'Echoicide': How Gaza Posts Can Remain Online Yet Become Harder To Find on Meta

When Palestinian journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin posted footage he said showed Israeli soldiers committing alleged war crimes, he said tens of thousands of people flocked to his Instagram page.

Shihab-Eldin, who has more than 1.1 million followers, told Al Jazeera that Meta had 'made my page disappear several times' and had 'started severely shadow-banning accounts like mine that were central to the documentation process.'

He also told Al Jazeera that some of his posts had been used by South Africa in its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

The Silent Hand of the Algorithm

The pattern has now been given a name. Writing for Al Jazeera, journalist Mohammad Qasem used the term 'Echoicide' to describe how a post can remain online while the platform carrying it is weakened until the voice behind it loses meaningful reach.

Jillian York, a London-based writer, activist and teacher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said such suppression is difficult to challenge because content does not visibly disappear. 'Algorithmic censorship doesn't need to erase testimony,' she said. 'It can leave it online while gradually stripping it of reach, discoverability and an audience.'

What Previous Reviews Found

Meta has faced similar concerns before. In 2021, its Oversight Board recommended an independent review of whether Facebook had applied its content moderation policies in Arabic and Hebrew without bias, including its use of automation, and Meta subsequently commissioned Business for Social Responsibility to conduct the review.

The resulting report, published in September 2022, found that Meta's actions appeared to have had adverse human rights impacts on Palestinian users, while it did not identify intentional bias. Meta has disputed the characterisation that it deliberately or systemically suppresses a particular voice.

A December 2023 report by Human Rights Watch, titled 'Meta's Broken Promises', documented more than 1,050 cases of content suppression or removal on Instagram and Facebook between October and November 2023. Of the 1,050 cases reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful pro-Palestinian content, while one involved content supporting Israel.

HRW cautioned that these cases did not necessarily represent the overall distribution of censorship. Its report also described the documented cases as a dataset rather than a global comparative analysis of censorship across social media platforms.

Meta rejected the characterisation in a statement, saying: 'The implication that we deliberately and systemically suppress a particular voice is false...' The company also disputed the use of the 1,000-plus examples as evidence of systemic censorship.

'Negligence Is a Choice'

Not all digital rights experts accept that framing. Marwa Fatafta, MENA policy and advocacy director at Access Now, argued that the volume and consistency of reported suppression pointed to structural problems rather than accidental enforcement.

'Proving systemic harm doesn't require finding a Meta executive who deliberately pressed a button to remove Palestinian content,' Fatafta said. 'But negligence is a choice, and so is how policies are designed, timed, and enforced.'

Leila Warah, a journalist based in the occupied West Bank whose Instagram account was suspended and restored multiple times during the war, said diminished reach has consequences beyond social media metrics.

'A viewer can watch footage from Gaza, feel affected by it and then close the app and go back to their life,' she said. 'Palestinians living through what appears on those screens do not have that option.'

The potential implications of algorithmic suppression during an active conflict extend beyond social media metrics.

If footage of alleged war crimes becomes less visible, questions arise over how easily courts, researchers and journalists can locate, preserve and independently assess material that could contribute to investigations or public understanding of events.

Reduced visibility may also affect how quickly eyewitness accounts and visual evidence reach human rights organisations, investigators and newsrooms, particularly when events are unfolding rapidly and access to affected areas is limited.

That raises questions about whether platform design could influence what material remains visible for future legal and historical scrutiny, and whether important documentation can remain accessible long enough to be independently examined and verified.