Echoicide: Who decides which truths survive in Gaza?

As bombs fell on Gaza in October 2023, Palestinian journalists turned to social media to show the world what was happening to their people. Israel’s siege on Gaza had been intensified, with food and water banned at one point, and the ban on the entry of foreign journalists was likely intended to create a media blackout during the genocidal war on the enclave.

While Palestinian media workers and citizen journalists in Gaza documented the genocide, there were other challenges in sharing evidence of war crimes with the outside world.

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Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented cases where Instagram removed images and videos showing Palestinian civilians killed or injured in Israeli attacks, claiming they broke Meta’s “violence and incitement” rules.

It highlights a trend of apparent social media subterfuge, which I describe as Echoicide, where a message might not be erased, but the medium through which it travels is weakened to the point that the voice loses its echo.

A social media platform can remove a post or suspend an account, but equally damaging, it can also reduce recommendations, making it harder to find content on Gaza or push users to change their language and posts about the war due to fear of penalties.

Ultimately, a message may remain online, but its audience shrinks, weakening its place in the public record and collective memory.

Palestinian journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, with more than 1.1 million followers on Instagram, has been a key medium for sharing firsthand information and accounts from the people of Gaza with the world.

These included videos of Israeli soldiers committing alleged war crimes, videos of US Senators appearing unmoved by the genocide in Gaza, and videos of Palestinians living under fire.

But soon after these videos or images have been posted, he has found them “disappear” or their reach severely limited for unexplained reasons.

“Some of my posts, particularly the ones in which Israeli soldiers were incriminating themselves, have been used by South Africa in its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ),” Shihab-Eldin told Al Jazeera.

“People were flocking to my profile in the tens of thousands. And because of that, Meta made my page disappear several times and then started severely shadow-banning accounts like mine that were central to the documentation process.”

Ahmed Shihab‑Eldin attends the opening night during the Doha Film Festival, November 20, 2025, in Doha, Qatar [John Phillips/Doha Film Festival via Getty]

Smartphones, livestreams, satellite imagery and social media platforms have made it possible for people across the world to witness wars, including the genocide in Gaza, screened in real time. But it still raises important questions: If information has never been more accessible, why are some wars highly visible while others remain hidden? What happens when a voice loses its “echo”?

Leila Warah, a journalist based in the occupied West Bank, has seen her Instagram account suspended and reactivated several times during the war. But the problem of reach goes beyond algorithms and shadow banning to self-censorship and human impulses, she said.

“The bigger issue goes beyond algorithms and shadow-banning. A viewer can watch footage from Gaza, feel affected by it and then close the app and go back to their life,” Warah said.

“Palestinians living through what appears on those screens do not have that option. Even when the content reaches people, the more important question is: What happens after you press share?”

Digital censorship can be harder to recognise because content does not necessarily disappear, Jillian York, a London-based writer, activist and teacher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

Unlike traditional forms of suppression, which can be explicit, algorithmic censorship can leave testimonies online but reduce their reach and discoverability, making it harder to detect and flag.

“Algorithmic censorship doesn’t need to erase testimony. It can leave it online while gradually stripping it of reach, discoverability and an audience,” York told Al Jazeera.

This is an issue that preceded Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and is not limited to this context, but the effects of Echoicide are not new to Palestinians.

Smartphone screen displaying the logos of social media platforms [File: AFP]

In 2021, Meta’s Oversight Board, which monitors and reviews content moderation decisions on Meta platforms, recommended an independent review of whether Facebook had applied its moderation policies fairly to Arabic and Hebrew content.

Meta responded by commissioning the Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, to conduct a review of the process, including via automated systems.

BSR found no evidence that Meta employees had intentionally tried to benefit or harm one particular community, but it did acknowledge unintended consequences for Palestinian and Arab users, including concerns about their freedom of expression.

But Echoicide does not require a person sitting in an office deciding which voice should be silenced and which should remain. There are many actors and entities shaping what users eventually see.

An engineer can change how a feed ranks posts, while a policy team can change what moderators are told to restrict. A product team can decide what the platform recommends to users. None of these decisions might appear to be a form of direct censorship on its own, but together they can decide which stories travel and which fall short of reaching an audience.

In response to questions from Al Jazeera, Meta referred to a statement it issued in 2023 rejecting Human Rights Watch’s allegation of systemic censorship but said it acknowledged that errors have been made and that changes were implemented to fix these issues.

“But the implication that we deliberately and systemically suppress a particular voice is false,” a Meta spokesperson said. “Claiming that 1,000 examples, out of the enormous amount of content posted about the conflict, are proof of ‘systemic censorship’ may make for a good headline, but that doesn’t make the claim any less misleading.”

Meta also insisted moderation is based on violations of its policies rather than users’ political views and that its policies are designed to give everyone a voice while keeping its platforms safe. Meta did not directly address Al Jazeera’s questions about whether the accounts or content of Warah and Shihab-Eldin had been downranked or otherwise had their reach restricted.

In the wider scope of online censorship, we see elements of Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil”, which was used to describe the horrific acts of common people during the Nazi Holocaust against Jews and other minorities in Europe.

The concept refers not just to the unintended consequences produced by large organisations, but also to ordinary actions within systems that produce morally harmful and objectionable outcomes. This can be applied to more familiar and mundane acts we see today than the ruthless and calculated system of the Nazi death camps.

Computer engineers optimising a ranking model, a policy specialist rewriting a moderation rule and a reviewer applying guidelines may not intend to silence anyone, yet their decisions can collectively contribute to systems that determine which stories travel and which do not.

Marwa Fatafta, MENA policy and advocacy director at digital rights organisation Access Now, said the silencing of Palestinian voices cannot be put down to a series of isolated moderation glitches, but appears more “systematic, structural, and widespread” than this.

“Proving systemic harm doesn’t require finding a Meta executive who deliberately pressed a button to remove Palestinian content,” Fatafta told Al Jazeera. “In fact, Meta’s own human rights review after the Sheikh Jarrah protests confirmed arbitrary censorship, attributing it to structural policy flaws rather than explicit intent. But negligence is a choice, and so is how policies are designed, timed, and enforced.”

Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have each examined, in their own ways, how power shapes representation, credibility and whose suffering acquires political meaning. Social platforms now exercise aspects of that power at enormous scales, helping determine what becomes visible, trusted and remembered.

Rebecca L Stein, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University who studies visual politics and digital media in Israel-Palestine, argues that reframing of victimhood can invert perceptions of vulnerability.

This has shifted some global attention away from Palestinian suffering to the perceived injury these images and videos have caused Israel. Claims of anti-Semitism against the Israeli directors of the documentary film NAZA, which documents the systematic killing of Palestinians in Gaza, are one recent example of this.

“The violence of the Israeli state was replaced by the ostensible violence of the Palestinian image. In the process, Israel was refigured as the war’s foremost victim,” she said.

Rescuers excavate rubble to retrieve bodies from a collapsed building in the Tal al-Hawa area of Gaza City on September 16, 2026 [AFP]

Visibility alone does not explain why suffering in other contexts produces different political reactions. This is where I use a second concept: the Tyranny of Precarity. This explains the process by which powerful actors are able to monopolise the political language of vulnerability, while the chronic insecurity of less powerful communities loses its ability to command the same concern.

Saree Makdisi, coauthor with Ussama Makdisi of the forthcoming book Anti-Palestinianism, told Al Jazeera that the problem is not simply that Palestinian suffering is unseen, but that it is repeatedly subordinated through a “complex of narratives, distortions, carefully cultivated blind spots and forms of denial”.

Powerful actors who possess far greater military or political power than their opponents can ironically invoke fear, insecurity and historical trauma to make their violence against this disenfranchised group appear defensive. Meanwhile, repeated suffering among less powerful communities can become so familiar that it is treated as a background story rather than the crisis itself.

If Echoicide is about whose testimony retains an echo, the Tyranny of Precarity concerns whose vulnerability retains political meaning. Together, they can weaken the ability of a community to be meaningfully heard.

Gaza has brought these questions into sharper focus. Journalists, researchers and human rights groups have documented concerns over how Palestinian content travels online, while restrictions on access to Gaza have made Palestinian journalists and civilians even more central to telling their own stories.

Alana Hadid, a Los Angeles-based activist and creative director, told Al Jazeera that she has seen a drastic decline in views when posting about Palestine.

She says she has witnessed this decline on her Instagram Insights, where her evergreen and fashion content receives substantially higher view counts than her Palestine-related posts.

“We are not fighting simply to be heard. We are fighting for the right to tell our own story,” she told Al Jazeera. “We are not asking for permission to exist. We are insisting that we will not be erased.”