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pro-Israel voices have sought to silence Owda, including in a campaign in 2024 to pressure her Emmy nomination to be withdrawn.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.

  • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    2 days ago

    You mean you want people to believe unsubstantiated claims that lack evidence?

    Just because we don’t have a signed confession and video recorded statement from the leader of China detailing a propaganda campaign doesn’t mean this is a completely unsubstantiated claim that lacks evidence. I listed numerous pieces of circumstantial evidence and we can use Occam’s Razor to conclude they would use this for that purpose.

    We don’t have hard evidence proving that Trump raped kids with Epstein, but I’d bet you believe he did based on the circumstantial evidence that we do know, so what’s the difference between this and that? It’s not as if China is a benevolent and altruistic world superpower. They’re going to have their fingers in every pie just like the US would/does.

    Can you provide any evidence, whether direct or circumstantial, demonstrating that they weren’t using it for this purpose in order to substantiate the claim of “isn’t?” Can you even make a good argument for why they wouldn’t especially as a counter to all the western platforms doing it?