17 Jan 2025 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, Statements
The Palestinian lawyer and human rights defender Diala Ayesh has been released, after spending almost a year in Israel’s Damon Prison.
She was initially arrested on 17 January 2024 by Israeli military forces as she passed through a military checkpoint in the West Bank.
On 25 January 2024, she was issued a four-month administrative detention order by the Israeli military’s Central Command for the occupied West Bank. Reports indicate that this order was imposed without charge or trial, and Ayesh was not brought before a court. The detention order was subsequently renewed several times until her release. According to her lawyers, she endured assault, threats and verbal abuse by Israeli soldiers during her arrest.
Shortly after her release, Diala Ayesh commented on the worsening conditions within Israeli prisons since the siege on Gaza began. The following quote has been translated into English from Arabic from an interview released by Quds News Network:
“The conditions for female detainees are much, much worse in comparison to before the war. This is the testimony of people in prison before and during the war. There are constant human rights violations.”
Since 2018, Ayesh has monitored the suppression, arrest and persecution of Palestinians exercising their human rights. She has represented many who have been targeted and has provided legal support to women journalists persecuted by Palestinian security agencies. Following Hamas’s 7 October attacks and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, Ayesh continued her work providing legal advice and visiting Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
In November 2024, Ayesh won Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Award for Campaigning. She was awarded for her bravery and fortitude, fighting opposition on every side. The Campaigning category honours activists and campaigners who have had a marked impact in fighting censorship and promoting freedom of expression.
Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship, said:
“We’re pleased to hear that Ayesh is out of prison and can hopefully get back to her crucial work. It is worth repeating – she should never have been arrested to begin with and we hope that this marks the end of her harassment. We also hope that it signals a change in how both Israeli and Palestinian authorities treat human rights defenders.”
For more information or press enquiries, please contact: [email protected]
Index on Censorship is a non-profit organisation that campaigns for and defends free expression worldwide, including by publishing work by censored writers and artists and monitoring threats to free speech. We lead global advocacy campaigns to protect artistic, academic, media and digital freedom to strengthen the participatory foundations of modern democratic societies. www.indexoncensorship.org
17 Jan 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
What do you do when your culture has been destroyed? When your studios, galleries, and universities all lie in rubble? How do you plan to rebuild when war continues? And how do you find hope amidst utter devastation?
These were some of the questions asked during Archiving Gaza in the Present, a two-day conference held at SOAS University by the Arab British Centre and the Centre for Palestinian Studies in December. The conference brought together artists, writers, journalists, architects and more to discuss the desperate situation facing those in Gaza today.
A ceasefire deal has now been agreed in principle between Israel and Hamas, which is due to come into effect this Sunday. The Israeli Cabinet still needs to vote on the deal, and if it passes, this could see an end to the current conflict.
But since the siege on Gaza began 15 months ago, more than 45,000 people have been killed and roughly 1.9 million people displaced. The impact of the war on Gaza’s institutions is also devastating. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, more than 93% of Gaza’s schools and all of their universities have been destroyed or significantly damaged. What’s more, 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed.
It was amidst these horrifying figures that conversations unfolded, as artists, architects and cultural leaders from Gaza gathered to reflect on what has been lost and to consider the path forward.
A conversation between artists Hazem Harb and Malak Mattar put things into perspective. Harb, an artist from Gaza now based in Dubai, spoke about the destruction of Gaza’s Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) building where he first learnt art as a teenager. It was in that space that he also met some of the artists who he continues to work with today. Since then, the YMCA has been destroyed along with their art studios.
Malak Mattar, a painter and illustrator representing a younger generation of Gazan artists, is now based in the UK. Witnessing the war from abroad, including the destruction of her family home, has profoundly influenced her artistic practice. Once characterised by vibrant colours, her work now relies solely on black and white.
During the session, she discussed her piece No Words, inspired by real events in Gaza that she observed online. At its centre, a young boy sits on a horse-drawn cart with all his belongings strapped on to it. To his left, limbs protrude from the wreckage of destroyed buildings, birds pick at decaying flesh, and a mother clutches her baby in fear. To his right, a soldier takes aim with his rifle while men are lined up as prisoners. The painting evokes echoes of Iraqi artist Dia Al-Azzawi’s Sabra and Shatila Massacre mural, created in response to the massacre of civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon in September 1982.
“This is not only my painting, it belongs to the people of Gaza, and I hope it really disturbs you, I hope it haunts you forever…” Mattar said in an interview with The Markaz Review.
Even before October 2023, Gaza was a challenging place to be an artist. Israel’s blockade on Gaza since 2006 has had a profound impact on all aspects of life including the economy, freedom of movement, and the arts. The blockade limited access to art materials and supplies and severely restricted travel, preventing many Gazan artists from engaging with the wider world. What’s more, artists faced censorship and self-censorship under the control of Hamas, including restrictions on free expression. Gaza’s Hamas-run Culture Ministry cracked down on work that did not conform to its edicts and all artists and performers were forced to get permits from the Hamas authorities in order to put on cultural events.
But as bad as things might have once been, they are certainly worse now.
Yet all is not lost. During the conference, cultural practitioners shared how they are already working to rebuild what has been destroyed.
One such example is artist Salman Nawati and the NAWAF collective, who have created the Sahab Museum project, an imaginative virtual museum. Their latest initiative, BARRA (Off-site), is a virtual reality experience where participants can explore, collect, and reflect on artworks that have been lost or damaged and symbolically return them to the Sahab Museum. The project aims to create “a space to rethink and imagine—a space for our dreams to take shape despite the weight of Gaza’s violent everyday life”.
Others, such as RIWAQ director Shatha Safi, are already planning the rebuilding of Gaza. RIWAQ is an organisation that works on preserving and restoring archeological sites across the West Bank and Gaza. Before October 2023, they had successfully restored a number of historic buildings in Gaza, transforming them into vibrant community spaces. Now, those same buildings are either partially or completely destroyed. However, they don’t plan to give up. Today, they are documenting information about the level of destruction on Gaza’s old city. With an end to the war now hopefully in sight, they plan to work with the local community in the future to rebuild once again.
It is hard to reflect on the conference without feeling despair and hopelessness. Yet, for people in Gaza, hopelessness is not an option. And with a ceasefire now on the horizon, there is a glimmer of hope for the opportunity to begin cultural reconstruction. As one speaker reminded us at the end of the day, the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said famously said, “where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission”.
10 Jan 2025 | News and features, United States
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week of changes to Meta’s content moderation policies appeared to primarily be about building trust. Trust among users. Trust among investors. And trust among the incoming Trump administration. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement.
While we applaud anything that is generally trying to embolden free expression, will these moves actually do that? We break it down –
Fact-checking
In the USA, Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact checkers on its platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Threads) and replacing them with X-style “community notes”, where commenting on the accuracy or veracity of posts is left to users. But fact checks by dedicated fact-checking organisations do not work against free expression. As a rule they do not remove, override or stifle existing content. Instead they challenge it and contextualise it. As tech expert Mike Masnick wrote after the announcement: “Fact-checking is the epitome of “more speech”— exactly what the marketplace of ideas demands. By caving to those who want to silence fact-checkers, Meta is revealing how hollow its free speech rhetoric really is.”
On the flipside, as Masnick also points out, professional fact checkers are not always effective. The “people who wanted to believe false things weren’t being convinced by a fact check (and, indeed, started to falsely claim that fact checkers themselves were ‘biased’),” he writes. The notion of “bias” was referenced by Zuckerberg himself, who accused fact-checkers of this.
No fact-checker should be biased, although this is difficult to control. Many fact-checkers have taken issue with Zuckerberg’s assertion that they could be biased. Full Fact, who are part of Meta’s fact-checking programme, said that they “absolutely refute Meta’s charge of bias – we are strictly impartial, fact check claims from all political stripes with equal rigour, and hold those in power to account through our commitment to truth.”
While the set-up that existed until now has been imperfect, are proposed community notes any better? This is complicated. and there is little evidence to suggest they work to the extent that Zuckerberg claims. Community notes tend to be effective for issues on which there is consensus, because there must be agreement before a note can be added to a post. This means that misleading posts on politically divisive subjects often go unchecked, while some accurate posts can be flagged as untrue if enough people determine it that way. According to MediaWise, a media literacy programme at the Poynter Institute, only about 4% of drafted community notes about abortion and 6% of those on immigration were made public on X.
There is also a big difference between those who are paid (and qualified) to fact-check versus non-professionals and this can be evident in the very logistics. According to X, “in the first few days of the Israel-Hamas conflict, notes appeared at a median time of just five hours after posts were created.” In the online world, where a post can go viral within minutes, hours is a long time, arguably too long.
Content moderation
In addition to getting rid of dedicated fact-checkers, Meta is dialling back its content moderation teams and reducing reliance on filters. The move away from automated content moderation processes is to be welcomed. Due to the complexity of speech and online content sharing – with languages and communities evolving slang, colloquialisms and specific terminology – and the ambiguity over imagery, automated processes do not retain the contextual details or complexity necessary to make consistent and informed decisions.
Mis- and disinformation are problematic standards for content removal too. For instance, satire is commonly presented as fact when obviously false and this a central tenet of protected speech across the globe. Simply removing all posts that are deemed to contain misinformation is not and has not worked.
What is more, censoring misinformation does not address the root cause; removing fake news only temporarily silences those that spread it. It doesn’t demonstrate why the information they are spreading is inaccurate. It may even end up giving conspiracy theorists more reason to believe in their theories by feeling that they are being denied access to information. It can end up undermining trust.
Content moderation isn’t just about removing perceived or real misinformation. It is also about removing posts that propagate hate and/or incite violence. Like with misinformation these have to date been imperfectly applied – sweeping up legal speech and missing illegal speech. Algorithms are ultimately imperfect. They miss nuance and this has had a negative impact on speech across Meta platforms.
It is right for Meta to review these policies as they have too often, to date, failed the free speech test.
Still, in scaling filters back – rather than addressing how to improve them – it does run the risk of allowing a lot more bad content in. Zuckerberg, by his own admission, says that the newly introduced measures are “a “trade-off”. “It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
The flipside of catching “less bad stuff” can be, ironically, less free speech. Harassment can drive people to silence themselves or leave online spaces entirely. This form of censorship (self-censorship) is insidious and cannot be easily measured. Unchecked it can also lead to some of the gravest attacks onto human rights. In 2022 Amnesty issued a report looking into Meta’s role in the Rohingya genocide. It detailed “how Meta knew or should have known that Facebook’s algorithmic systems were supercharging the spread of harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar, but the company still failed to act”.
Following Zuckerberg’s announcement, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, from Meta’s oversight board, said: “We are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm.” She raised concerns about the potential impact on the LGBTQ+ community as just one community.
Another damning response came from Maria Ressa, Rappler CEO and Nobel Peace Prize winner:
“Journalists have a set of standards and ethics. What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform.”
Finally, Zuckerberg said the remaining content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas where, he said, “there is less concern about the bias of our teams”. As pointed out by many, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there is no evidence that Texas is less biased than California. Due to the political leadership of Texas and the positioning of this state and the perception that it is more closely allied with the incoming administration, there are real concerns that this is replacing one set of perceived biases with another. Instead, a free-speech first approach would be to address what biases exist and how current teams can overcome them, irrespective of geographical location. Establishing a process based on international human rights and free expression standards would be a step in the right direction.
Hateful conduct policy
In Zuckerberg’s announcement he stated “we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”
Simplifying the policies can increase their efficacy, with users clearer as to the standards employed on the platforms. However, suggesting that policies must move with “mainstream discourse” is a challenging threshold to maintain and could embed uncertainty into how Meta responds to the ever-changing and complex speech environment. Identifying topics such as immigration and gender threatens to define such thresholds by the contentious topics of the day and not objective standards or principles for free expression.
It could also open the floodgates to a lot of genuine hate speech and incitement, which will be incredibly damaging for many individuals and communities – in general and in terms of free speech.
Foreign interference
In Zuckerberg’s speech he took issue with foreign interference. Platforms and governments have often collided over their interpretations of what is acceptable content and who has the power to decide. Ideally we’d have standardised community guidelines and rules of moderation in line with international human rights law. In practise this is not the case. Except instead of highlighting countries where the human rights record is woeful and content removal requests have been clearly politically motivated, Zuckerberg cited Latin America and Europe here. Article19 said they were “puzzled by Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that Europe has enacted an ‘ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship’” and that it showed “misunderstanding”.
Parking a discussion of EU laws, it was certainly disappointing for the reasons stated above. As reported by the Carnegie Center in 2024: “In illiberal and/or autocratic contexts, from Türkiye to Vietnam, governments have exploited the international debate over platform regulation to coerce tech companies to censor—rather than moderate—content.” That is where we need to be having a conversation.
Countries such as India have demonstrated processes by which political pressure can be exerted over content moderation decisions undertaken by social media platforms. According to the Washington Post, the Indian government has expanded its pressure on X: “Where officials had once asked for a handful of tweets to be removed at each meeting, they now insisted that entire accounts be taken down, and numbers were running in the hundreds. Executives who refused the government’s demands could now be jailed, their companies expelled from the Indian market.” Further in the piece, it states: “Records published by the Indian Parliament show that annual takedown requests for posts and accounts increased from 471 to 6,775 between 2014 and 2022, with those to Twitter soaring from 224 in 2018 to 3,417 in 2022.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement was silent on how Meta would respond to or resist such explicit state censorship in countries with weak and eroding democratic norms and standards.
Final thoughts
For now Meta says it has “no immediate plans” to get rid of its third-party fact checkers in the UK or the EU, nor could it necessarily do so because of the legal landscape. Some countries also have outright bans on Meta’s platforms, like China. So this is a story that will play out primarily in the USA.
Still, it is part of a broader pattern of Silicon Valley executives misusing the label “free speech” and the timing of it suggests the motivation is for political gain. Even incoming president Donald Trump acknowledged that this week. The shift towards kowtowing to one party and one person, which we have seen occur on other platforms, is incredibly worrying. As Emily Maitlis said on the News Agents this week when evaluating the announcement: “There is a king on the top here and there are courtiers and they recognise that their position is in terms of how they respond to the king now”.
Whether the platforms are used for sharing pictures of your family or galvanising support for a campaign, we know the powerful and central role social media plays in our lives. Furthermore, according to a 2022 OECD report, around four out of 10 respondents said they did not trust the news media, and more and more people were turning to social media for their news, especially young people. As a result it’s essential that social media lands in a helpful place. Content moderation policies at scale are incredibly difficult and cumbersome. They are impossible to do perfectly and easy to do badly. Still, we have little faith that these changes will be helpful and concerns that they could be hurtful.
We will continue to monitor the situation closely. In the meantime, please do support organisations like Index who are genuinely dedicated to the fight against censorship and the fight for free expression.
6 Jan 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, France
This week, 7 January 2025 marks exactly ten years since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, when Islamist gunmen stormed the satirical magazine’s Paris editorial office and killed 11 people over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. A month after the attack, the Turkish writer Elif Shafak wrote for us on the increasingly divisive world in which we live, and the urgent need to differentiate between the right to be offended and the right to commit violence. Ten years on, with the proliferation of fractious rhetoric on social media, her words seem more poignant than ever. To mark the anniversary of the tragedy, we have republished Shafak’s piece below. It was originally published online on 12 March 2015, and in print in Volume 44, Issue 1 of Index on Censorship. Charlie Hebdo has also produced a special edition to mark ten years, which you can read more about here.
After the horrific attacks against the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, the world has turned into a Tower of Babel where there are too many languages spoken but too little, if any, real communication. Ever since those three days of terror in France, across the globe there has been more anger than sorrow, more emotional backlash than rational analysis, and more confusion than insight.
As heartwarming as it was to see millions of Parisians march against religious extremism and countless others show their solidarity via hashtags and messages on social media, we cannot ignore the fact that a rather disturbing cognitive gap is opening up between different parts of the world and different segments of humanity. Even in the face of atrocity, humankind is failing to speak the same language.
Among the political leaders who marched in Paris there were quite a few with a lamentable human rights curriculum vitae. While Saudi Arabia was quick to send a representative to France, the regime did not shy away from publicly lashing Raif Badawi, a liberal blogger, for his views. Israel, Russia and Egypt, among others, have been criticised for their double standards at home and abroad. Turkey, my motherland, has a shocking number of journalists and cartoonists either in prison or facing trial.
No doubt, the most moving response to the act of brutality came from cartoonists across the globe. With powerful images and few words they showed their unflinching support for freedom of expression. But those of us who cannot draw, and therefore must talk or write have done a poor job in general. With every aggrandising remark the cognitive gap widened.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy claimed: “This is a war declared on civilization.” Soon after, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced: “French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay a price.” He then added: “Games are being played with the Islamic world, we need to be aware of this.” Such statements only served to increase conspiracy theories, which abound throughout the Middle East. Meanwhile journalists, academics and writers lampooned each other. The response to a book is another book.
So far, the language over Charlie Hebdo has been more divisive than unifying. Even the usage of conjunctions is a problem. After the tragedy, a top-level politician in Turkey tweeted that it was wrong to kill journalists, but they should not have mocked Islamic values. Never had the word “but” disturbed me so much.
The controversy had important echoes inside Turkey. The secularist newspaper Cumhuriyet wrote a powerful statement, saying that having lost some of their own writers to terrorism in the past, they understood so well the pain of the Charlie Hebdo killings. But the AKP government was of a different mind. The prime minister said printing the cartoons would be considered “heavy sedition” and they would not allow anyone to insult the Prophet. Accordingly, a court order was issued to prohibit access to Turkish websites that insisted in publishing Charlie Hebdo’s recent cover.
In response, independent news website T24 openly defied the court ban and published the entire issue of the magazine. And people kept spreading the cover via their Twitter and Facebook accounts. It was interesting to see how many of these reactions came from people who were already tired of the AKP government’s restrictive attitudes towards freedom of speech. As always, Turkey’s social media operated as a political platform. Over the years as media freedoms shrunk visibly, the social media became more and more politicised.
Every journalist, every poet, every novelist in Turkey knows words carry a heavy weight, and they can get you in trouble. We know that only too well that because of a poem, an article, a novel, or even a tweet we can be sued, put on trial, demonised, even imprisoned. When we write, we write with this knowledge at the back of our minds. As a result there is a lot of silent self-censorship. Yet we find it rather difficult to talk about this subject, mostly because it is embarrassing.
As a Turkish writer both freedom of speech and freedom of imagination are precious to me. When I travel in Muslim-majority countries I often hear people saying “I am offended, don’t I have a right to be?” Yet I believe we are making a grave mistake by focusing on the word “offence”, and questioning whether art can be offensive or people have a right to be offended. We are stuck in a mental trap as long as we cannot manage to discuss violence and offence separately.
We need to divorce the two notions. It is perfectly human to be offended in the face of mockery, opprobrium or slander. That is understandable. Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Christians or agnostics, we can all feel offended by something someone says, writes or does. But that is where the line must be drawn. What is inhuman and unacceptable is to resort to violence and shed blood in response.
The response to a book is another book. The response to an article is writing a counter-article. The response to cartoons is more cartoons, not fewer. Words need to be answered with words. This simple equation is what we have failed to teach to both the younger generations and ourselves.
Let’s be clear: this is not a clash of civilizations. It is not even a battle of religions. Yet it is a clash, and a deepening one, between two mindsets. The real chasm is between those of us who believe in pluralistic democracy, culture of co-existence and the value of diversity and cosmopolitanism, and those who have chosen to divide humanity into mutually exclusive camps: us versus them. It is a cognitive clash therefore.
As Sufis have been saying throughout the centuries, we are all profoundly interconnected. Globalism has way too often been interpreted as an economic and political phenomenon. Yet it also means that our futures, our stories and our destinies are interconnected. The unhappiness of someone living in Pakistan affects the happiness of someone living in Belgium or Australia. We must understand that in this complex web of relations any divisive rhetoric is bound to create more of the same.
Extremism somewhere breeds extremism elsewhere. Islamophobia spawns anti-Westernism and anti-Westernism spawns Islamophobia. A far-right racist in Germany might regard a Taliban man in Pakistan as his arch-enemy but in fact, they are kindred spirits. They share surprisingly similar narrow mindsets. And what’s more, they need each other to exist and to thrive.
We need to get out of the vicious circle of division and hatred before it engulfs us all. Together we must stand and speak up for pluralistic democracy and harmonious coexistence. At the same time, however, now is the time to think about the response we have given to the tragedy calmly and carefully. In this response lie the hidden important clues to our strengths and weaknesses as fellow human beings and the sharpest dilemmas that will continue to beset the world in the 21st century.
