Technology

Anyone who uses Arabic-language social media has encountered this. They used to ban you for just making reference to "Al Aqsa" (Arabic name for Dome of the Rock) because their algorithm deemed it terror-related. They banned the word "shaheed" (martyr) too even though in Arabic it's commonly used to refer to loved ones who died an untimely death, even in accidents. It's also a name, which is hilarious because a member of their oversight board said in an interview that after they banned the word one of her coworkers named Shaheed had to explained that this was nonsense. Researchers did an experiment where they ran pages that used uncontroverdial Arabic keywords that would get censored, then do the same for Hebrew (including #death_to_arabs) which were left up and even gained traction.

You can blame Meta to some degree, but the chief issue are US federal institutions that use notices and scare stories aimed at making risk-averse firms shut down anything deemed anti-American (which essentially means anti-Israel.) Just recently they've been sending FBI agents to knock on journalists' doors if they publish the leaked Vance dossier and give them a "friendly reminder" that it may have been leaked by Iran. Even when the journalists mentioned it in their reports on the dossier.