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Mona Shtaya is the Campaigns and Partnerships Manager (MENA) and Corporate Engagement Lead at Digital Actions. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) focusing on surveillance and digital rights in the MENA region. Additionally, she’s a Non-Resident Scholar in the Middle East Institute’s Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs Program. She previously worked as the Advocacy and Communications Manager at 7amleh-The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, and as the community outreach specialist and Social Media Specialist at Transparency Palestine, the national chapter of Transparency International. She holds an MA in Social Media and Digital Communication from the University of Westminster.
How Meta’s platforms normalize anti-Palestinian racism
The ongoing Palestinian-Israeli crisis is further intensified in the information space by the failure of the leading tech giants, including Meta, to combat online disinformation, incitement to violence, and hate speech proliferating on their platforms, most egregiously against Palestinians.
Nowhere to hide: The impact of Israel's digital surveillance regime on the Palestinians
Over the course of 2020 and 2021, groundbreaking investigations revealed in stark detail Israeli authorities’ intensifying use of surveillance and predictive technologies to police and control Palestinians. Subjecting Palestinians to such scrutiny from security and military apparatuses narrows their expressive spaces and plunges them into a state of constant anxiety. This practice also carries out a commercial purpose: Occupied Palestine effectively functions as an open-air laboratory for Israel to test techniques of espionage and surveillance before selling them to repressive regimes around the world.
