How the Gaza War Is Reshaping Social Media

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Meta — Facebook and Instagram's parent company — refuses to provide evidence refuting widespread reports that it's censoring Gaza-related content on its platforms. This week on Deconstructed, technology reporter Sam Biddle joins Ryan Grim to discuss his recent reporting on the efforts of Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to press Meta for specifics.

Grim and Biddle dig into debates blaming the horrifying images coming out of Gaza for turning young people against the war. "When people see images of horrific bloodshed," Biddle says, "when they see bodies blown apart by bombs, that's upsetting to most people. There doesn't have to be any ideology attached." They also dive into how pressures to sanitize Israel's war is being used to ban TikTok, and how X, formerly known as Twitter, is profiting off of government surveillance.

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Transcript

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0:23.6	Available at selected retailers or online at Karcha.uk. Welcome to Deconstructed. I'm Ryan Grimm and social media has played a really
0:40.7	interesting and unusual role in the way that we've understood the conflict
0:45.2	between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza over the last several months in a way that reminds me in
0:51.8	some ways of how the advent of Twitter and
0:55.4	Facebook in the kind of 2010s really shaped the way that the world understood the
1:01.0	Arab Spring and how the how people at the time were able to
1:04.9	connect and then also how the dictators that faced the consequences of the
1:12.3	ability of those people to connect,
1:13.8	started to blame kind of Twitter and Facebook
1:17.0	on the fact that they were now getting toppled.
1:20.8	And so I say all that to kind of preface the conversation that I'm going to have today with my colleague Sam Biddle who reports for us on technology with a focus on surveillance, privacy, corporate power, and all other things related to tech and power.
1:36.0	Sam, welcome to deconstructive.
1:38.1	Thanks for joining me here.
1:39.4	Thank you so much for having me on.
1:41.3	So we've got this really interesting situation that has developed
1:44.6	where on the one hand you've been doing a ton of really fascinating reporting on the
1:49.4	way that social media platforms, these social media giants, have been censoring users
	...

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