Digital battle for online influence continues after Gaza ceasefire

Activist groups seek to win hearts and minds of users and big tech employees

A desire to shape the policies of big tech companies seems to be the new normal. Getty Images

The digital battle for influence between activists supporting Palestinians and those backing Israel continues despite the ceasefire in Gaza.

The activist, non-profit and information organisations that have emerged in the two-year war show no sign of slowing down operations.

The battle spilt over to social media platforms that were accused of censorship, and even established technology companies such as Microsoft and Google found themselves on the defensive.

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At one point, Google workers were fired by the company for protesting against the company's $1.2 billion deal with the Israeli government.

About the same time, a group called No Tech For Apartheid gained significant momentum, organising workers at Google and Amazon seeking to protest against both companies' contracts with Israel.

A pro-Palestinian protester interrupts the presentation of Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, in Washington on March 14, 2024. AP Photo

A subsidiary of NTFA, known as No Azure for Apartheid, consisted largely of current and former employees of Microsoft who accused it of providing AI tools and cloud-computing solutions to Israel's military.

Amid pressure from No Azure for Apartheid and media reports, in September Microsoft announced that, based on its own findings, it decided to disable a set of services to a unit in Israel's Ministry of Defence.

Even with the ceasefire announcement on October 11, No Azure for Apartheid kept pressure on Microsoft.

“We do not stop for a ceasefire or half-measures! We stop when Palestine is free,” the group posted on X one day after, revealing that another Microsoft employee, Scott Sutfin-Glowski, had resigned in protest.

Several days later, No Azure for Apartheid rallied protesters who rowed kayaks lose to the homes of Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and president Brad Smith, accusing them of stalling in cutting some services to Israel's military.

No Azure for Apartheid did not respond to The National's requests for comment.

Along similar lines, 7amleh, more commonly known as the Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media, released a report several days after the ceasefire titled: “A War without Bullets: How Disinformation Reshapes the Reality of Palestinian Youth on the Backdrop of a Genocide”.

“The paper examines how disinformation has become one of the central tools of Israel’s war on Gaza – not only to justify genocide but also to re-engineer the collective consciousness of both Palestinians and the global public, particularly among youth,” reads a brief description.

More specifically in its report, 7amleh accused technology companies of algorithmic bias with social media platforms and even search engines.

A protester holds a Palestinian flag at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington, on August 19. Bloomberg

“Tech companies manipulate the contents to which users are exposed through removal, Shadowbanning and automated visibility restrictions,” 7amleh claimed.

It said that the Palestinian situation was disproportionately affected and censored by the companies.

On the other side of the spectrum are organisations such as CyberWell, based in Tel Aviv, which describes itself as world’s first live database of online anti-Semitism.

“Over the last six months and more recently since the October ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel users have flooded social media with terms like 'Gaza Holocaust' and 'Gaza Holocaust survivor',” a news release from the group reads.

CyberWell's founder and chief executive, Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, said the trend was an attempt to “blatantly trivialise the Holocaust, trying to equate its victims – the Jewish people – with its Nazi perpetrators".

Although described as 'AI-empowered', Jewish Onliner said humans check the facts in content on the website

Also showing no sign of winding down is Jewish Onliner, which uses artificial intelligence to show “anti-Israel movements".

In March, the site’s reporting on Helyeh Doutaghi, a scholar of international law at Yale University, led to Yale Law School severing ties with her.

She denied the accusations, and accused Jewish Onliner of deception, but the site did not back down.

Jewish Onliner still shows no indication of slowing down its output or winding down operations, with recent stories being posted on Monday.

“We’ll continue to refine and expand this model in the months ahead as the information space evolves,” it said in a statement. “We believe that the results of the responsible, AI-driven work that Jewish Onliner does speaks for itself.”