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Pro-Palestinian creators use secret spellings, code words to evade social media algorithms
(www.washingtonpost.com)
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When Rathbone deBuys, 37, posts TikTok videos critiquing Israel in its conflict with Hamas, he turns to common strategies to avoid being detected and deleted by the social media giant.
Since the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas escalated into war this month, Palestinian-focused creators have increasingly been using “algospeak” — a collection of phrases, special spellings and code words — to prevent their posts from being removed or suppressed by social media companies.
Some users are bleeping or adding sounds to disguise their voice-overs, while others are shifting the spellings of common English and Arabic words like “Palestine,” “genocide” and “Hamas” to evade detection.
An outside audit commissioned by Meta on the recommendation of its independent Oversight Board found that the #AlAqsa hashtag was mistakenly added to a list of terms associated with terrorism by a third-party contractor that does content moderation for the company.
When Instagram user Womena promoted an interview Wednesday with the journalist Mariam Barghouti, who critiqued the way international news outlets covered the Israel-Hamas war, they used the shorthands “Ples+in1ans” and “trr0rist+s” in place of “Palestinians” and “terrorists.”
Just a few days ago, deBuys said TikTok removed the sound from a satirical video he posted in which he impersonated members of the Israel Defense Forces carrying out orders to attack Gaza.
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