Meta, X, TikTok restrict pro-Palestinian content to give floor to Zionist narrative alone: Al-Azhar

CAIRO – 14 October 2023: Al-Azhar Observatory for Combating Extremism (AOCE) has warned of social media platforms’ practices to restrict pro-Palestinian content in order to give a boost to Zionist content.

“The current events in the Gaza Strip showed a manifest social media duplicity by ‎Meta, X, TikTok, and others in covering the events in the occupied ‎Palestinian territories,” the observatory said in a statement on Friday.

The observatory also noted that social media platforms also showed a “clear bias” in favor of the misleading ‎narrative of the Zionist occupation.

This bias was exposed through the ‎deliberate restriction of pro-Palestinian digital content and deliberate ‎suppression of the Palestinian narrative, giving the floor to the false Zionist ‎narrative alone, the statement added.

Gaza has been under heavy Israeli bombardment over the past week, which killed around 1,900 Palestinians according to the strip authorities and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless.

The Israeli assault comes in retaliation for a surprise attack launched by the Hamas fighters against Israeli cities, in which hundreds of Israelis have been killed and dozens more were taken hostage.

Over the past days, dozens of videos on social media showing Israeli massacres in the strip, where scores of civilians including women and children were killed, removed or restricted.

Among those videos was a video of a Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza who was providing coverage of the Israeli attacks in Gaza, when he was surprised that the Israeli jets hit his house and killed all his 15 family members inside.

His camera shows heartbreaking scenes while the remains of his family were packed for burial.