Cultrface

For Syntax, Mara Cavallaro wrote an insightful essay on the digital occupation of Palestine and what digital resistance really means. This section refers to censoring of terms to avoid posts and comments from getting erased:

Across social media, even original videos, stories, reels, posts, and captions about Gaza are distorted. In fact, this is the norm. Pro-Palestine becomes “pro-[watermelon emoji],” Israel becomes “Isr@el,” Gaza is referred to as “Watermelon City,” Palestine is censored with asterisks between its letters, genocide is “g-cide,” and so on. Creators begin videos and tweets with celebrity gossip only to launch into critiques of US complicity in genocide. Some pro-Palestine Instagram accounts, Wired reported late last year, have taken to posting with the hashtag #IStandWithIsrael. Others use selfies to break up their Palestine content, posting smiling, dolled-up photos with captions requesting eSIM donations or petition signatures. On my own feeds and For You pages, I have seen all of the above and more—from friends, writers, influencers, scholars, strangers, teenagers, mothers. Dystopia pervades each of our platforms, and its villains—the “algo,” the “al gore,” the “algo rhythm”—are hinted at extensively in code. We read something that means something else; we respond. The result is a new, secret language: one understood only within the context of palpable, systematic social media censorship of Palestine and the amateur efforts to evade it.

I posted a few days ago about how we need to be more compassionate with people who feel that they have to censor words to avoid this kind of erasure (unalive instead of suicide, redacting letters in “murder” or “death”, etc.) This is a byproduct of tech totalitarianism and while its liberal proliferation makes me cringe no end, people are using it to avoid their words being obscured. I see it here and I welcome the scrutiny at this level because Palestine still isn’t free and Israel still keeps bombing countries they feel like. Maybe being overt at the risk of erasure is necessary.