repost…for 2 hours now,” with a crying emoji.
The supermodel has been a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights and was targeted by Israel’s official social media account last year after attending a rally in New York.
Gigi Hadid declared last month that she will donate all of her earnings from the Autumn 2022 shows to people in Ukraine and Palestine. Vogue Magazine was chastised for leaving Palestine out of a post celebrating the promise.
Hadid’s raised concern doesn’t come as an isolated incident as other activists faced the same notably during the May 2021 events in sheik jarrah where the company took to Twitter and admitted the removal of posts under pretexts of having technical issues of which ‘ was a “technical issue not related to any particular topic”
The censorship of Palestinian content isn’t restricted to Instagram, it is present also on other social media accounts, namely the META-owned ones.
Facebook blocked Alqastal News Arabic, a local news page, which has covered the events in the Al-Aqsa mosque during the current situation.
Omar Suleiman’s account has been disabled on Friday, Omar Suleiman, a well-known American-Muslim preacher, reported that his account had been banned.
He said “My Instagram account was down when I woke up this morning. Because he posted a video of Al Aqsa being attacked, he was clearly shadowbanned. There was nothing provocative in what I said. Unthinkable,” He sent out a tweet asking why accountability for these firms isn’t present?
The company’s stance comes out flagrantly hypocritical in comparison to the statement Facebook sent out on March 10th allowing hate speech towards Russia and proposing a no censorship policy in ‘support’ of Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion
That same duality is present in North Africa when protesters used social media to spark the Arab Spring, a democratic movement, only for the Islamic State terrorist group to use those same platforms to advance a caliphate in the region years later.
This leads to making social media outlets become propaganda machines for the west.
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