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pro-Israel voices have sought to silence Owda, including in a campaign in 2024 to pressure her Emmy nomination to be withdrawn.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.
TikTok was never “Chinese Propaganda”. It had roughly as many American investors as Chinese investors, with management centered in Singapore.
But the Singapore owners didn’t bend over backwards to purge any Palestinian Rights power users. So it got slandered as “China Social Media” as an excuse to force the sale of the US operations.
It was absolutely Chinese propaganda, it’s absurd anyone would say that it wasn’t. Literally you thinking it isn’t Chinese propaganda is a result of the Chinese propaganda on it.
We’re moving from reality to orthodoxy. You’re making an unfalsifiable claim.
It censored Tiananmen Square and fostered a positive impression of China politically, economically, and socially. It openly promoted propaganda. Hell, all those “traditional Chinese manufacturing” videos were literally state sponsored. Are you operating on some extremely narrow definition of propaganda?
The crime TikTok users committed was fostering a positive impression of Gaza.
If you searched for Tiananmen Square, it would censor/remove anything about the massacre, and promote anything about tourism.