Owda’s account had 1.4 million followers, she said.

The Palestinian journalist has spent years documenting life in Gaza under Israeli occupation and, recently, amid Israel’s genocide. Her series with Al Jazeera’s AJ+ has won numerous awards, including a Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and even an Emmy. At the same time, pro-Israel voices have sought to silence Owda, including in a campaign in 2024 to pressure her Emmy nomination to be withdrawn.

In her Instagram video, Owda said that the ban was “expected” due to pressure from high-powered figures to censor Palestinian voices from TikTok.

She overlaid a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he named TikTok as a “number one” priority of Israel.

She also shared a video with the company’s U.S. CEO, Adam Presser, saying that the company made a change to designate critically labelling someone as a “Zionist” as hate speech. “Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity,” Presser bragged at a conference last year.

  • edible_funk@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    2 days ago

    People on lemmy can’t read any better than people on reddit. Censored. Past tense. This was all in the news a few years ago for those of us that haven’t had their attention spans ruined by tiktok and can remember longer than a week or two at a time. Pro-China content is literally propaganda on a state sponsored app. Positive PR for a country is called propaganda. Hope this helps with your ability to understand relatively basic concepts in the future.