The Intercept: This is how Israeli groups delete content supporting the Palestinians on social media platforms
Since the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza, a group of Israeli volunteers in the technology sector has been working to delete “anti-Israel” content from social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and others, on the grounds that it doesn’t comply with the rules of these platforms, according to the Intercept website.
The group, which called itself “Iron Truth,” works by exploiting its personal relationships working in major technology companies in order to delete content and publications that support the Palestinian narrative or criticize Israel or Zionism in general, according to the report.
Danny Kaganovich, the group’s founder and a software engineer at Google, says that volunteers used their informal connections in technology companies to remove nearly 1,000 posts from X, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn under the pretext of misinformation or anti-terrorism or support for terrorism.
Kaganovich explained to The Intercept that the group began its work after the October 7 attack, when he saw a video on Facebook whose owner cast doubt on the crimes committed by Hamas in the attack.
He said: “I copied the website URL of the video and sent it to a team of workers at Meta, and some Israelis who work in the company, and told them that this video should be deleted, and they actually removed it after a few days”.
This coincides with a large number of complaints submitted by social media users in the West Bank and Gaza, accusing major companies of blocking Palestinian content or narrative without any clear violation of the policies of these platforms.
The Palestinian Observatory for Digital Rights Violations documented more than 1,009 violations of Palestinian digital rights, which varied between cases of removal or restriction, hate speech, and incitement to violence.
The list of posts that the “Iron Truth” Group requested to be deleted from LinkedIn platform included all content that cast doubt on the Israeli army’s narrative, for example dozens of posts that questioned the reality of the mass beheading of children in an Israeli kibbutz by the Hamas movement, and classified these posts as inciting “terrorism”.
After reviewing a list of terms that the group used as keywords to delete, the website reported that most of them are common in news coverage or political analysis of the ongoing war, for example: Israel bombs hospitals, Israel bombs churches, Israel commits crimes, the Israeli army and genocide, or even Israel… You lie.
Kaganovich admitted that anger is the main driver, and anger was the motivation to demand the deletion of most of the posts that we reported on.
“We were demanding the removal of any post that involved anti-Israel or anti-Zionism, and anything like that; We considered it misleading news, even if it wasn’t so,” he added.
The group’s account on Telegram continuously publishes thanks to the corporate collaborators for removing and deleting the requested content.
The group said in a post on October 28 last, the following: “Thank you to the TikTok team in Israel who is fighting for us and for the truth”.
The group also thanked LinkedIn, which appointed a special team and has so far deleted 60% of the content we reported on.
