When Israel issued an evacuation order from north Gaza on October 13, Shouq Al-Najjar left her house and headed south, to the city of Khan Younis, where she’s now sharing a home with 150 relatives and friends. Every day is a struggle for the basics. “Now bakeries are stretched to the limit. They cannot meet the demand for bread,” she said in a video message over WhatsApp. “Hospitals could stop working at any hour now, as there is no electricity and no fuel to power generators.”
A ground invasion of Gaza is thought to be imminent. Al-Najjar, a coordinator at Ma’an Development Centre, a nonprofit that works with other local community organizations on Gaza’s humanitarian and economic development, says there are no more shelters to go to. Local health and aid workers are warning of an impending humanitarian crisis. Services are collapsing The last remaining power station ran out of fuel on October 11, just three days after a near-total blockade began. On October 17, the Health Ministry in Gaza asked people to bring their remaining personal stashes of fuel to pump generators at hospitals and keep them running. Fresh drinking water has run out, according to the UN Refugee Agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, leaving people to drink dirty well water.
With the situation on the ground constantly in flux, social media is a lifeline. People stay informed via a patchwork of videos, text posts, and voice notes, along with official statements from government agencies. But getting information within Gaza, and getting information out of Gaza, has become increasingly difficult. Internet and electricity services have been disrupted by attacks. Last Friday, Israel vowed to cut Gaza’s access to the internet. Since then, services have been intermittent. Exacerbating this, Palestinians and their supporters allege that social media platforms—particularly Instagram, which is a critical communications tool in Gaza—are “shadow-banning” their content—algorithmically deprioritizing it so it’s harder to find, or actively over-moderating it. Instagram’s owner, Meta, denies this is happening, calling the issues “a glitch,” but this alleged phenomenon has been documented for years. These information blackouts could deepen the suffering of those fleeing the fighting, or in the firing line.
“It makes it even hard to get in touch with loved ones, to get critical information about where to find medicine, food, safe passage, which are all critically limited,” says Deborah Brown, a senior researcher and advocate on digital rights at campaign group Human Rights Watch. “It also seriously hinders the ability of journalists and human rights monitors to document mounting abuses.”
On social media, shadow-banning is hard to prove. But users across the world say any posts containing Palestinian content, or mentions of Gaza, get atypically low views and engagement. In some cases, Instagram users weren’t allowed to comment on other posts, with a pop-up message that read, “We restrict certain activity to protect our community. Based on your use, this action will be unavailable for you until [date]. Tell us if you think we made a mistake.”
Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.
On Sunday, Molly Crabapple, an artist and author based in New York, shared a post from the news television show, Democracy Now!, covering Israel’s distribution of weapons to settlers in the West Bank. Within a day she received a notice that read, “Your account can’t be shown to non-followers.” The notice said her account wouldn’t appear in explore, search, suggested user, reels, or feed recommendations. “It’s a dangerous attempt to stifle information,” Crabapple says.
Some users have begun posting tips and tricks on how to circumvent moderation: add stickers, polls, use symbols instead of letters (p@le$tine, for example), and even hashtags that read #IStandWithIsrael.
On October 19, Instagram apologized for inserting the word “terrorist” into automatically translated bios of Palestinian users. Meta was previously accused of shadow-banning Palestinian voices in 2021, during violent clashes between police and Palestinian protesters. An independent report later found that the platform had over-moderated content in Arabic, and under-moderated content in Hebrew.
Mona Shtaya, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy specializing in digital rights, who is based in the West Bank, says that while this phenomenon isn’t new, it becomes a particularly acute issue during moments of increased tension. “This ‘technical glitch’ is only happening when there are escalations in Palestine,” she says. “There is a huge censorship of Palestinian content.”
With access to information patchy and unreliable, misinformation spreads and people are liable to moments of panic, Shtaya says. A few days ago, rumors spread of an impending total blackout, leaving many fearing they’d be unable to reach family abroad, or to make appeals for help, making an already exhausting, intensely stressful situation even worse.
While the blackouts and alleged blocking of accounts hampers humanitarian work in Gaza, they are also preventing Gazans from showing the world what’s happening on the ground. The death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 4,200 people, with over 1 million people displaced, according to the UN Office of High Commissioner. The NGOs Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International allege that Israel has deployed white phosphorus, whose use is forbidden in heavily populated areas under international humanitarian law. But with the information flow disrupted, it’s hard for people outside of Gaza to document potential war crimes and human rights violations.
Laura Albast, senior editor of digital strategy at the Institute for Palestine Studies, said collecting firsthand accounts and documenting live updates is essential to their work. “Social media makes this possible for me,” she says. “Unfortunately, because a lot of researchers, journalists, and families are relying on social media to document and check in, we have put our faith in the hands of big tech conglomerates.”
Ahmed Al-Sammak, a freelance journalist who left Gaza a few months ago to pursue a master’s degree in Dublin, Ireland, says it’s becoming incredibly difficult to get news from remote areas of Gaza, which aren’t being covered by the media. He has to rely on Instagram and WhatsApp to find out what’s happening. “The regular citizen is my main source of information now,” Al-Sammak says. “My parents don’t have internet, so if there’s a strong air strike near them, I won’t know from news agencies.”
With the electricity down for well over a week, his parents have to go outside and find any makeshift energy source—a truck, car, or outlets powered by solar panels. Yesterday, Al-Sammak tried reaching his parents but couldn’t for over two hours. “Can you imagine calling your parents and you can’t reach them?” he says.
As Gaza starts to go dark, people have been posting farewells to Instagram, writing their own obituaries so that people have something to remember them by. They mention hunger, thirst, and being unsure of when they will next be able to speak to the outside world. “I feel lucky to make it to another day,” said Bayan Abusultan, an independent journalist in Gaza, in one of her many videos describing developments and showing scenes of the aftermath of strikes from her account BayanPalestine. “We spend our days terrified of the nights, and we spend the night wondering if we’re going to survive to see another sunrise.”
