Last month, Zoom, a video conferencing site that has boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic, joined YouTube and Facebook in censoring a webinar organised by San Francisco State University because it included Leila Khaled, an icon of the Palestinian resistance movement now in her seventies.
On Friday, Zoom blocked a second scheduled appearance by Khaled - this time in a University of Hawaii webinar on censorship - as well as a spate of other events across the US to protest against her cancellation by the site. A statement concerning the day of action said campuses were "joining in the campaign to resist corporate and university silencing of Palestinian narratives and Palestinian voices".
The decision, a flagrant attack on academic freedom, was reportedly taken after the social media groups were heavily pressured by the Israeli government and anti-Palestinian lobby groups, which labelled the webinar "antisemitic".
Wiped off the mapThe degree to which the tech giants' discrimination against Palestinians is structural and entrenched has been underscored by the years-long struggle of activists both to include Palestinian villages on online maps and GPS services, and to name the Palestinian territories as "Palestine", in accordance with Palestine's recognition by the United Nations.
That campaign has largely floundered, even though more than a million people have signed a petition in protest. Both Google and Apple have proved highly resistant to these appeals; hundreds of Palestinian villages are missing from their maps of the occupied West Bank, while Israel's illegal settlements are identified in detail, accorded the same status as the Palestinian communities that are shown.
The occupied Palestinian territories are subordinated under the name "Israel", while Jerusalem is presented as Israel's unified and undisputed capital, just as Israel claims - making the occupation of the Palestinian section of the city invisible.
These are far from politically neutral decisions. Israeli governments have long pursued a Greater Israel ideology that requires driving Palestinians off their lands. This year, that dispossession programme was formalised with plans, backed by the Trump administration, to annex swathes of the West Bank.
Google and Apple are effectively colluding in this policy by helping to erase Palestinians' visible presence in their homeland. As two Palestinian scholars, George Zeidan and Haya Haddad, recently noted: "When Google and Apple erase Palestinian villages from their navigation, but proudly mark settlements, the effect is complicity in the Israeli nationalist narrative."
Out of the shadowsIsrael's ever-tightening relationship with social media corporations has played out largely behind the scenes. But these ties moved decisively out of the shadows in May, when Facebook announced that its new oversight board would include Emi Palmor, one of the architects of Israel's online repression policy towards Palestinians.
The board will issue precedent-setting rulings to help shape Facebook's and Instagram's censorship and free speech policies. But as the former director-general of the justice ministry, Palmor has shown no commitment to online free speech. Quite the reverse: she worked hand-in-hand with the tech giants to censor Palestinian posts and shut down Palestinian news websites. She oversaw the transformation of her department into what the human rights organisation Adalah has called the Orwellian "Ministry of Truth".
Tech corporations are now the undeclared, profit-driven arbiters of our speech rights. But their commitment is not to open and vigorous public debate, online transparency or greater civic engagement. Their only commitment is to the maintenance of a business environment in which they avoid any regulation by major governments infringing on their right to make money.
The appointment of Palmor perfectly illustrates the corrupting relationship between government and social media. Palestinians know only too well how easy it is for technology to diminish and disappear the voices of the weak and oppressed, and to amplify the voices of the powerful.
Many more of us could soon find ourselves sharing the online fate of Palestinians.
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