Social media has been an increasingly vital tool in political activism across the globe for well over a decade now. Prominent social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (now X) billed themselves as democratic spaces dedicated to freedom of expression and promoting alternative voices. Yet we now see social media sites engaging in various forms of censorship, most recently by taking down informative content related to ICE raids across the country as a result of government pressure. 

What happened? In this talk, Dr. Omar Zahzah will explain his views on how social media censorship reflects the current politics of power, and why Palestine is so central to this issue, given that Big Tech companies’ ability to normalize the erasure of Palestine from their platforms has in turn enabled their ability to censor all liberation-focused movements and voices from what was once billed as the digital town square.

About the Speaker

Omar Zahzah is assistant professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. His work appears in Arab Studies Quarterly and collections such as Centering the Margins: Reimagining the Field of Arab American Studies. He is the author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.