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pro-Israel voices have sought to silence Owda, including in a campaign in 2024 to pressure her Emmy nomination to be withdrawn.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.
I mean, there’s RedNote, which has a much larger audience and absolutely is controlled by the Chinese government.
The problem with these smaller services is that there’s very little content, relatively speaking. Outsiders want to know about the genocide but they don’t want it to be their exclusive fixation.