C (6:36)

So, you know, it's interesting because I also, you know, obviously when social media became popularized over the last decade and a half, I also noticed, you know, it would corresponded with a significant, it seems, accelerated recognition of, among many other causes which have been neglected, previous media environment, the Palestinian cause. And of course, you know, the nature of social media is its decentralized nature. That's kind of the main characteristic of it. Whereas previously, you know, in the last 20th century at least, it was a very centralized media environment where it seemed like it was possible if you controlled a few major nodes, like if you had relationships with a few editors and a few TV stations, stuff like that, you could control what everyone thinks, so to speak. That was kind of the level of hegemonic control that was possible. But for a brief moment, when these platforms emerged, as you said, it was a very egalitarian sort of situation. People really did have access on an equal playing field for many different narratives which had not been heard before. And I say the Palestinian narrative was probably among the most heavily suppressed and the most heavily censored and marginalized, almost was rendered invisible or simply depicted in a very negative way by its opponents. And that was pretty much the only story you got. And then you got to see, you know, people, just Palestinians often, most of the time, speaking in their own voice too, just explaining their condition, documenting their conditions, people in Palestine doing that, people getting to know them on a personal level through that medium. And like you said, it was great. Now it seems like in 2025, as.

A (8:15)

You said, there is an attempt to.

C (8:16)

To try to put the toothpaste back in the tube a little bit. So, you know, people have kind of got this perception, a different perception in some cases at least, of more complex perception of the Palestinian cause. And sometimes they've come to come identified very strongly because of what they've seen online, but they're trying to stop that now. But it's interesting to me because, you know, there are different tools I can imagine, to do that. And now we're seeing really extreme media consolidation, like people who are very statedly motivated by, you know, some sympathy for Israel just buying platforms like TikTok at the moment. But also, you know, there's algorithmic manipulation, this pressure inside of companies from the top and so forth, to do things in a certain way. So, like, how exactly are they trying to censor? Is it just removing people's accounts, or are they trying to change what people see, to try to recreate the previous homogeneously or almost homogeneously pro Israel media environment people had before social media.

B (9:16)

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. And you know, as part of going into it, I want to very quickly kind of go back to the point that you, or the description that you gave earlier when you were saying that you've noticed that, you know, there was a particularly intense censorship of the Palestinian struggle. I think that, you know, that was part two, basically of what kind of got me to think that a study of this nature was important. Because I, I think it would be difficult to find people who don't understand on some level that talking about Palestine is repressed or is censored in general. But I think the, what surprised me, you know, going into this project was the extent to which censorship of Palestine is normalized on these platforms and to the extent to which it seemed to be escalating. So part of what I was trying to do was to also identify the type of erasure that we see on these digital platforms of Palestinians, of posts related to Palestine, to really diagnose that as its own example of how big tech fortifies an identity based form of oppression. You know, because we had had a lot of studies that talked about the ways that big tech kind of fortifies different patterns and system of racism, structural oppression. And so for me, this example, which reflects how big tech fortifies the, the Zionist settler colonial project of erasure, you know, by basically eliminating Palestinians from the digital sphere was another example of that. And so I wanted to make sure to codify that basically through this work and make sure that it's out there for kind of a more broad based intervention now in terms of the, the goals of what is happening, I do think that what we are seeing is an attempt to basically recycle the model of legacy corporate media and now to do it on these digital platforms. The mechanisms, I think, of these types of media make it a little bit more difficult. The scholars who talk about the way that content moderation works, for example, often note that there's such a sheer scale of content that is posted that it's difficult, if not impossible to literally erase everything everybody ever does. You can't do that. But what you can do is you can find different means of censoring or policing topics or even at times going after particular users if they become too big. So this is when you start to see people who have their accounts suspended or banned for posting about Palestine. You know, I've talked to people who've experienced shadow banning, which is a very. The tricky thing about that is it's difficult to Prove it happens because companies don't normally admit that they're doing it in the first place. And you have to be a prominent enough account to have so many users that you really notice that your reach starts to fall. But some, you know, I did talk to digital content creators in the book who talked about how they had been experiencing intense shadow banning and it really ramped up after October 7th, and they talked about the ways that they identified that. But to answer your question, or to come back to the full answer to your question, I do think that what we are trying to see is the recreation of the legacy corporate media censorship. Of course, the mechanisms of social media make it so that you do need to use different means of trying to bring that about. So, you know, you do have this algorithmic censorship. You do have going after particular accounts, you have things like shadow banning. And you know, of course you have the increasing attempt to actually introduce different forms of, you know, community standards, what they call community standards, basically to make sure that from the get go, topics related to Palestine or critiques of the Israeli colonial project are already preemptively banned under the false premise of trying to stop discrimination. So this is, for example, what you see when companies like Meta, you know, unveil policies such as they did in 2024, you know, saying how they're going to criticisms or usage of the term Zionist or anti Zionist on their platforms. How you saw the, the streaming platform Twitch unveil something similar, you know, a little while later. Increasingly we're seeing companies really lean into the prohibition of anti Zionist expression on their platform. And they do this through the false completion of anti Semitism and anti Zionism, which is a tactic that I think will be familiar to people who engage and work for Palestine in general. It always relies, the censorship of, it always relies on that false conflation, split conflation. But we're seeing an increasing entrenchment in terms of the, the stewards and the leaders of the big tech industry, the moderators of these platforms, to kind of explicitly normalize this censorship and to kind of entrench this increasingly anti Palestinian context for communication on their spaces. And the danger of that, I think, is that the more normalized it becomes, the more difficult it is to escape. And so when you have, you know, especially leading examples of like some of the most prominent outsized tech companies, like Meta, for example, doing it, it signals to the others this is not only okay, this is the way to do it in order to thrive in this industry. And this is a perfectly legitimate thing to be doing, which of course it's not.

C (14:41)

Yeah, absolutely. And the attempt to normalize it is quite pernicious because, you know, there was, you know, as we talked about, there was this environment where there was sort of an egalitarian of sort, sort of climate around this topic for many years. And it's so opposite now. And you see it actually even during the current genocide, there's been extensive efforts to suppress, ignore and ignore. When I say ignore, not just ignore just by not giving attention, but actually forcibly ignore or you know, render invisible is a good way of putting it. Accounts from Palestinians in Gaza during current events. It's terrible. And you know, one thing that I've been noticing also in the macro sense is that this increasingly censorious environment in these tech firms and the platforms that they maintain, it's also coinciding with an increasing consolidation economically into very large like, it's almost like an oligopoly now the, the big tech world. And you know, at one time there was this whole mantra of like, you know, plucky startups in Silicon Valley that were going to fight the big established.

A (15:48)

Players in various industries.

C (15:50)

And now it seems very, very obvious that this big tech has become just another main note of power in the United States along with Wall street and the military industrial complex and large agglomerations of power like that. But one thing that's been heartening to some degree is that, you know, we've done a lot of stories at dropside about this, but there's been a lot of internal discontent with the activities in some of these firms. And you know, as you mentioned in the origin, Silicon Valley did have this sort of like you can say pro social sort of ideology. You know, it comes out of like there was a 1960s countercultural movement has some sort of relationship to the origins of Silicon Valley in a sense. So people, a lot of people took that to heart and like a lot of people in the tech firms, they were, they saw it as like a moral kind of job in a way too. And that seems like very antiquated at this point, but that was really a thing and some residue of that remains. So, you know, in our stories we've spoken to people and gotten tips and you know, reporting people can see online based on leaks or based on people acting out of conscience, particularly on the subject of Palestine and the activities of some of these firms collaborating with the Israelis or with, you know, U.S. government to suppress speech and the subject. So I was curious, actually Israeli government, Israeli military. So you know, I was curious, you know, Your own take, because you have studied this in quite depth. How have people responded in, you know, what has been the backlash in some sense in companies? And how have they attempted to suppress dissent on the subject in as much as they've been trying to continue on with these policies you outline?

B (17:33)

Yeah, that's a, That's a great question. You know, and I, I just want to say right off the bat that I think whistleblowing people leaking kind of insider information about how entrenched their companies are with the Israeli colonial project and now with the genocide. I think that's, that's one of the most important tools we have to kind of fighting Big Tech's fortification of settler colonialism and genocide at this moment, precisely because, you know, that's the much needed insight and information that we would otherwise not have access to. And so that's one of the most important thing that I think people who are within these industries can do. And so I, I think that whistleblowers play a very, very prominent role. And I've seen people, you know, from various, I. I guess I would say from various positionalities of being inside, you know, fight back in, in differing ways. So I have, you know, even beyond this book, you know, for some of my reporting for Electronic Intifada, for example, I've worked with people who were revealing information about how entrenched companies are in the genocide. You know, I did recently a piece about Dell where whistleblowing was, you know, flying very vital to exposing the extent of that entrenchment, you know, and, you know, I've also seen examples of, for example, even people in Meta who started publishing letters kind of decrying, you know, the rampant anti Palestinian censorship that they're, that both is reflected in the, their external interface of their platforms and also, like internally within, you know, sort of company communications. And of course, you've had examples like Project Nimbus, right? The exposure of the Google and Amazon partnership to do Project Nimbus, which really came from workers, right, who founded what would become no Tech for Apartheid as we know it to be today. The information about that project, even as there's still pieces to flesh out, the large extent of what we have really, is because of the people leaking information to the outside world, people engaging in really courageous disruptions of, you know, different proceedings that would otherwise be dedicated just to singing the praises of these companies. So I think that the role really is, you know, providing the vital information that otherwise would intentionally be sort of kept behind the curtain, as it were, and also in continuing to remind us of different examples of what resistance can look like in this moment. Because, you know, part of the insidiousness of our moment, I think, is that we're really being force fed this false narrative about how the most important thing is for business as usual to continue. And you know what people like those who engage in some of the examples that I mentioned and many others are reminding us of is that they know that's a lie. As long as there's genocide, as long as there's colonialism, we need to continue to basically throw cogs in the wheels of the machinery that's continuing to lead to that death and destruction. Right. And we have a particular obligation as people who are variously connected to these industries to continue to find ways to, to sabotage this process as much as we can. So yeah, I would say definitely in terms of revealing the information, but also serving as an example and reminding us, you know, of what it means, you know, to be an ethical human in this world, in this context, in this moment. I mean, I think that that can't be understated.

C (21:13)

Yeah, you know, it can often be demoralizing, especially with what we're seeing right now. It's probably one of the worst things any of us have ever seen what's taking place in Gaza at the moment. But there have been, you know, elements of hopefulness as well. And I would like to point out that recently Microsoft announced that would cease cooperation with, you know, unit A200 and a certain program for the Israeli military, which was, as a result of critical reporting and activities by Microsoft employees to register their dissent, often at great cost and great risk for quite a lot of time. So there are some receptiveness seems to this pushback that would not have been the case had there not been in this resistance that took place. So, you know, that that is something which is happening, but still it's so much going on that is unaddressed. And that kind of brings me to the next question I want to ask you because, you know, a lot of the times we talk about, when we think about, you know, the tech industry and the big tech firms and the platforms and the subject, we think about speech and we think about censorship and those things which are extremely vital and important. But you know, there are these other and very important sort of facilities and capabilities which are granted to the Israeli government and the Israeli military and intelligence services via the big tech firms. And oftentimes, you know, it's discussed that, you know, Israel has its upper hand over its neighbors, not just the Palestinians, but many other Neighbors when it comes to technological capacities and military capacities and logistics. But really pretty much all of that is only a byproduct of this privileged relationship they have with Western institutions, governments. But also these tech firms, they do a lot for them and they enable the things that we see, like the drone strikes, the intelligence used to carry them out, and surveillance, to do mass surveillance on individuals and detain them and so forth. It's really being provided by third parties in the United States in many cases, in many cases, firms like these. Can you talk about what the Israeli side or the Israeli military or government gets out of these firms? That is, you know, especially tech firms in this case, that is relevant and that is enabling their genocide and apartheid.

B (23:26)

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think first, I think you're absolutely right to note that there's really a discontinuity between the propaganda that we get about Israel and it's kind of technocratic prowess, if you will. Right. Like, you know, Israel sells itself on being the, the so called startup nation. So I, you know, and I, I talk a lot in the book, or I have a chapter in there where I talk about this idea of how we need to think of it rather as the startup colony and understand how every single bit of tech innovation, you know, that Israel realizes is, you know, made possible by the dispossession of and, you know, the colonization of Palestinian land, you know, and the erasure of the Palestinian people. So even like, you know, you're looking at different startups that are profiled in the, you know, that propagandistic book Startup Nation, right, Which kind of gives us that phrase from the beginning. A lot of these projects are projects that are begun on colonies, on colonial communes, and that later leads to the start of projects that continue to just fortify, you know, what we now today know to be the modern military occupation. But what I would say really that they get, I mean, I think ultimately it's a mutually beneficial relationship in the sense that, you know, the companies that partner with the Israeli project don't need to do so. Right. They make an active choice to do that. And it's always been a matter of intentional series of choices that continues to fortify the dispossession of the Palestinian people. And that's one thing that I think it's really important to emphasize. And that's what I try to reemphasize time and time again in the book. Because sometimes when we just think about, you know, big tech as an industry, when we think about how outsized it is and how powerful it is, there can be almost this kind of fatalism that comes with that, that assuming that it's all powerful and, you know, all controlling. Whereas in reality, everything that we've seen come about in this current moment is the result of a series of strategic and coordinated choices that these powerful actors have made. You know, there's no inevitability to fortifying Israeli apartheid, colonialism and genocide. That was the result of choices made by the elites in this industry. Right. And you know, what do they gain from that? You know, they gain the basically access to this lab that is the Israeli colonial project. Because as Israel fortifies, you know, the surveillance and the occupation technologies that, you know, your question noted, right, Other tech companies, you know, internationally can benefit from being able to sort of streamline their own technologies, their own capacities. Right. The surveillance that begins in Palestine never stays in Palestine. You know, it goes into different companies like Palantir, and you start to see an increasing interface into how not just Palestinians, but people as a whole come to be targeted and surveilled. So, you know, there's always kind of this boomerang that's happening with this broader process of basically techno fing, if you will, the occupation. That's something that's going to have returns for the industry as a whole. And you know, it's, it's not a question unfortunately of what is best for human rights, what is best for freedom, what is best for the world. It's a question of what is best for the bottom line. And so that's also part of why in the book, what I get into is that fundamentally we need to have an anti imperialist analysis when we look at the big tech industry. Because otherwise we'll never really understand how it is that as these companies get bigger, we always end up at the same moment where it's going to be about silencing, it's going to be about erasure, and it's going to be about fortifying different mechanisms for surveilling and suppressing people and people en masse, not just Palestinians, you know, that's where it begins now. But where is it going to end up? It's going to end up with the increasing militaristic and police fortification of technologies of surveillance and incapacitation as a whole, globally. But unless we have again that anti imperialist analysis and even an anti capitalist analysis in the sense of understanding how it is that pursuing the bottom line at all costs is always going to lead us to these situations where what we're looking at is what puts humanity the worst off for where, you know, it's, it's going to continue to remain occluded. So I really think it's important to have those elements of the analysis when, you know, mounting these critiques of the big tech industry.

C (28:24)

Yeah, it's a really important point because a lot of times people, you know, there are many people who care deeply about the subject for itself but you know, sometimes they don't appreciate, even those who don't or aloof to it are.

A (28:34)

Not aware of it.

C (28:34)

They don't appreciate that the tactics and, and the programs and the protocols which are being refined in this case in Gaza and the west bank and beyond that as well too, almost inevitably are exported to other countries as well too in some sense. Israel has unit A200 and these other high tech units which are tasked with signals intelligence. And basically people go there and they get this specialized training on how to conduct surveillance and how to refine their surveillance tactics on Palestinians in occupied territory. And then they go into the private sector and in the private sector they go into create companies which are, you know, some cases bought out or they go around the world and disseminate their products and you know, the security that in question. But also, you know, just the very principle and practice also gets expanded and we see spyware which was initially refined by people from the this units, then deployed by other countries, Gulf Arab countries, Western countries, countries in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, and deployed for similarly injurious purposes. So what starts in Gaza or starts in the west bank by no means ends there. It's only the first laboratory in their view of how to test out these technologies and these practices. So I was curious, you know, something we've covered at drop site quite a bit is this phenomenon of the Israeli tech industry and incubated most of the time in the Israeli military intelligence services, which has now become a part of global tech in a way. And we had a story a few months ago about the number of people unit a 200 people who are in US tech firms. And it's quite a lot, well over a thousand people, people who publicly identify, there's probably more than that, but just people who can be traced to that. You know, many people startups from that unit. Then they go get bought out and then they come into big tech firms with their influential individuals and they bring their friends and colleagues over as well too over time. That's kind of like a conveyor belt. And you know, it's not like this is the only example of that in the world. But it's a particularly extreme example. And obviously it, you know, it opens the door to all sorts of like, concerns. And oftentimes in the United States there is concern expressed of like Chinese influence in US tech industry or Russian influence or Iranian influence or something, but they don't really talk about this. One country's influence is really influence in not just tech firm, but other major industries. Like countries usually protect or scrutinize the composition of critical industries. But it seems like in this case they've kind of not done that, and especially in tech, they've not done that. So tech has become like increasingly, you know, we've kind of seen it happen perceptively over like a decade and a half. It's become more and more overtly pro Israel and even quite ideologically pro Israel. And that can manifest in so many different ways. So I'm curious, you know, what you have seen or what you kind of know about the subject of the relationship, not just of big tech to Palestine, but even the Israeli tech side and the US tech side and the kind of political symbiosis that may be taking place there.

B (31:47)

Well, I definitely think we're seeing an increasing symbiosis for sure. And I think one of the reasons that I find it instrumental to think about not just tech, but tech in relationship to other industries, including for example, the way that the media industry in the US in particular has worked and has, you know, essentially always carried water for the Israeli project, especially since post 1967. Really, I, I find it instrumental to not completely exceptionalize tack precisely because I think that there are some broader aspects of that dynamics that we can see at play that I think will to a certain extent be consistent across the board, even as you move from industry to industry. And you know, tech in general is a, is a subject where if you start to look into it, you know, or think about it, you already like, you know, fall into the danger of risking exceptionalizing it too much or, you know, especially since a lot of the, the rhetoric that we tend to hear about it is, you know, an exceptionalization of some kind. You know, so what I mean by that is we often are kind of lulled by the, the propaganda we will hear, you know, from people in the tech industry themselves, you know, about how exceptional it is, you know, how, you know, revolutionizing it's, you know, it, it seeks to be, or what was the term? The disruption, right. That used to be a really big one. Like it's disruptive, it's disrupting everything. It's actually keeping everything the same more intensely in a lot of ways, both. Which is to say that, for example, if we go back to the, the question about media, the way that, you know, you've had the US Media industry really always essentially be kind of a pro Israel narrative industry when you look at the legacy corporate media. Right. I think that that gives a really good precursor for what we are increasingly seeing realized in this Big Tech moment or in this particular moment of Big tech where, as you're noting, right. Things are so increasingly aligned around Israel and in support of Israel, you know, and Israel's intentions, you know, however horrible its actions actually are. So I think that that is illustrative in a lot of ways of, you know, so long as you're gonna have this particular configuration of imperialism fortifying the Israeli project. And of course, it's, I think it's pretty much a given how Israel is such a boon for Western imperialism. Right? But as long as that relationship remains intact, we're always going to see different industries capitulates, right. Toward advancing the Israeli project, because the Israeli project is the Western project, is the US Project. Right. And so I, I would say again, you know, to kind of close this off that we've had preceding examples in the past, we're looking at this seemingly exceptional case with Big Tech. But I think it becomes a little bit less exceptional when we remember that ultimately we're seeing these political powers and interests aligned because it's always been in the best interest of imperialism to support the Israeli colonial project. And that's going to remain true. Whatever industry is at the top right now, it was big Tech. You know, tomorrow could very well be a different industry depending on how things turn out, but it's always going to move in that direction so long as imperialism remains unchallenged.

C (35:39)

Omar, thanks so much for joining us on Dropsite.

B (35:42)

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

A (35:45)

That was Omar Zaza, the author of Terms of Zionism, Silicon Valley and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. And that does it for this episode.

C (36:02)

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A (36:03)

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C (36:12)

Our show today was produced by Jose Olivares. This episode was made in part with support from the Intercept.

A (36:18)

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C (36:22)

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A (36:25)

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