The Palestinian journalist has spent years documenting life in Gaza under Israeli occupation and, recently, amid Israel’s genocide. Her series with Al Jazeera’s AJ+ has won numerous awards, including a Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and even an Emmy. At the same time, pro-Israel voices have sought to silence Owda, including in a campaign in 2024 to pressure her Emmy nomination to be withdrawn.
In her Instagram video, Owda said that the ban was “expected” due to pressure from high-powered figures to censor Palestinian voices from TikTok.
She overlaid a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he named TikTok as a “number one” priority of Israel.
She also shared a video with the company’s U.S. CEO, Adam Presser, saying that the company made a change to designate critically labelling someone as a “Zionist” as hate speech. “Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity,” Presser bragged at a conference last year.
I am curious how many have heard of UpScrolled which is pitched as a Palestinian alternative to Tiktok (although it isn’t much like tiktok)?
It only has 2.5m users, although I guess that’s twice what Lemmy has. It’s also less than a year old.
Everyone on tiktok deserves that’s coming to them.
They should be smarter and use Mastodon!
They should be smarter and use Mastodon!
“Smart” depends on the purpose. If you want miniblogging without corporate control, sure.
If you wanna reach many people, Mastodon isn’t smarter than any of the large platforms with way more people. It sucks, but Twitter and TikTok and Instagram all have a wider audience.
There is Upscrolled which is owned by someone who is Palestinian. But that seems more like what imagine Instagram is like and doesn’t have many users yet.
Isn’t mastodon the better Twitter? And loops thee tik tok equivalent?
…including a firm headed by the notoriously pro-Israel Larry Ellison.
Finally. Someone finally calls out Larry Ellison by name.
FYI: He also owns Oracle and Paramount/Skydance (CBS). His reach into our data and the information we consume runs very deep.
Was reminded of this article if you’ve got some time to read
It is reasons like this we are being distracted by a moral panic about social media being bad for our health.
We need to forbid American social media at national or EU level
The account did appear to be banned on Wednesday and Thursday. However, late Thursday afternoon Eastern Time, Owda’s account appeared to be restored, but restricted. Some content seemed to not be available, and a banner appeared at the top of her feed that read: “Posts that some may find uncomfortable are unavailable.”
The account is back evidently.
