Digital Rights Weekly Update: 19 - 25 September

Google Allows Israel-Sponsored Propaganda About Global Sumud Flotilla

Trouthout

Evidence posted over the weekend online appears to show that tech giant Google has allowed the government of Israel to purchase sponsored content spots so that online users searching on the Global Sumud Flotilla will be shown inaccurate, propagandized content accusing the flotilla particpants as being allied with violent, terrorist elements. The Sumud Flotilla — a group of international humanitarians and peace activists sailing toward the coast of Gaza with over 40 vessels in its fleet as a way to break the unlawful blockade of life-saving supplies imposed by Israel and its allies amid an ongoing genocide — has no documented connection to any terrorist organization and has made clear repeatedly that it is a completely nonviolent effort by independent groups and individuals who want to see an end to the suffering, starvation, and death taking place in the besieged Palestinian enclave. In Arabic, sumud translates as steadfastness and resilience. On its website, the groups says, “We are a coalition of everyday people — organizers, humanitarians, doctors, artists, clergy, lawyers, and seafarers — who believe in human dignity and the power of nonviolent action.”

Will TikTok’s New Owners Censor Pro-Palestine Content?

NY Magazine

TikTok will soon have new American oligarch overlords. If Donald Trump is to be believed, Lachlan Murdoch, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison are potential investors in a deal to keep the social-media giant in the United States. Trump has been actively thwarting legislation, signed into law under Joe Biden with bipartisan majorities, to force a sale to the U.S. because TikTok is currently owned by ByteDance, which has close ties to the Chinese government. If members of Congress under Biden rightly sweated the implications of a Chinese Communist Party–linked social-media platform holding sway over American citizens, the outcome of American TikTok ownership could mean censorship of a different kind — against pro-Palestine content, which has proliferated on the platform. For the Israel hawks in the MAGA orbit — and those in general who want Trump-aligned forces to wield as much power over what we see and hear as possible — it will be a great day when TikTok is sold. We could be moving closer to state social media of the American sort, with big-tech bosses straining to remain in Trump’s good graces. As much as this is a story of the president’s authoritarian id, it’s also far more an outgrowth of the consolidation of business in American life and the terrifying clout corporations now wield. The Murdoch family may soon have a social-media behemoth to add to its News Corp and Fox empire. This should chill us all.

Systematized supremacy: The consequences of blind faith in technology

Advox Global Voices

Israel uses data collected from Palestinians to train AI-powered automated tools, including those co-produced by international firms, like the collaboration between Israel’s Elbit Systems and India’s Adani Defence and Aerospace, that have been deployed in Gaza and across the West Bank. Israeli AI-supercharged surveillance tools and spyware, including Pegasus, Paragon, QuaDream, Candiru, Cellebrite, as well as AI weaponry, including the Smart Shooter and Lavender, are world-famous and exported to many places, including South Sudan and the United States.  The US is also looking into ways to use home-made and imported facial recognition technologies at the US–Mexico border to track the identities of migrant children, collecting data they can use over time. Eileen Guo of MIT Technology Review wrote: “That this technology would target people who are offered fewer privacy protections than would be afforded to US citizens is just part of the wider trend of using people from the developing world, whether they are migrants coming to the border or civilians in war zones, to help improve new technologies.” In addition to facial recognition, the United States is also collecting DNA samples of immigrants for a mass registry with the FBI.

TikTok exposed young Americans to Gaza war. Is it falling under the control of Israeli sympathisers?

TRT World

On many nights over the past two years, teenagers across the United States opened TikTok not for watching dance videos or memes, but to witness first-hand what was going on in Gaza.  The app helped beam shaky footage of Israeli brutality against the Palestinians to tens of millions of young people — most of them Gen Z — who otherwise were largely oblivious or confused about the Middle East’s longest-running dispute.  Ambulances pulling children from rubble, mothers wailing outside hospitals, skeletal children dying of starvation, and journalists being killed — TikTok had helped capture all of this in its raw, unedited form, something that legacy Western media was censoring or, at best, showing a very toned-down version of what was happening on the ground. For a generation that does not watch the famed nightly news on cable TV, TikTok became both a newsroom and a witness stand. But all of this is in danger. There’s concern that Americans won’t be able to witness the plight of Palestinians after TikTok’s US operation is taken over by a consortium of US firms.