MADRID - Last February, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, removed the accounts on these two platforms managed on behalf of Iran's Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, due to the support provided to Hamas after its attack on Israel on October 7th. 

In the last few hours, a new account of the Iranian Supreme Leader was created on Instagram, reaching over 1 million followers, and it was also deactivated by Meta. In this regard, Mohammad Mehdi Esmaeili, Minister of Guidance, stated that the closure of Khamenei's pages on Instagram and Facebook following the publication of materials against Israel and in support of Palestinians is "evidence of the falsity of the Western claim of freedom of speech."

Officials at Meta stated that the accounts were removed "for repeatedly violating our policy on Dangerous Organizations and Individuals." According to this policy, platforms controlled by Meta do not allow violent individuals or organizations to have a presence on them. This includes those groups designated as "terrorists" by the United States government.

META'S CENSORSHIP OF PRO-PALESTINIAN VOICES

The issue with the American tech company is that its content moderation policy is not neutral. For years, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has systematically censored pro-Palestinian voices globally.

Since October 7th, several technology experts have pointed out that Meta has exhibited "six key patterns of undue censorship" of content in support of Palestine and Palestinians. These include the removal of posts, stories, and comments; deactivation of accounts; restriction of users' ability to interact with others' posts; and "shadow banning," where the visibility and reach of a person's material are significantly reduced.

In this regard, several users of Meta's products have documented a technological bias in favor of pro-Israel content and against pro-Palestinian posts. For instance, Instagram's translation software replaced "Palestinian" followed by the Arabic phrase "Praise be to Allah" with "Palestinian terrorists" in English. Additionally, WhatsApp's artificial intelligence, when asked to generate images of Palestinian boys and girls, created cartoon children with guns, whereas images of Israeli children did not include firearms.

Meta's removal of the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the Iranian Leader reflects a desire to silence voices that oppose Zionist colonialism. This makes the technology company complicit in erasing pro-Palestinian presence on the Internet.

At a more political level, this can be analyzed from the perspective of what is known as digital colonialism, which can be defined as the use of technology for the political, economic, and social domination of another nation or territory.

Under classical colonialism, Westerners seized and colonized foreign lands, installing infrastructure such as military forts, seaports, and railways. Additionally, they built heavy machinery and exploited native labor to extract raw materials.

In other words, classical colonialism relied on the ownership and control of territory and infrastructure, as well as the extraction of labor, knowledge, and goods, all supported by the exercise of state power.

This process evolved over centuries, incorporating new technologies as they developed.

Today, it can be argued that digital colonialism continues to perpetuate an unequal division of labor, where countries of the so-called Global North use their digital infrastructures to keep the Global South in a situation of permanent dependency.

DIGITAL COLONIALISM IN PALESTINE

In the Palestinian context of settler colonialism, Internet, celebrated in the West as a force for liberation, becomes a site of digital authoritarianism. Palestinian activists and communities have been demonstrating resilience both on the ground and in cyberspace against Israel's colonial project, which systematically seeks to erase all forms of Palestinian life and existence. Internet, as a globally governed space, has become a refuge for Palestinians to organize politically, narrate their stories, and resist. However, due to the racial construction upon which Internet is based and the weight of digital colonialism, Palestinian digital activism faces censorship, algorithmic bias, discrimination, and invasive surveillance, turning these supposedly safe and free online spaces into a battleground for narratives and presence.

The omnipresence of digital technology and control, along with the monetization of personal data, have led to data becoming the new frontier of colonialism. In this regard, it is important to note that the repression methods tested on Palestinians are being adopted worldwide. Particularly, the complicity between major tech companies like Meta and the U.S. and Zionist armies.

Both processes, digitization and militarization, are deeply intertwined in the colonial history of Palestine. Since before its establishment in 1948, through the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Israel has deployed its military and surveillance apparatus to further dispossess, fragment, and disempower the Palestinian population. The Intelligence Corps of the Israeli Occupation Forces, Unit 8200, was founded in 1952. Since then, it has been tasked with intelligence gathering and code decryption. Spying and mass surveillance of Palestinians are the driving force behind much of the rapid development of new technologies in Israel.

Israel exports this security paradigm, for example, by selling its spyware software "Pegasus" to different countries, where alleged threats justify authoritarian responses by states to ensure their 'security' and 'survival', along with their weapons and technologies. In the case of Israel's apartheid regime, this need for security extends only to the Jewish population, while Palestinians live in varying degrees of dispossession, stripped of security by Israel's policies.

The Unit 8200 has the capability to intercept any phone conversation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Additionally, facial recognition cameras, one for every 100 Palestinians, have been installed in occupied East Jerusalem. Private information is used to blackmail Palestinians and coerce them into collaborating as informants. The Hawk Eye cameras, designed to read license plates, enable Israeli police forces to obtain real-time information and the location of vehicles. Moreover, Israeli checkpoints are equipped with facial recognition technology, initially provided by the company HP. On the other hand, the 'Blue Wolf' app, known as the 'Israeli army's secret Facebook for Palestinians,' captures images of Palestinians throughout the occupied West Bank and compares them with the database managed by the Israeli military and intelligence. Israeli soldiers are rewarded for capturing a large number of photographs of Palestinians under occupation.

Palestinian writer Jalal Abukhater explains that for Israeli companies engaged in the development of surveillance and espionage technologies, the occupied territories serve merely as a laboratory where they can test their products before marketing and exporting them worldwide for profit. For the Israeli government, this surveillance regime serves both as a tool of control and as a lucrative business.

Lastly, we cannot overlook the economic ties between Meta and Israel. In 2021 alone, Israeli companies, as well as the colonial state itself, invested approximately $319 million in social media advertising, with 95% of that money directed to Meta's platforms. This level of advertising expenditure surpasses the combined spending of Palestinians, Jordanians, and Egyptians on social media ads, making the Israeli advertising market one of the largest in the region and thus a crucial client for Meta.

Therefore, the removal of the accounts managed on behalf of the Iranian Leader by Meta can be understood considering that technology is not a neutral field but rather reproduces, at a discursive level, the unequal distribution of power based on racial considerations found outside of the Internet.

Finally, and by way of conclusion, it can be asserted that the removal of the accounts managed on behalf of the Leader is part of the will to discipline those groups or individuals considered "disobedient" according to the hegemonic discourse prevailing on the Internet.