Following the controversial agreement between Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and Albanian PM Edi Rama to process asylum seekers outside the EU, two detention centres in the port of Shengjin and the village of Gjader were opened in October 2024. 

Despite being located in northern Albania, the camps are completely under Italian control and have shifted to serving as ‘deportation hubs.’ 

Shrouded in secrecy, little is known about the deal. Albanian and Italian authorities rarely answer Freedom of Information Requests about it. The public only knows what officials announce sparingly to the press. The number of migrants behind the grey walls of the detention centre is ever-changing, and no official records are made public. 

Currently, 90 people are held in Gjader. Usually picked directly at sea and dumped in cells, but called “guests” in the official forms. 

Access to the centres is extremely restricted for human rights observers. Through the few testimonies of survivors, Italian and European MEPs who visited, it was revealed that detainees face isolation and languish without communal or recreational spaces.

For Fioralba Duma, an Italo-Albanian activist and member of the grassroots migrant and civil rights collective Mesdhe Collective in Albania, detention centres are impossible to be humane. “This is a ‘black hole’ site invented for this occasion. The environment in detention centres is extremely pathogenic,” she adds, recalling the case of an Albanian man committing suicide in migration detention in the UK. 

Whilst no deaths have been recorded so far, former detainee Younouse Kone revealed to journalists that he witnessed two suicide attempts in the short time he spent in Gjader. Likewise, the facility’s ‘Critical Incidents’ sheet, shown only to MEPs, listed multiple incidents of self-harm. 

Albania’s Complicated Journey with Democracy 

After a successful tourism campaign, rebranding Albania’s image from a poverty-ridden, isolated country of emigration to an idyllic getaway, drawing investment by the likes of the Kushner and Trump families, Prime Minister Edi Rama has been on a fervent crusade to raise Albania’s status as a ‘success case’ in a region often marred by political and economic instability. 

Tracing back to Albania’s troubled past, the agreement is problematic. According to Sidorela Vatnikaj, a Tirana-based activist with Mesdhe, “if Albania were really a fully democratic state, the deal wouldn’t have happened. Albanian citizens only got to find out about the deal once it was signed by Rama, and Italian media started to report on it.” 

“This is a worrisome sign for the state of public transparency and an indicator of how the Albanian government could be acting in other issues. It shows that anything can happen without the public’s consent. The Rama-Meloni deal is the most visible violation of democracy and the state of law,” Vatnikaj explains.  

Indeed, the campaign hasn’t gone unchallenged. For Vatnikaj, one of the most acute problems was how mainstream Albanian media reported on their movement. “Albanian media framed our march as ‘anti-immigrant’ mobilisations trying to create a false narrative that these are ‘racist’ protests.”

Ranking 83rd on the World Press Freedom Index, media independence in the country is compromised by conflicts of interest between the business and political worlds and inadequate legal frameworks. 

Duma also notes that the group has suffered intimidation, directly affecting local organisers, one of whom, based in Lezhe, had their mother fired from her civil service position due to her activism – later reinstated after a complaint. 

Two other Albanian activists were detained for going to the opening ceremony of the Shengjin detention centre when Meloni was present, and hanging a protest banner from the rooftop of a building and using a sound system to play the announcement of the occupation of Albania by Italian troops during WWII. “We have the right to protest this, and we did so peacefully without causing any damage, yet our comrades were still detained”, Duma explains.

Activists believe that the deal is enforcing neocolonial dynamics, with Vatnikaj pointing out that the arrangement breaches Albania’s sovereignty for the sake of its ‘special relationship’ with Italy: “In essence, we handed over parts of our land to a completely Italian-run, Italian-funded administration. Are we actually an equal and respected part of the European community when we are being used as a “dumping ground” for migrants?”

For Duma the deal is a form of blackmail: “It implies that we have to accept things like that because of the financial or political support we have received from Italy regarding EU accession talks” or the supposed ‘welcome’ Albanians received in the 1990s as migrants in Italy, which in Duma’s words had nothing to do with the government and all to do with mutual aid groups, local communities, churches and individuals helping out of kindness.

How Activists Fight Back

“These camps were built for our parents in Europe,” one of the Mesdhe activists explains whilst giving a speech during a protest. The agreement now forces Albania to confront the fact that most of its citizens remain a target for ‘fortress Europe’. 

From violent pushbacks to detention, exploitation and criminalisation, the generations of Albanians who experienced the aftermath of regime collapse and mass displacement have had their life trajectories changed by such restrictions. The society they left behind was also deeply changed by their absence, with whole villages being almost emptied. 

For Albanian activists, this reality fuels their incentives to protest regressive government policies that do not represent the country’s historical experience. 

Duma says that for the Albanian activists, the agreement is viewed through the lens of whether it adheres to Albania’s historical memory as a displaced people and to Albanian values of hospitality. Vatnikaj adds that the deal goes against Albania’s very core as a nation, where “every family has a story to tell about the hardships Albanian immigrants have faced abroad”. 

Activists mobilised quite quickly in response despite the novelty of the situation. When the first ship arrived, they “welcomed” it with a banner reading “The European dream ends here.”

However, it took hard work before the group managed to get outside the walls of the Gjader detention camp in November 2025. Vatnikaj recalls that when they first started organising, they needed to figure out many things, as immigration in that context hadn’t been an issue in Albania before: “We mobilised around the unifying message of standing for human and migrant rights”. 

Solidarity beyond borders has been essential for the movement. Vatnikaj explains that Albanian activists are working with collectives in Italy and Europe, marching together, and organising assemblies: “We need knowledge, and we need people to fight with. Cross-border solidarity is essential.” 

In Duma’s experience as an Albanian migrant in Italy, striving to connect Albanian and Italian activist circles has been a lifelong aspiration. This goal has powered her resolve to create a shared space where activists can make meaningful exchanges. “Italian activists have helped us a lot with capacity-building and information-sharing. Now we have been building these platforms to join forces and create solidarity networks, with second-generation migrants in Italy being a crucial link between Italian and Albanian-based activists. Having them by our side is giving us hope. It is a really powerful gesture that they have joined us, and now we can say we are friends in the truest sense,” she adds. 

As a result of one of those assemblies, the idea for the collective march was born, which is now set to become an annual action for as long as the detention centres remain. . 

Activism has also been happening on an institutional level through advocating as a coalition with Italian parliamentary deputies and producing research on the topic. Activists have also been pursuing a legal challenge to the agreement, despite an underwhelming response from EU legal circles. 

Some wins on individual cases have also been scored when Italian courts or the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against their deportation to Albania, and it has been proven a fruitful avenue, as many of the detainees sent to Albania have been returned. 

The Way Ahead 

With economic development resulting from tourism and construction, the issue of migration, that has always preoccupied public discourse, is now shifting from Albanians as migrants themselves to the country slowly becoming a destination for seasonal and manual labour, as workers from as far as the Philippines or Colombia come to the country in hopes of making a living.

Vatnikaj with her collective have been assisting Nigerian migrants coming to Albania to work highlighting a small shift towards Albania becoming a destination for foreign workers: “It is not uncommon to have their rights violated, so now immigration becomes a more visible phenomenon and for us we can demonstrate how exploitation and abuse can manifest in the Balkans”. 

Whilst activists prepare for further mobilisations, Duma says that it is paramount for them to expose the suffering of those in the migration routes who are often trivialised: “The far right has done a lot of damage by infiltrating people’s minds and making them accept this situation as a positive thing that needs to be done.” 

Vatnikaj adds, ”Between Albanian, Italian and European officials, this agreement is talked about as a success, but to us, activists and ordinary people alike, this is a moral failure.”

Vatnikaj now finds herself disillusioned with the ideals she was raised with. Growing up hearing that in Europe, states respect human rights and civic freedoms, many of these beliefs don’t hold anymore. “As migrants, we have experienced abuse, discrimination and racism abroad, and it is hard for me to believe that our country is now doing the same,” says Vatnikaj. 

Emerging from a decades-long dictatorship, many grew up hearing phrases such as “Albania needs to be part of Europe because Europe is a Utopia. Europe is the dream,” because of the presumed respect for democracy, prosperity and freedom. “Now that we see how those in the margins are treated, we don’t really have any state to look up to as the blueprint for all those freedoms. It feels like we lost our dream,” Vatnikaj explains.

With Western countries looking to expand and emulate this model, this is an uphill battle. The deal between Italy and Albania is not the first attempt by an EU government to use a third country as a return hub. In attempts to externalise asylum and create offshore processing centres, after a short-lived arrangement with Rwanda, the UK is courting Macedonia, after being rejected by Albania for a similar arrangement. In that dim backdrop, activists continue their fight. 

The post “These Camps Were Built for our Parents”: Albanian Activists Resist Italy’s Offshore Detention Experiment appeared first on Untold.

Then he told the room what SpaceX is actually for: “We want to make Star Trek real. We want to make Starfleet Academy real.” 

This was not an aside. It was a mission statement, delivered to the people who sign US defense checks. He went on to describe a future of “big spaceships” exploring alien civilizations. “That is the goal!” he said. “And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!”

The speech was revealing – not for what it promised, but for what it concealed. It was the clearest example yet of a pattern that has been building for decades: Silicon Valley’s tech elite borrowing the ideas, images, and authority of science fiction while throwing out everything that made those stories politically meaningful. 

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, in their recent book Muskism, argue that the right question is not “who is Musk?” but “what is Musk a symptom of?” – treating him not as an individual but as the representative of a whole worldview, just as we speak of “Fordism”. That worldview is expressed through science fiction: not as decoration, but as the medium that makes its accumulation strategies feel natural, necessary, and inevitable. This is not to say that Science Fiction precedes or causes these projects – it is part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions become thinkable and certain power grabs feel like common sense.

No example makes this clearer than Musk’s own words. Because Star Trek, the franchise he claims to be bringing to life, stands for almost everything he and SpaceX are not.

In Gene Roddenberry’s vision, the future is not built by billionaires or defense contractors. The United Federation of Planets has abolished money. Humanity has left capitalism, nationalism, and militarism behind. The Enterprise does not explore space for profit or military advantage; it explores for knowledge, diplomacy, and shared understanding. Starfleet is not an army; it is a peacekeeping and science organization. This is not background detail. It is the whole point of Star Trek.

Strategic Looting

What Musk is doing – what Silicon Valley has perfected – is what I call “strategic looting.” They take the look and feel of science fiction while throwing out its politics. They want the Enterprise, but with defense contracts. They want the warp drive, but not the equal society that made it possible. They want the adventure, but not the social change that gave it meaning.

Musk is not alone in this. It is how the whole tech industry operates. These companies have learned that science fiction’s hopeful imagery can be put to work while its warnings are quietly ignored.

Peter Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir after the all-seeing stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – objects used by those hungry for power. Tolkien wrote them as instruments of corruption; Thiel turned them into a brand for a company whose main early investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and whose business is selling mass surveillance to governments and militaries. The goal, as Slobodian and Tarnoff show, was never to escape the state but to vassalize it: to make the government’s exercise of power dependent on purchasing services from a private monopoly. The look is borrowed. The warning is thrown away. The contract is signed.

A Manifesto for Silicon Valley

The depth of this project has now been made explicit. In April 2026, Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto on X – a condensed version of CEO Alex Karp and head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska’s book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, which racked up 35 million views in days. 

The document calls for reinstating the military draft, declares that Silicon Valley owes a “moral debt” to the United States, argues that the “engineering elite” must build AI weapons rather than “obsession-driven apps,” and dismisses non-Western cultures as “middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” 

As I argue at length in a recent article in Science as Culture, the book is not really philosophy. It is a sales pitch. Establish that Silicon Valley owes a debt to the American state. Call out Google, Amazon, and Meta as companies that wasted that debt building social media. Present Palantir as the one company that actually paid up. The conclusion follows: Palantir is not just a tech firm – it is the rightful heir to state power. 

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat put it plainly: 

“Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration and police agencies. These 22 points aren’t philosophy floating in space; they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.” 

The Tolkien name provides the mythology. The manifesto provides the politics. The defense contracts provide the money.

In each case, the pattern is the same: take the technology, the imagery, the sense that the future is inevitable. Throw out the warnings, the criticism, the politics that gave those stories their meaning. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) invented the word “cyberspace” and imagined it as a corporate battleground where human beings are just another resource to be mined – that vision becomes a product demo. Foundation’s galactic civilization becomes a justification for private space colonies. And now, Star Trek’s dream of humanity working together becomes a pitch to generals.

Materialized Science Fiction

The setting of Musk’s speech matters. He was not at a fan convention or a tech conference. He was speaking to the people who run the US military and decide where its money goes. When he said Space Force should make people think of Star Trek, he was not talking about exploration. He was pitching a military vision wrapped in the language of a show millions of people love.

This is “materialized science fiction”: the process by which science fiction stories are turned into real projects, with their original meaning stripped out and replaced with something that serves those already in power. These tech billionaires do not misread their source material by accident. They understand it well enough to know exactly which parts to keep and which to discard. The distortion is deliberate.

Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism offers the most rigorous account yet of what this political project looks like in practice. By 2025, they show, SpaceX accounted for 95 percent of all orbital launches in the United States – a position that made the Pentagon and NASA “deeply reliant on Musk,” making SpaceX the de facto gatekeeper for government access to low Earth orbit. They call the endpoint of this logic “sovereignty-as-a-service”: “the logic of the modern internet platform, scaled up to the level of the nation state”. 

The wager of Muskism, they write, is that “sovereignty, going forward, will be infrastructural before it is territorial — defined by access to bandwidth, compute, launch cadence, and orbital real estate as much as by borders and bureaucracies”. What is sold as independence through technology is, in practice, entry into Musk’s walled garden – to which he holds the master key. 

Their analysis is indispensable. But my argument here goes one step further. For Slobodian and Tarnoff, science fiction functions primarily as what they call “financial fabulism” – “science fiction in the mouth of the right entrepreneur could conjure capital from thin air”. That is true as far as it goes. The argument here is that Science Fiction does not only conjure capital at the pitch stage; it continues to accompany and amplify the accumulation strategies as they unfold – part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions remain thinkable, certain power grabs feel like common sense, and certain futures get built while others get closed off. 

Muskism names the symptom. Materialized science fiction explains one of the mechanisms by which it reproduces itself. 

A Tool for Grabbing Power

In a recent essay, Slobodian and Tarnoff push the argument further: where Fordism offered mass consumption and post-Fordism offered financialized aspiration, Muskism offers something qualitatively different. Not a social contract but what they call a “fan contract” – loyalty rewarded with amplified reach and a share of the attention economy, combined with the threat of expulsion for those marked as outside the walls. If Fordism and post-Fordism were, in different ways, organized to secure social peace, Muskism, they argue, is oriented toward social war.

What connects Thiel’s surveillance business, Zuckerberg’s digital world, Andreessen’s push against regulation, and Musk’s military space programme is not just a love of science fiction. It is a shared political goal: replacing democratic control with tech industry control, and using borrowed science fiction prestige to make that look acceptable. In their hands, science fiction stops being a literature of hope and becomes a tool for grabbing power.

Star Trek’s Federation was not built by tech billionaires or defense contractors. It came from humanity choosing, together, to cooperate rather than compete, to share rather than exploit. That choice came after humanity nearly destroyed itself. The Enterprise does not fly to escape Earth’s problems. It flies because those problems have already been solved.

Musk’s version turns this inside out. His spaceships are not a reward for fixing things here. They are a way to avoid fixing them. Why tackle climate change when you can go to Mars? Why fight inequality when you can promise abundance in space? Why repair democracy when you can build a private kingdom on another planet? 

A Guest List for the Few

As Slobodian and Tarnoff observe, Mars functions in Muskism as a “failover mechanism” for the civilizational collapse Musk learned to expect from science fiction – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens with the destruction of Earth; Asimov’s Foundation begins with the collapse of a galactic empire. 

As the Argentine novelist Michel Nieva argues, the appeal of Mars to Musk is not solving the problems of capitalism but relocating its logic to a new address. And as The Atlantic has reported, the question of who boards the Starship is not rhetorical – it runs directly through Musk’s pronatalist politics, his amplification of eugenicist accounts, and his dismantling of USAID while children died in South Sudan. 

Slobodian and Tarnoff go further: Musk is an indicator species for a broader Silicon Valley vision of a post-human future in which humans merge with machines, are gradually supplanted by AI, and the colonization of space is carried out not by people but by “cyborgified” organisms that are only distantly human. The guest list for the Starship, it turns out, may not include humanity at all. 

There is an additional irony here. The historian Jill Lepore has shown that Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the BBC in 1977 with an explicit target in mind: the mega-rich and their privately owned rockets, settling colonies on other planets because no world was ever quite good enough. The typewriter Adams used had a sticker on it. It read: “END APARTHEID.” Musk grew up in Pretoria listening to the same BBC broadcast, claims the book as a formative influence, and is now building exactly what Adams was satirising. 

The science fiction story gives cover for walking away from the present. It also, it turns out, comes with a guest list.

From Utopia to Pitch Deck

When the world’s richest man stands before military leaders and says he wants to make Star Trek real, he is not being a fan. He is doing politics – winning contracts, shaping policy, building support for a vision that has very little to do with Roddenberry and everything to do with power. The audience was not the public. It was the people who control the defense budget.

Musk used Star Trek’s imagery because it carries weight: it makes privatized space exploration sound like a shared human adventure rather than a billionaire’s project. It makes working with the military sound like boldly going where no one has gone before. The same logic governed DOGE. To explain his approach to dismantling the federal bureaucracy, Musk cited Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: in the film, Captain Kirk wins an unwinnable training simulation by reprogramming it. “The only way to achieve success,” Musk said, “is to reprogram the matrix such that success is one of the possible outcomes. That’s what we’re doing”. The same logic runs across the whole industry.

The irony is that Star Trek saw this coming. The Ferengi – a species that puts profit above everything – were written as a warning, not a model. The Borg – a collective that strips away individual freedom – were the opposite of everything the Federation stands for. Corporate-run worlds were shown as places to be feared.

None of this means pretending Star Trek had no flaws. Critics, most notably the media scholar Daniel Bernardi, have rightly pointed out that the Federation’s vision of universal values often looked like American values in disguise – that its “we come in peace” approach echoed the language of the very colonialism it claimed to have left behind, and that alien cultures were usually judged against a human, Western standard. 

That criticism is fair. But even a flawed utopia contains more political imagination than a defense contractor’s pitch deck. The question is not whether Star Trek was perfect. It is what gets lost – and what gets used as a weapon – when even its imperfect values are stripped away.

This is what materialized science fiction looks like from the inside: not the utopia the stories promised, but the infrastructure of a political project that has no use for utopia. And yet here we are: a tech elite pitching Star Trek to defense contractors while running companies that harvest data like a natural resource, treat workers as replaceable, and fight every attempt at oversight. They have cut these stories open, taken the parts that suit them, and thrown away everything else.

Until the politics catch up with the aesthetics, what we are getting is not science fiction made real. It is a small group of very powerful people using science fiction’s authority to close off the futures it once imagined – billionaires in borrowed costumes, acting out the adventure while gutting the story that made it worth telling.

The post Billionaires in Borrowed Costumes: How Silicon Valley Loots Science Fiction to Justify Its Power Grab appeared first on Untold.

Imagine this: you’re sitting at home watching the news. An employee in a major beverage company is coming out of the courthouse in an ongoing, much publicized legal battle with her employers. All she did was inform government officials of a specific component that has been added to a recent product without proper tests. After going through the proper channels and filing a complaint at the company, she was told that it would be investigated, but nothing happened. 

She took action. Because someone had to.

The company argues that she signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prevents any employee from divulging trade secrets. Her lawyers counter that when it comes to public health, NDAs are not legally (nor ethically) binding. 

You have been following this case from the start, and you’re waiting for the court-ordered independent lab results to settle the matter. 

Now, ask yourself this: which part of that scenario did you care about most? You’d only be human if the first thing that came to mind was personal interest. When it is a health-related topic, everyone’s first priority is – and should be –  their own. The second thing might be a coin-toss between how the court would penalize the company if wrongdoing was proven, and how government officials would try to revise laws on food additives.

Coming last would be the employee who reported it. Why? Because we all assume she’ll be fine.  She actually did the right thing and her actions will save lives. If the courts rule in her favor, she’ll be lauded as a heroine. She presented evidence: lab results, testimonies, and her own eyewitness account. What more is there to think about?

She’ll be fine.

And you’d be right to think that way. In the United States, whistleblowers in the food industry are protected under the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The company can’t retaliate against her in any way for whistleblowing: by dismissal, demotion, or transfer. Should that happen, she’d be within her legal right to file a complaint, win it, and likely be compensated and reinstated back to her position.

Let’s use the same scenario but shift the industry; this time it’s an AI company. Here, the story takes a different arc. 

The common theme among AI whistleblowers differs from that of the food and beverage industry. In the absence of clear laws and reporting channels, the decision to speak out against AI industry giants is often weighed against livelihood, personal and professional reputation, and, in one case, life itself.

Stories from the AI Trenches

Sounding the alarm takes not just evidence, but courage and a firm moral belief that you’re doing the right thing: telling the truth. 

Meet a few brave individuals who faced hard obstacles to let the world know what goes on behind closed lab doors.

Leopold Aschenbrenner: Former OpenAI safety researcher, fired from his position for allegedly sharing documents externally. He warned of “egregiously insufficient” security against foreign threats, citing OpenAI’s failure to adequately protect critical algorithmic information and model weights. He became an advocate, urging a shift away from fast, unsafe deployment towards robust safety measures.

Suchir Balaji: Former researcher at OpenAI and perhaps the most tragic story on this list. He resigned in August 2024 after stating the company’s use of copyrighted material violated U.S. law and posed commercial harm to creators. He was set to testify in intellectual property lawsuits against OpenAI; but was tragically found dead by suicide on November 26, 2024. 

Timnit Gebru: Co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, dismissed in 2020 after writing a research paper that exposed how current AI training methods could deepen biases against minorities and marginalized communities. Her dismissal gained widespread coverage, exposing corporate retaliation, prompting her to found the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).

Louis Hunt: Former CFO and VP of Business Development at Liquid AI. He resigned from his position and publicly challenged the claim that AI models don’t replicate copyrighted works. He  presented evidence of generated outputs that were exact copies of texts from The New York Times, Stephen King’s books, and Harvard Business Publishing articles.

Margaret Mitchell: Founder and co-lead of Google AI ethics unit who was fired in 2021 for alleged misconduct. She testified in the September 2024 Senate hearing on AI oversight, stressing the need for clear instructions to employees navigating NDAs, and accessible whistleblowing channels to provide support to those who wish to come forward with their concerns.

William Saunders: Ex-OpenAI technical staff member who testified at the September 2024 Senate hearing. He advised on: 1) establishing a list of government contacts who understood the reported issues and could act on them, and 2) identifying legal protections insiders need when flagging actions that don’t break laws, but put public safety at risk.

Helen Toner: Former OpenAI board member on the nonprofit arm, who testified at the September 2024 Senate hearing. She highlighted how vagueness in current AI whistleblower laws discourages people from coming forward, specifically those with complaints about AI development that often don’t fit existing legal categories designed for traditional industries.

Anonymous and Named Whistleblowers: Group of eleven-thirteen current and former employees at leading AI companies who in June 2024 wrote an open letter “Right to Warn” calling for principles to create a safe environment for employees to voice their concerns on potential risks. In July 2024, they filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requesting an investigation into how NDAs restrict scrutiny of safety behaviors (e.g., the rushed testing of GPT-4o). 

This list is not exhaustive, many more names can be mentioned, including, David Evan Harris, Jacob Hilton, Geoffrey Hinton, Daniel Kokotajlo, Ramana Kumar, Jan Leike, Neel Nanda, Carroll Wainwright, and Daniel Ziegler, among others. 

Why Blow the Whistle

Merriam-Webster defines a whistleblower as “an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or by other employees to the attention of a government or law enforcement agency,” followed by the following note: “A whistleblower is commonly protected legally from retaliation.” 

If we analyze the stories above based on that definition, we see events unfolding in two stages. Stage One: the employee notices wrongdoing and first reports it internally. When the response from the company dismisses the complaint or addresses it inadequately, the employee either reports their concerns to the government/the media or publishes their findings as independent research.

The complaints themselves span a wide range, from ethical and governance concerns to more technical issues of alignment and safety. In addition, the alarms raised aren’t about one company’s specific attitude towards AI training, testing, and deployment; they bring to light an industry-wide, systemic pattern of behavior that if left unchecked could lead to non-reversable consequences.

For an insider to have that first-hand experience and courage to go through the steps to prevent such dangers, their actions should be celebrated as a reflection of moral integrity, not cause for retaliation. This brings us to the second part of the definition where the key term is “commonly protected”. Commonly means usually/often and that is an apt description in the case of AI whistleblowers. 

Stage Two is where we fail them, because there is simply no protection. The stories show that all of them lost their jobs, either by dismissal (with or without stated reasons) or through resignation (as a form of protest). They became industry pariahs just for speaking up, and some couldn’t find employment immediately after their stories broke out. 

If you’re an employee in an AI frontier company and read about the consequences faced by those who actually wanted to help, would you risk your career/livelihood, your industry standing, and your future to report AI risks? 

Nuclear Whistleblowing as a Model

In recent years, AI research has seen a surge in academic papers, books, interviews, and podcasts that wrestle with growing safety concerns. These works highlight AI’s dual-use and emphasize its black box nature – the opaque decision-making processes that continue to baffle even the scientists building these systems. 

In response, many AI governance and ethics experts compare the risks posed by advanced AI systems to those of the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) materials and agents in their severity and potential for catastrophic and even existential harm.

Therefore, as a model for the AI industry, I turn to the nuclear field. Its whistleblower laws and regulatory frameworks have long maintained vigilant oversight over both plant operations and worker safety.

The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 (ERA) established the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which regulates civilian (not military) nuclear facilities and materials. The Act was substantially strengthened in 1992 through the Comprehensive National Energy Policy Act, which added significant whistleblower protections including Section 211.

The key provisions in this amendment include the following:

1. It defines the protected activities for which employees cannot face discrimination. 
2. It establishes a clear complaint and investigation process for whistleblowers who face retaliation. 
3. It requires that these protections be posted permanently in the workplace for constant employee access
4. It directs the NRC or the Department of Energy (DOE) to conduct swift investigations into whistleblower allegations of substantial safety hazards.

Here are examples of how this works in practice:

In May 2013, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found that Enercon Services Inc. wrongfully fired a senior engineer at Wolf Creek Generating Station for reporting safety violations. The engineer’s employment had been terminated in January 2012 after pointing out that soil coverage for buried safety pipes didn’t meet federal requirements. He was also asked to write a report justifying inadequate backfill material, but he refused.

OSHA ordered the company to reinstate the engineer with back pay, benefits, and compensatory damages. Enercon appealed, claiming the termination was for legitimate business reasons, but investigators found the engineer’s concerns were valid and that the field errors weren’t his fault.

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a comprehensive review of DOE whistleblower protections and found that while the legal framework exists, enforcement and implementation needed strengthening. The report’s six recommendations, which were mostly accepted, demonstrate that Nuclear whistleblower protections are actively monitored, regularly evaluated, and continuously improved to address gaps, and ensure the law’s promise is realized.

In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Murray v. UBS Securities that whistleblowers under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) don’t need to prove their employer intended to retaliate. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals had required plaintiffs to prove employer’s intent, but the Supreme Court vacated that decision. It held that if an employer treats someone worse (by firing, demoting, or changing their working conditions) because of whistleblowing (a protected activity), that constitutes a violation. The employer’s motivation is irrelevant.

This ruling is significant because the Supreme Court noted that the Energy Reorganization Act protections already worked this way. Under ERA, whistleblowers only need to show their protected activity was a factor in the adverse action. Then the employer must prove by clear and convincing evidence they would have taken the same action anyway. The Murray decision reinforced what nuclear whistleblowers already have: strong legal protections that shift the burden away from those who speak out.

The established path for Nuclear whistleblowers could serve as a blueprint for their AI colleagues, who operate in a similarly high-risk domain.

The Push for AI Whistleblower Protection: A Timeline

We now have a question: if AI risks are widely acknowledged as severe, from systemic bias to existential threat, why does the law still fail to protect those who report these risks? The answer is quite simple: existing legal frameworks typically require evidence of fraud or illegality – thresholds that may not encompass AI safety concerns. This leaves insiders vulnerable as they attempt to alert the public and policymakers. 

The following timeline traces key events from 2024 to 2025 that have shaped the need for whistleblower protection. 

In May 2024, news of OpenAI’s restrictive NDAs became known. Following public criticism, CEO Sam Altman admitted he was unaware of their extent and expressed embarrassment. He confirmed the company’s revisions of these agreements to remove provisions that threatened to deprive departing employees of their vested equity. This acknowledgment came after reports that OpenAI’s NDAs prohibited ex-employees from criticizing the company or disclosing safety concerns, sparking broader scrutiny of AI industry practices.

In June, thirteen current and former AI employees wrote an open letter “Right to Warn” urging frontier AI companies to promote an environment of safety-first in AI development and deployment. They stressed the current practice of forcing new hires to sign an NDA, the terms of which demand that they cannot voice concerns or disparage the company, even after leaving.

Moreover, they raised the point of widespread retaliation against whistleblowers, which adds to the growing concern that AI companies fear losing funding and investments more than protecting humanity from a technology that could possibly destroy it. By not allowing criticism, the companies silence well-meaning experts who could steer innovation in the right direction.

On July 1, the same group filed a formal complaint to SEC’s chairman Gary Gensler and to Senator Chuck Grassley’s office. In it, they provided evidence that OpenAI’s NDAs were restrictive to any protected disclosures of concerns related to AI safety, and asked the chairman to conduct an investigation into whether that practice broke SEC rules.

On July 31, OpenAI sent a letter to senators outlining robust safety measures, including dedicating 20% of computing resources to safety efforts like red-teaming and risk evaluations. The letter also affirmed support for whistleblower protections by introducing anonymous reporting options, for example: the Integrity Line.

On August 1, Sen. Grassley sent a letter to Sam Altman demanding answers about OpenAI’s restrictive NDAs with a deadline of August 15. The questions included:

1. Whether OpenAI changed the restrictive language of their NDAs, and provide proof of it.
2. The number of employees who requested to contact federal authorities, including all the relevant details.
3. The number of SEC investigations into OpenAI, including basis and outcome.

Sen. Grassley’s aim was to identify the purpose of the NDAs: whether it is for protecting trade secrets, or preventing employees from voicing their concerns.

On September 17, Sen. Blumenthal chaired a hearing by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. He and several senators heard testimonies from, and directed questions to, expert witnesses on current AI regulations from an insider’s perspective. The hearing covered topics relevant to AI safety implementation and whistleblower protection.

At the start of 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14179 in January titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” which revoked Biden’s AI safety order (EO 14110 of 2023). The new EO mandated the creation of an AI action plan within 180 days, and explicitly set the policy of maintaining U.S. “AI dominance” by removing regulatory barriers to innovation. This shift in policy marked a decisive turn towards deregulation, one that positioned acceleration as a national priority.

In May, Sen. Grassley and bipartisan cosponsors introduced the “AI Whistleblower Protection Act” (S. 1792) in response to mounting concerns about retaliation against AI employees who raise safety issues. The bill would prohibit retaliation against both employees and independent contractors who report AI security vulnerabilities or safety violations. As of October 2025, the bill has yet to advance beyond the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Following the executive order mandate, the White House released the AI Action Plan in July. It advances the deregulatory vision by explicitly prioritizing speed and innovation, while dismantling what it calls “onerous regulation” and “bureaucratic red tape.” By eliminating safety requirements, the plan effectively grants the private sector carte blanche to accelerate AI deployment with minimal oversight.

In October, California passed SB-53 “Transparency in Frontier AI Act”, the first U.S. state law establishing frontier AI transparency and whistleblower protections. Among other provisions, SB-53 introduces direct whistleblower protections for covered employees tasked with assessing or managing critical safety risks:

• It mandates that large AI developers establish anonymous reporting channels.
• Employees are shielded from retaliation when using these channels or when reporting externally to state or federal authorities.
• Protection applies when the whistleblower reasonably believes their employer’s actions pose a substantial threat to public health or safety; especially in cases involving catastrophic risk.

These provisions mark a shift from viewing whistleblowers as disruptors to recognizing them as vital protectors of public interest.

From corporate controversies to whistleblower advocacy and legislative breakthroughs, the road to stronger safeguards has been anything but easy, especially when the drive for rapid deployment outweighs the call for scrutiny. Yet through the combined efforts of courageous individuals and responsive institutions, robust protections are finally within reach.

Line of Defense

In her testimony at the September 17 2024 Senate hearing, Dr Mitchell compared AI training to baking:

“With Data as essentially ingredients, training is cooking, and the model is the output … we’re missing an approach where we have recipes, a deep understanding of what the pieces are that result in this output.”

In a landscape where the builders themselves don’t fully grasp the systems they create, insider disclosures may be the only path to effective regulation.

As the race to develop and deploy AI accelerates, safety and alignment concerns take a back seat at frontier companies. Governance frameworks are racing to catch up by creating laws and policies to protect public welfare, but the gap between innovation and governance remains wide. We need whistleblowers now more than ever. 

But how can we rely on insiders to shield us from high-stakes AI failures when they lack industry-wide protections and remain vulnerable to retaliation? Whistleblowers are our primary line of defense in this field. But shields need protection too. Without enforceable legal guarantees, we’re asking people to make sacrifices they shouldn’t have to.

Where is the justice in that?

The post Whistleblowing as a Shield: Protecting the Voices That Keep AI Safe  appeared first on Untold.

The mass mobilizations challenged autocratic structures, thereby disrupting or attempting to disrupt hegemonic state-society relations and catalyzing a shift towards participatory contestation and demands for democratic reform. 

The new context of heightened socio-political volatility was exploited by regime elites and non-state actors, particularly fascist and fundamentalist factions, to proliferate discourses based on othering, social conservatism and ultra-nationalism often reinforced through securitization regimes, the proliferation of digital surveillance, and restrictive legislation. 

What emerges is a form of digital fascism: the algorithmic extension of state power that invisibly shapes public discourse, weaponizes data and not only silences dissent but also “preemptively works to erase the very possibility of rebellion”.

Social media, Hate Speech and Anti-Black Violence in Tunisia 

Anti-rights ideologies in the SWANA region, including anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, are interconnected with far-right currents in the global north, as seen for example in the alignment between Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. This ideological synergy is reinforced through formal political cooperation: Meloni’s visits to Tunis and EU-led negotiations on “enhanced cooperation on migration management” illustrate how European powers leverage Tunisia’s economic and political vulnerabilities to outsource border control. 

In practice, these anti-rights ideologies are not merely rhetorical: they translate into concrete state-sanctioned repression. While Meloni has mobilized fears of demographic change and the influx of ‘illegal’ immigration to consolidate power in Italy, President Kaïs Saied has adapted parallel narratives to target Black African migrants within Tunisia. 

Saied’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric, including his February 2023 speech describing “hordes of irregular migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa” as part of a criminal plan to alter Tunisia’s demographics, triggered widespread anti-Black violence, with mobs attacking migrants and asylum seekers and police complicit in arbitrary arrests and deportations. Social media amplified these narratives, providing platforms for hate speech and conspiratorial ideologies, particularly those propagated by groups like the Tunisian Nationalist Party. The combination of state-sanctioned incitement, online amplification, and impunity for perpetrators has created an environment where egregious anti-Black violence is normalized.

One of the most critical issues fueling technoviolence is the inadequacy of content moderation systems, especially those relying heavily on automation. In the region, the linguistic complexity of dialects such as the Maghrebi Arabic dialects confounds these systems. Internal Facebook surveys reveal that only 6% of hate speech in the SWANA region was detected by Instagram’s automated moderation. Such a failure could be explained, as per the findings of Mona Elswah’s 2024 report Moderating Maghrebi Arabic Content on Social Media, by the lack of diversity in natural language processing teams that develop automated content moderation systems at social media companies, combined with insufficient training datasets for Maghrebi Arabic dialects and the recruitment of non-native annotators.

Livestreaming Death in Sudan

In the meantime, Meta has become even less safe. In early 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a series of policy changes including the “simplification” of content policies, removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, ending its third-party fact-checking program, and relaxing its filtering algorithms. While these changes were framed as promoting free expression, Amnesty International echoed the warnings of various human rights experts who have raised concerns about Meta’s role in fuelling mass violence and genocide in fragile and conflict-affected societies. Researchers have highlighted that these rollbacks could be particularly dangerous in fragile democracies and conflict contexts, where the absence of fact-checking and robust moderation allows political actors, state-backed influencers, and coordinated campaigns to exploit social media for harassment, racialized violence, and disinformation.

A recent investigation by Sudanese independent platform Beam Reports revealed how the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan are using TikTok to glorify atrocities during the genocide in Darfur. Following the takeover of Al-Fashir, RSF fighters committed widespread massacres and civilian-targeted violence have occurred, with fighters like the notorious commander “Abu Lulu” openly boasting on TikTok Live about killing thousands. These livestreams, often featuring RSF uniforms and direct claims of violence, attract thousands of viewers who send virtual gifts and comments praising the attacks. Clips are then reshared across TikTok, Facebook, X (Twitter), and Telegram. 

TikTok’s platform and algorithms have played a central role in amplifying these atrocities. Despite earlier warnings from Sudalytica in May 2025 about monetized hate speech and propaganda networks, the company has mostly failed to remove accounts or moderate content in Sudan. According to Beam Reports co-founder Raghd Orsud, while TikTok has banned RSF commander Abu Lulu’s account following the report, the broader harm persists, as months of atrocity-glorifying and hate content spread unchecked. Orsud clarifies how a single takedown is insufficient and calls for systemic action: “TikTok must deploy moderation teams fluent in Sudanese Arabic, establish a crisis-response channel for Sudan, preserve and securely archive violating content for accountability while preventing further spread, and proactively block re-uploads”.

The Complicity of Big Tech in Palestine 

In Palestine, researchers and digital rights advocates have documented a longstanding pattern of systemic censorship and bias on Meta platforms, which disproportionately removes Palestinian content while under-moderating hate speech and dehumanizing rhetoric targeting Palestinians, as 7amleh and Sada Social reported. This includes the deletion of posts documenting war crimes, photos of victims, and even content flagged simply for including Palestinian symbols, while similar content from Israeli sources often remains untouched. As documented by Palestinian organizations 7amleh and Sada Social, and highlighted in the 2021 Business for Responsibility (BSR) report and subsequent advocacy by the Stop Silencing Palestine coalition, these practices are embedded within the company’s algorithms and policies, reinforced by high compliance with Israeli government takedown requests. 

A more recent report by 7amleh criticizes Meta for failing to adequately protect Palestinians from incitement and hate speech in Hebrew. It highlights that Meta’s policies are biased and have contributed to enabling harmful discourse during Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza. The report also points out Meta’s disregard for the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice on January 26, 2024, which explicitly called for preventing and punishing “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”.

Social media platforms’ role is embedded in the “Empire stack”, where Big Tech operates in tandem with state power, extending digital forms of domination. This alliance merges with the interests of the military-industrial complex, and in the SWANA region, technologies are not only tested on marginalized populations but also generate enormous profit, as these tools are then marketed and exported to governments and security agencies around the world. 

The region has been both a laboratory and a lucrative marketplace for powerful corporations, profiting from the global circulation of surveillance systems, predictive policing tools, and AI-enabled warfare technologies, a dynamic that has fueled the accelerating AI arms race, where innovations tested in the region are deployed worldwide in both military and civilian contexts.

Silicon Valley has been actively enabling Israel’s occupation and genocide of Palestinians by recruiting Unit 8200 veterans, investing in Israeli surveillance and AI-driven military technologies, and integrating these tools into global cloud and cybersecurity infrastructure. Grassroots worker-led advocacy initiatives such as No Tech for Apartheid and NoAzure for Apartheid have emerged to challenge the complicity of Big Tech in apartheid, settler-colonialism and genocide particularly in Palestine, calling on companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to end all ties to the Israeli military.

In August 2025, an investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealed that Israel’s Unit 8200 was using Microsoft’s Azure cloud to collect and analyze vast amounts of Palestinian phone communications in Gaza and the West Bank. Following the report and protests by human rights organizations and the No Azure for Apartheid campaign, Microsoft announced on September 25 that it had suspended certain subscriptions and access to its cloud and AI services for the military unit while reviewing the allegations. 

While Microsoft’s decision to disable specific Israeli military subscriptions and services in response to the Guardian’s reporting was welcomed by human rights NGOs as a positive step, it remains insufficient. The organizations have called on Microsoft to conduct a comprehensive review of all its business relationships with Israeli government and military bodies, suspend or terminate any products or services contributing to human rights abuses, increase transparency about its due diligence and the scope of its review, and rigorously apply its AI and acceptable use policies to ensure it does not become complicit in mass surveillance, targeting of civilians, or other violations of international law. 

However, efforts to hold Big Tech accountable remain limited, as documents published in October 2025 revealed that when Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government in 2021 (Project Nimbus), they agreed to extraordinary terms, including a secret “winking mechanism”, intended to circumvent legal obligations in other countries while ensuring uninterrupted access for Israeli government and security agencies. Another recent example comes from internal Meta documents shared by whistleblowers, which show that the company repeatedly downplayed and buried research demonstrating the harmful effects of its platforms further highlighting the depth of Big Tech complicity in human rights abuses and the limitations of accountability and tech justice efforts.

In the words of Nadine Moawad, in a region like SWANA, “tech policy problems are compounded with a litany of daily struggles, most devastating of these being occupation, war, conflict, and displacement which affects, we sometimes forget, two billion people, a quarter of the world’s population. People Like Us are often, sadly, irrelevant to or tokenized in global policy”.

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In April 2025, Microsoft’s President, Brad Smith, pledged to challenge “any government” that requested his company to suspend its services in specific countries, alluding to threats from the Trump administration within its trade war. However, Smith’s promises were put to the test just one month later. In May, the President of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, and a number of his colleagues discovered that Microsoft had blocked their access to email accounts hosted on its servers. This blockade was implemented in compliance with Trump’s decision to place Karim Khan and all ICC staff on a sanctions list managed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under the US Department of the Treasury.

The United States has long weaponized the OFAC sanctions list to isolate individuals and companies from the global financial system and global internet services. This is done by leveraging the influence and dominance of US-based companies over critical internet infrastructure, including hosting services, data centers, and undersea cables. However, this list expanded after October 7th, as the Trump administration actively targeted institutions and individuals working to document the genocide and prosecute the crimes of the Zionist occupation.

Just as Microsoft froze the email accounts of ICC staff in compliance with OFAC sanctions, other US-based big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta also froze the online accounts of numerous Palestinian institutions after the US administration listed them on the OFAC list— accused of supporting Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 2024 alone, the number of individuals and entities designated by OFAC as “Specially Designated Nationals” increased by 25% compared to 2023. Even the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, was not spared from this list after publishing her report “From an Occupation Economy to an Economy of Genocide,” under the pretext of her relations with the International Criminal Court.

As the internet has become increasingly central to strategic and sensitive national infrastructures worldwide, economists and academics have been sounding the alarm for years about the implications of concentrating the ownership of the network’s infrastructure in the hands of a small number of private US-based companies, governed by US laws. But the allure of easy access to hosting and cloud-computing services, coupled with their low cost, meant that these warnings found little resonance among most governments—until Edward Snowden’s 2014 leaks provided evidence of extensive surveillance programs employed by the U.S. government, leveraging its influence over the network through the fact that US companies owned most of the sensitive infrastructure that powers the Internet. At that point, government discourse in Europe, Asia, and Latin America intensified, calling for the importance of gaining independence and asserting national sovereignty over sensitive layers of the Internet infrastructure.

Following the extensive sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia during its war with Ukraine, and the trade war waged by the Trump administration against countries worldwide to tip the scales in the United States’ trade balance favor, official calls for achieving digital “sovereignty” or “independence” reached their peak, encompassing a diverse spectrum of voices. On the left of these calls are human rights and academic institutions advocating for reclaiming infrastructure ownership from private companies by building “public infrastructure” managed by civil institutions. On the right are national governments calling for the imposition of their digital “sovereignty” to kill multiple birds with one stone: developing their economies and extending their control over their populations’ communications and data.

In this article, I attempt to map the landscape of cloud-computing infrastructure—the most central set of services on the Internet—and to trace the discourse of digital “sovereignty” or “independence,” which has grown steadily in recent years. Despite the way major tech companies portray the Internet as a “cloud” where data floats weightlessly, this cloud is in fact embodied in most physical forms of data centers and servers, most of which are owned by a very small number of companies. Contrary to the immateriality implied by the word “cloud,” this data is bound to those servers and data centers, which ultimately fall under the interests of the states and corporations that manage them. I also seek to identify the available spaces that rights-based organizations can turn to start their journey to “digital independence”.

The Hosting and Cloud-Computing Ecosystem

To imagine the ecosystem of companies that control the web and services hosting infrastructure, we can take as an example the chain of requirements for an organization to establish its online presence—such as creating a website, running email services, and setting up cloud storage.

To create a website, an organization must first rent a domain name from an Internet domain-name registrar, then obtain space to host its webpages, an email service, and possibly storage space for its databases and internal files. It may also choose to create pages on social-media platforms, where most online audiences are concentrated today.

Up until the mid-2000s, all these needs could be met through small companies—most based in the United States, with some in Europe—none of which controlled a dominant share of the market. Costs were reasonable in the industrialized North, though relatively high in the rest of the world. But over the years, the market for the requirements of a cyber presence changed significantly, with new patterns of comprehensive services emerging under what came to be known as cloud services.

These services became increasingly concentrated and monopolized by major corporations. For example, by the end of 2024, two US-based companies—GoDaddy and Namecheap—together owned as registrars one-third of the global domain-name market, which had reached 360 million registered domains. Meanwhile, the six largest US companies in this sector collectively held nearly half of all domain names registered worldwide.

The most famous of these domains were those that started with the internet itself, such as .com and .org, referenced as gLTDs (General Top-Level Domains) were then managed by a private US-based company called Network Solutions under a special contract with the U.S. government, until the non-for-profit organization, ICANN was established in 1998. The responsibility of managing domain names moved to ICANN, and the domain names sector consisting of registries and registrars was privatized and transformed into a profitable market.

This sector has undergone changes between 2019 to 2023, as an increase in domain-name registrations has been observed in Asian and African countries, especially country level top-level domains (cLTDs) such as .cn for China, .in for India, and .za for South Africa, alongside a decline in the growth of .com domains.  One of the drivers of this growth is the enactment of laws and strategies by governments in those countries that encourage local domain markets, the localization of hosting services and data centers on their territory, and the encouragement of local private and public sectors to register domains that end with country codes.

As a result of U.S. sanctions, many human rights organizations around the world lost control of their domain names, especially those ending with .org, .net, .com, which they had previously rented from registrars located in the United States. However, while some registrars claim that they are bound to legally comply with US law, NamesCheap arbitrarily revoked the domain name of the website genocide.live owned by Zionism.observer on January 5, 2026 as the website held a digital memorial honoring the victims of Gaza resulting in the removal of 16,000 videos documenting war crimes. According to NamesCheap CEO, violent content of the website violated their terms of service.

After registering a domain name, an organization needs to provide hosting storage for its website, its files, its email, and its archives. In the early expansion of the internet, companies and institutions used to set up and manage their own servers for hosting purposes. Today, just as U.S. companies dominate the domain names market, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively control about 62% of the cloud computing market.

As for countries under sanctions, they were pioneers in building local cloud-computing hosting infrastructure, such as China, where Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent lead the domestic Chinese cloud market (with shares of 33%, 18%, and 10%, respectively). In recent years, Alibaba’s share of the global cloud market has grown to 4%, due to its provision of regional hosting and domain services across Asia.

Just as with domain names, US cloud-computing companies froze the accounts of individuals, organizations, and countries placed on the OFAC list. Sanctioned organizations are forced to turn to cloud-computing providers outside the United States to continue their operations, and many of them lost access to even backups of their websites and databases. Meanwhile, some organizations proactively secured domain names and cloud storage from companies outside the U.S in anticipation of the risk of being placed on sanctions list.

It is important to note that using a non-U.S. service provider whether a domain registrar or a cloud service computing does not inherently shield an entity from OFAC sanctions enforcement. Many registrars outside of the US source their domains through wholesale agreements with U.S.-based registrars, and their agreements could contain clauses that prohibit from servicing parties designated by OFAC. As for cloud computing providers outside of the US, if they have offices or infrastructure located in the US, they are obliged to abide by the sanctions list.  For example, the Canadian-American company Tucows decided to comply with a request from the organization “Lawyers for Israel UK” to suspend the account of the Palestinian institution “Addameer,” due to the company’s offices and servers being in the United States.

If providers don’t have any presence in the US, the matter is governed by the provider terms of service with regards to conditions of removing content or suspending services.Some service providers may also decide to freeze their clients’ accounts without a court order if they believe, based on their personal assessment, that they are hosting content that may support terrorism or incite hatred. On the other hand, some service providers in Europe are fighting legal battles in local courts against decisions to remove content or suspend services on charges such as terrorism or anti-Semitism, as the Icelandic company “1984” is doing by refusing to remove the website “The Mapping Project” after being sued by a Zionist organization.

A Growing Global Debate

The Snowden leaks marked a turning point in the trust of international and local human rights institutions and governments alike in the internet infrastructure controlled by the United States. Official reactions on these leaks where security-centered where the concentration of ownership allowed governments to spy on one another. One of the most prominent reactions was the announcement by then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff of the construction of a submarine data cable between Brazil and Portugal that bypasses the United States. Named EllaLink and completed in 2021, the cable was intended to secure the data and communications of the Brazilian state and its citizens after it was revealed that Dilma was among the heads of state subjected to US espionage according to the leaks. For its part, the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, which forced global companies to implement controls for using and processing European citizens’ data outside European borders, requiring legal permission.

These secret espionage programs, and the ability of the United States’ government to cut off entire populations from the internet’s ecosystem through sanctions, have driven many countries in Asia and Europe, including those friendly to the US, to enact policies and launch projects to build hosting infrastructure seeking greater sovereignty over their communications and their citizens’ data. Some countries developed laws that compel international cloud computing providers to host their citizens’ data in local data centers subject to the countries’ legal jurisdiction, as in the case of Vietnam and Singapore, or through agreements with foreign companies to build a national cloud, as in the case of Malaysia. these policies did not always mean independence from the US-based companies providing these services, as much as they aimed to generate jobs locally, as in the case of Malaysia.

In Europe, although “digital sovereignty” was at the center of discussions in the European Parliament of the European strategy for data in 2020, the Union became alert of the danger of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google controlling 70% of the cloud computing market within the continent. This awareness grew after Trump signed an executive order at the beginning of 2025, clarifying the by laws of the CLOUD Act passed in 2018, which allows US executive agencies to access – via a court order – data centers located outside the United States if they are owned by US-based companies. This contradicts the controls the European Union established via the GDPR for foreign companies processing European data hosted in their centers. As a result, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon rushed to develop internal policies guaranteeing the “sovereignty” of the host countries over their national data stored in their data centers. Microsoft executives later admitted to the French Parliament that the company could not guarantee France’s – or by extension, any EU country’s – sovereignty over its national data or its citizens’ data stored in the company’s data centers in France if the US government requested access via a court order. In Britain, over 50% of tech company leaders expressed in mid of this year a desire to work with local service providers rather than those in the United States.

Today, serious discussions are emerging in the European Union about adopting digital sovereignty strategies not only to protect its citizens’ data but also to catch up in the artificial intelligence race between the United States and China. In addition to the “Europe Digital Strategy” policy, which gives preference to European service providers in government tenders, calls has escalated to “liberating Europe from the digital siege” or urging the development of a plan to control all layers of the infrastructure, starting from the nationalisation of “semiconductor chips” manufacturing to building local data centers and hosting infrastructure.

Towards a Public Cloud Computing Infrastructure?

In the endeavor to dismantle the concentration of ownership over sensitive infrastructure, some human rights institutions and internet governance organizations are raising concerns about granting greater “sovereignty” and influence to local governments over citizens’ data, communications, and websites. This is particularly worrisome in countries that impose high levels of internet and media censorship and run unaccountable surveillance programs on their citizens’ data. Within a group called the “Democratic and Ecological Alliance for Digital Sovereignty,” a number of institutions, academics, lawyers, and rights advocates proposed a roadmap to “reclaim the concept of digital sovereignty.” The roadmap aims to expand the concept of “sovereignty” beyond state control,  which has historically served the economic and political interests of the ruling class and provided a framework for governments to evade accountability and transparency in governance.

The roadmap’s starting point is to redefine the cloud infrastructure that enables cloud computing as “public, state-ledcloud composed of public data centres interconnected through public infrastructure” that serves the public interest of diverse peoples and communities and distributes its economic returns the wider society. According to this roadmap, digital independence will also be achieved by building public infrastructure and platforms such as “public search engine or a public e-commerce market place”, governed by civil society institutions or international bodies (following the model of telecommunications network governance and global postal services). It also involves investing in open research that provides solutions for building public knowledge online for the benefit of society, rather than serving the profit motives of a handful of companies, and establishing restrictions and accountability mechanisms to dismantle government surveillance tools over their citizens’ data.”

Global movements are also emerging, targeting human rights organizations and small businesses to propose alternatives to the solutions and services of major tech companies. This year, the “Rise Against Big Tech” campaign was launched, calling to move away from big tech tools that have contributed to increasing climate change risks, data militarization, and police empowerment. It also advocates for promoting hosting service providers whose values align with cooperation, transparency, and equality.  In addition, some organizations are offering guidance to reduce independence on Google through reverting to self-hosting open-source tools on their own servers, such as daily communication tools (as alternatives to Slack or WhatsApp), storage administration tools, productivity software suites (as alternatives for Google Workplace), or self-hosted VPNs. Some initiatives also propose an “alternative” to social media companies, based on a decentralized hosting structure where social networks communicate directly with each other in a federation called the Fediverse.

Achieving complete independence from US service providers may be a privilege most human rights organizations cannot afford, especially in the Arab region. However, at the same time, reliance on service providers in the United States, especially for organizations documenting war crimes, or working on holding the Israeli occupation accountable, has become a digital existential risk . Therefore, there is no better political moment than the current one to engage in serious discussions within these human rights institutions, on what does it require to begin moving towards “digital independence” using open-source and self-managed tools.

But if there is one practical thing human rights institutions can start with, it is to move their domain, hosting, and email service outside of the United States with providers with terms of services that protect their right to exist online. Between complete dependence on US service providers and complete independence, there are spaces that can be explored to achieve a measure of gradual independence, until the day comes when initiatives emerge that offer infrastructure governed by an international body.

**Tech activist Ahmad Gharbieh reviewed this article and contributed to developing some of its ideas.

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On the technological side, search engines are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence, the World Wide Web by social media apps, while cryptocurrencies keep rising.

The title of the book was inspired by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s work investigating the extractivist, destructive and world-threatening character of contemporary global capitalism. In this context, Lovink maintains that digital platforms and their owners (X, Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber, just to mention a few) have reached a (predictable) point at which their logic of treating the world as “an immense reservoir” is ultimately translated directly into political violence. 

We can see this in different forms: when data collection is used to control borders or target civilians, the trivialisation of violence to normalise it and disturb dissent, and deletion to destroy voices and entire communities.

Enrico De Angelis: The book starts with a consideration: we have already lost the battle to change the techno-social aspects that you described in such detail in your previous work. You say there are no imaginative follow-ups on the horizon, no paradigm shift in sight: “The Universe ignores us”. And yet, while Franco Berardi (who is also included in this dossier) calls for a radical withdrawal to enable the emergence of a new horizon, you propose another approach. Also radical, but you say it is the moment to fight back. What should we do? Wait for the moment to leave the platforms ‘en masse’? Or, as you propose at the end of the book, are there other, smaller steps that can be implemented immediately, even by non-tech-savvy people?

Geert Lovink:  The exodus of social media platforms will have to happen together, as Team Human, for a reason, in an urgent setting. Sadly, this will only be done during a period of shock. Addiction and attachment are real. So far there are no effective strategies for the literally billions of users to voluntarily abandon Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Google. Ever since 2011, when we started our Unlike Us campaign, where we emphasised the unity of social media critique and alternatives, we have known that the individual guilt trip is going nowhere. Nudging is nonsense. We came to the conclusion that platform/app dependency can be overcome with the ‘tools’ approach. Tools that we use and then put aside. There will be an end to the techno-misery: “We want to see the sunshine after the rain.”

Attempts to reduce excessive smartphone time through awareness campaigns, offline weekends, and blocker apps that help you focus did not make a noticeable difference. The consumer behaviour approach is simply the wrong one. The addiction aspect cannot be ignored, but the medical ‘detox’ angle simply doesn’t work in this context. The desire for social connection in a time of loneliness, the growing travel time within urban sprawls, and the coordination issues of meeting others should not be ignored. Do we need Meta and Google for that? We don’t. Getting your phone out in the elevator is a habit. Uncooling the phone will be a task of the generation after Gen Z.

All the above has been known for years—that’s the sad part of this topic. Regression and stagnation are real. As we are still stuck on the platform, we need to be brave to question the exit strategies on offer so far. 

I am confident that Gen Z will be able to revolt—not just to demand a return to access to social media, as was the case in Tibet and other places where authoritarian regimes, in a desperate attempt to remain in power, limited access to certain apps or even cut off the internet as a whole. But their demand was to get the apps back. They could not live without them. We need to leave our sorrow and open radical vibe labs and experiment. Just try stuff. Besides Signal, DuckDuckGo, cryptpad.fr, and more, get inspired by the Facebook Museum of the Utrecht media arts organisation SETUP, a temporary booth installed in the hall of Utrecht Central Station. Or think of Francesca Bria’s Eurostack initiative that showcases the complexity of interrelated levels of tech, from apps to datacentres, when we demand ‘tech sovereignty’. Let’s add more to this list.

EDA: You write that platform brutality is worse than any other media representation of violence because it is remote, invisible, and indirect.

GL: So far, average users do not notice data extraction. We need to learn from the violence debate over the past decades and apply it to the internet field. The start here is the realisation that the ‘free’ and innocent phase, in which we signed a social contract with Silicon Valley, exchanging free access to apps and online services in exchange for our data, is over. A violent turn has happened over the past five years. 

The question is to what extent we will ‘feel’ the abstract and structural violence that is unleashed. This goes beyond the complaints over annoying ads. Many users, primarily young people, are suffering from mental health issues related to 24/7 use of social media. At what point will this damage have a real and physical impact? 

We witness loneliness, depression, apathy and indifference and the rise of right-wing politics, especially among young people, but often this is still perceived as happening elsewhere, to others. Economic uncertainty, mental breakdown and cognitive poverty are such that it is perceived as cool to be conservative (as a virtual mask or psychic armour). 

Platform brutality is the case when all this is no longer happening to others, and real consequences are no longer information that you swipe away.

What happens when structural violence excludes you, but you cannot find out, or do not even notice? You’re out. No carrier. What’s wrong with this app store? Information is made invisible, just for you. You have no access, but have no idea why, or for how long. You do not get a home loan, visa, job, fellowship or discount. It can be discrimination or just an inconvenience. Or getting worse tomorrow, with an impact only much later. 

Randomness is often part of the tech exclusion logic. Search and you will not find; prompt and you will be offered the wrong information—all presented with the best of customer service intentions and impeccable UX design. I have pointed at the sliding scale of violence, from the creation of a profile, the categorisation of one’s identity, nationality, race, face, fingerprints and iris, genes, to the creation of confined groups, the selection and isolation of them, ultimately to the point of expulsion, removal, extradition or even extermination. 

The inflation of the term ‘genocide’ doesn’t help here, as it is solely focused on that very last part, not on the sliding scale we’re all already part of. Social media databases are the most incredible self-created data repositories of one’s preferences, opinions, and social network ever created—and are immediately at the disposal of authoritarian forces, assisted by the Californian Big Brother. 

Take this example that passed by recently: As 404 Media reports, Google has chosen a side in Trump’s mass deportation effort. “Google is hosting an app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officials.”

EDA: From the perspective of social and political movements from the global south, the issue with the platforms can be even more problematic. Let’s take the example of Gaza. On the one hand, as you also remind us, platforms have become directly entangled with the exercise of violence, including their role in deleting content and spreading fake news and bias. At the same time, since mainstream media coverage was also extremely biased, dissent was mainly circulated on those platforms (“TikTok is the problem”). Or, to quote you: “Can event-driven social movements afford to leave behind Big Tech, knowing they own the heads and minds of millennials and Gen Z?” How to respond to this urgency, to the paradox we are all facing? 

GL: Let’s not be moralistic and judge others from a distance. I have and will advocate for decentralised alternatives, but shy away from any suggestion on how people in hardship should communicate. You mention ‘content moderation,’ the infamous US ‘freedom of speech,’ and the censorship by Meta and Google, but the underlying problem there is the tech’s linking of content to IDs. There cannot be dissident content without an encrypted, anonymous delivery mechanism. We need to communicate more and leave less online. A tech renaissance of store-forward? The sky is the limit.

Throughout history, people have given their lives to deliver messages. Please read Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images despite All about four photographs from Auschwitz. As a teenager, my mother smuggled resistance newspapers on her bike in Nazi-occupied Breda. That defined my upbringing. The lesson taught was to fight registration, ID cards and centralised databases (see the chapter on this in Sad by Design). 

The question I have to ask myself is how my generation of what some call ‘internet pioneers’ was allowed to move from pseudonyms and anonymous users to Web 2.0 profiles and rigid ‘real names’ policies (with Google as ‘identity provider’). This is a collective sin, or defeat, if you like. It compromised the word ‘privacy’ for good, which is a travesty on the internet. All this is bad, but it affects people in crisis and war zones the most. What’s evident is the power of the message, regardless of all the petabytes that are collected to be used against us. There’s never an indifference against the signs of life that matter.

EDA: You dedicate the longest chapter to dreams. You say we cannot dream anymore because of social media overstimulation, which crowds our brains and deprives us of the time to ‘digest’ dreams. But dreaming, as you remind us, is crucial when it comes to creating new imaginaries and, therefore, to planning for political change. You launched the “dreamful computing” project, which explicitly tackles this issue. Can you explain what you mean by this expression and how it can be translated into specific practices?

GL: ‘Access to dreams’ is going to be vital for any substantive change. This will be a new era for the interpretation of dreams, that is, no doubt, post-Freudian. However, there is a dark, technological side to this renaissance: the capture and manipulation possibilities that future digital neuroscience will provide. 

To me, the corporate move to enter dreams is summarised in this awful, boring image: their ability to advertise in our dreams. The more material my Sydney friend Ned Rossiter and I collect, the clearer it becomes to us that the dream space will be one of the next Big Tech battlefields. It will be interesting to push the current psychedelic research further – and democratise that field, as it has to be taken back from the pharmaceutical establishment, time and again. 

I follow Erik Davis here, in this context. It is also important to stress the potential of (collective) dreaming that goes beyond the necessary reproduction of the imaginary labour force, and all we have to process during our busy, noisy days. How do you see we can Reclaim the Dream? This is a sincere, open question, as we’re into this not that long. The psychedelic winter was a long one, with generations destroyed by destructive neo-liberal investments into the (online) Self. As Yasha Levine puts it on his Substack in media terms: “The parasocial technology took over from where television left off and pushed society even more radically into an atomised configuration”.

We need to move away from the narcissistic preoccupation, embodied by King Trump. The psycho-political situation even worsens as we enter the phase of techno-fascism, aka techno-feudalism, if you look at it from a political economy perspective. The mental health situation deteriorates so fast that many start to act together. Common tools with real-life gatherings are the answer to this planned isolation. Our dream computing project is part of that movement. “I am dreamin’ man, yes, that’s my problem. I’ll always be a dreaming man, and I don’t have to understand, I know it’s alright.” Neil Young sings while I write this. The helpless state of this dreamin’ man will soon be a thing of the past—that’s for sure.

EDA: At the Institute for Network Cultures you dedicate a lot of attention to tactical media, which for many can appear as almost an obsolete term. How can tactical media be relevant today, in the face of all the techno-social aspects and the invasiveness of the platforms that you describe?

GL: I am not emotionally attached to any term. I believe in the speculative potential of the concepts we design to make a difference, to become machines, to cause long-lasting techno-social effects. When we use the term tactical media today, we do so to strengthen collaborations among hackers, designers, artists, and researchers in social movements. The tactical media approach reminds us to be open to migrating ‘Killroy was here’ aesthetics that wander from one medium to the next, from one locality to the next. This is so powerful today because, most of all, we are stuck on platforms that narrow our visual language, close down dialogue and discussion, and are utterly impossible as mobilisation tools. 

I admit that the guerrilla mode of tactical media makes it hard for resistance to scale up. The tactical media approach believes in the power of sparks, memes, stickers on traffic light poles: subversive signs that give strength to make it through the day. They are known today as copium, which is the opening essay of Platform Brutality. The more depressed a situation, the more powerful humour and irony can become. The more we experiment with the reversal of signs and concepts, the better. Come together and set up spaces. The emphasis should be less on aesthetics and more on tactical forms of organisation outside of platforms. This could be irritating about fluid, non-committing tactics in a time when sustainable self-organisation is needed most.

The post Capitalism, War, and the Violence of Digital Platforms: A Conversation with Geert Lovink appeared first on Untold.

In this conversation, Ozoma discusses her work, the current political situation in the US, how to bring change in the tech industry, and her sources of inspiration. 

Enrico De Angelis: You mentioned in your conversation with Tammarian Rogers that today it would be even more difficult to speak out loud for people who want to denounce cases of discrimination, harassment, or problematic behaviours in the tech industry in the US. Can you elaborate on that, and tell us about the general atmosphere today in your country? 

Ifeoma Ozoma: The reason why I said that is because of what we’ve seen already in the US with our federal government, the State Department, and the White House, taking very targeted retaliatory measures against even green card holders, threatening citizens with the revocation of their passports. So none of the retaliation from the government is hypothetical anymore. We’re seeing it happen all the time. And we’re only hearing about the cases with people who have access to media. 

There are so many more cases that I’m sure we haven’t heard about and we may never hear about because they’re people who are less resourced, which is exactly what authoritarian regimes do: They go after the people who have the least ability to fight back or have their stories told. 

And then, on the tech company side, both anecdotally and in the data, we’re seeing tens of thousands and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of people laid off. I have no doubt that many of those folks who are being laid off are people who have spoken up at some point, and they’re just added to the numbers of folks who are let go as part of a reduction in force. 

And so, especially in a society with zero social safety net, when your job is tied to your health insurance, tied to your ability to live, your ability to pay your rent or your mortgage and to provide for your family, what we’re seeing are not theoretical risks for people speaking up. They’re real immediate and long term risks for people. And so I think just overall, it’s so much harder for people to speak up. 

EDA: The situation is getting worse despite some substantial legal improvements you also advocated for (in 2022, in California the “Silenced no More Act”, a law that places restrictions to confidentiality provisions in work agreements, was approved). How do you explain these developments? Is it the general political atmosphere, or rather other factors more related to the tech industry? 

IO: It’s all of it. The law that I worked on was at the state level. We still don’t have federal protections that actually cover people to the same extent that the law in California and in Washington and a number of other states do. So, in the event that you’re working for a company, and you happen to be in one of those states, you have some legal protections. But of course, they hire people all over the country and all over the world. So unless you are in a jurisdiction where you are covered, you are totally left on your own. 

Moreover, the few measures that we used to have in the United States, like the “Equal Employment Opportunity Act” (EEOC), the Commission and other federal agencies that are supposed to deal with labor issues are now much weaker, as many of their lawyers have been fired by this administration. 

The people in charge are not folks who are aligned with workers anymore. And so you have a much worse case even if your situation is heard or taken up. If you file at the federal level now, you’re just as likely to have them make a ruling in favor of your employer. 

And I think from our perspective as advocates, we have to be understanding of that and careful not to ask people to martyr themselves. 

EDA: During the last two years, the role of tech companies in wars, as we have seen particularly in Gaza, has come to the surface as never before. Is there a direct connection between your work in terms of protection of workers’ rights in tech companies and this aspect in particular? In other words, does protecting the rights of tech workers in the US have an impact on tech companies’ complicity with human rights violations abroad? 

IO: It’s absolutely connected because those who are working in the kinds of positions that I used to work in, in these tech companies, are the most privileged folks in the tech worker ecosystem. And so if companies are successful in silencing their ‘white collar’ workers in the United States who have the most means, the most money, and the most access to lawyers,  then what of the folks who are doing labeling in East Africa and in Southern Europe and in Southeast Asia? 

And what of the folks even further down the chain who are in mines and basically in slave labor conditions in Congo and in other areas? So it’s all very, very connected to me. If you’re able to silence people in your offices on issues that are already settled in law, then you’re making sure that no one is able to speak up about what they’re seeing when they’re being told to program things for drones that will end up killing people in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan, and wherever else, because all of it is connected. 

EDA: You mentioned the importance of adopting pragmatic approaches in order to bring change and avoid what you call the typical analysis/paralysis many activists suffer from. In the context of the US, you say you were inspired by the strategies of the environmental movement, like exerting pressures on shareholders in order to force companies to change their behaviours. You stressed also that we should accept that we live in a capitalist society and recognise its power balances, and act accordingly. Do you think this type of approach is effective also when it comes  to addressing the relationships between tech giants and weapons industries? I ask this especially since you said that in your case the leverage was money (as shareholders have to pay  lawsuits for example) and not racism or gender discrimination. In other words: what if that economic leverage doesn’t exist? Or, as you mentioned, when the wider political atmosphere is particularly hostile, as it is today? 

IO: I think it depends on where you are, but certainly in the United States, in Germany, in the UK, you’re not going to be very successful when the government is also supportive of arming folks who are carrying out genocide. And so if you don’t even have leverage with your own government, then you’re not going to have the kind of leverage you need with shareholders. 

You certainly aren’t going to have leverage inside the companies with the individuals who are making money off by arming attackers in a genocide and arming those like the Israeli government, like the Russian government, like the UAE that is operating in Sudan. 

Yeah, it’s all really terrible and so I think part of why there has to be global engagement and global connections between activists is that even though we’re not able to do much in the US, our folks who are in Ireland and able to put pressure on a government that actually agrees that genocide is wrong is then able to leverage pressure. Because many of these companies have international headquarters in Dublin. All of it is connected and so we have to be working together to figure out where there’s the ability and where’s the political space to put pressure on the companies, even if it’s not directly from the US, directly from the UK, directly from Germany. 

EDA: You said that one of the lessons we should learn in Europe while observing the US is that things can indeed get worse from one day to another. But trends are quite clear. Things are already getting worse here too: far right parties are winning or at least gaining consensus; freedom of speech is being repressed, and welfare eroded. In this context, how would you think your practical approach should be adapted? 

IO: The answer is always the same: to diversify the approach. And I think it also means working with different types of activists. So I think in the advocacy space, we’re so good at siloing ourselves. Like: ‘oh, I’m the group that works on human rights’, ‘I’m the group that works on immigration issues’, ‘I’m the environmental advocate’, when all of these things are connected. 

And so folks need to be working together. If a labor action is able to get things moving in France, then that’s the type of action you need to do. If environmental issues are more salient in Germany, then you can use different parts of the activism ecosystem to target the same companies and to target the government in different ways. 

You know It’s so interesting that World War II was not that long ago. So in theory, it shouldn’t be curious to people that fascism can take over in Europe in general, country by country and very quickly. History is not that separated from us and yet two generations past people completely forget what happened in their own countries, even if some of the people who witnessed those events are still alive. 

And so for me it is really infuriating that we can be so close to it and people can still act like, oh, there’s no way that it could happen here. 

EDA: During the conversation with Tammarrian Rogers, I really liked when you said that change in tech companies doesn’t pass only through those who are strictly “tech workers” but also other worker figures, with smaller wages and rights. So here are two separated questions: where are we in terms of organising across different types of workers in the tech industry? And, second: across different countries?

IO: I think the companies understand exactly how important it is, and that’s the reason why they’ve worked so hard to silo groups. So that, even in one company, you may literally not be able to reach out to and communicate or engage with folks who are doing work for the same company because they’re using countless different contracting agencies. 

The primary mechanism that they’ve used was to ensure that their engineers aren’t able to be in communication with even the data labelers who are ensuring that they’re able to feed all of this information into a large language model. So it is incredibly important that folks working on the coding of these systems understand that their work would be impossible without the people making cents a day, cents an hour in Kenya and in Bangladesh and in other places to label the information. 

But the companies have ensured that there isn’t the ability to directly communicate. And that’s where I think journalists actually have a huge role to play because they’re the ones who help to tell these stories. Like Time Magazine did a huge series on the Kenyan data labelers who have been doing both content moderation for companies like Meta and then the ones who are now doing a lot of the labeling for Large Language Models (LLMs). 

And the same for folks in Venezuela and in South America who are doing a lot of the labeling for these systems and looking at really horrific content because the companies know that no one would be willing to do it in Western Europe or in the United States, and certainly not at the pay that they’re able to exploit people with in these other countries. 

EDA: Are there no more traditional initiatives from below, like labor unions? 

IO: Not organizing, unfortunately, but I do know that there are a number of organizations like Tech Equity in the United States and others who have been doing reports. And they actually worked with a large labor union in the United States to do a report on how people in this chain of work are being exploited. 

But it’s next to impossible to do old school organizing because they’re not even at the same company. So the way that the companies have set up this work is you may work for OpenAI, but the people doing the data labeling are at 10 different contracted agencies so that the company can state legally that they never actually hired these people. They were just hiring the work through a contract with X, Y, Z agency. 

EDA: I want to finish the interview asking you about sci-fi writer Octavia Butler. In 2020 you founded a consulting firm, Earthseed, whose name is inspired by a political-religious movement in the novel “Parable of the Sower”. What place does she have in your work? 

IO: When you read Octavia Butler, it looks like she knew it all. I mean, if I believed in time traveling, she is surely an example of someone who has time traveled because she knew exactly what would happen and how it would happen. And that’s why her work moved me so much. But the core tenant of Earthseed in the books is that God is ‘change’. If anything is true, it is that things will change and we have our own role to play in changing things. 

And so that really is what I have believed in, that like so many of us can feel overwhelmed by the fact that so many horrible things are happening all of the time and what power do we have as individuals to change it. And what I really took away from her writing and what I try to live with day to day is that I can’t change absolutely everything but I can change small things that I have the ability to touch. 

So in my case, I have a background in political science and public policy and I know how laws are made. That is one thing that I can do. Can I change Hollywood? No. I have no experience in that. Can I go and change who becomes the president? I don’t have billions of dollars, so I don’t have the ability to buy the next president, unlike someone else. 

But where I can, in my own small space with my own expertise and my own networks, make changes, that is what I’m committed to. 

We all need to step up because I feel a lot of the power of authoritarians is in making people feel powerless. That there’s absolutely nothing that individuals have the ability to do, so they might as well just go along with what is happening to them and around them. 

The post Breaking the Code of Silence: Workers Rights and Systemic Change in Tech – A Conversation with Ifeoma Ozoma appeared first on Untold.

***

For decades, and particularly over the past two years, analyses of Western mainstream media coverage have highlighted a predominance of Israeli narratives. This pattern appears in the decontextualisation of events and in language choices that shape perceptions of Palestinians, like using passive language when describing their death, as Palestinians merely “die” as if by accident and unrelated to the violence that kills them.

In another example, Palestinian children are sometimes referred to as ‘people under 18’ rather than as children, which might not reflect their actual vulnerability in their childhood. This type of reporting can reflect a broader political framing, captured in the concept of ‘unchilding’, developed by Palestinian scholar from Haifa, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian as she describes how Israel’s military regime strips Palestinian children of their childhood.

“Unchilding” is the eviction of children from childhood for political goals, removing them from the realm of childhood, positioning them as threats to be controlled, criminalised, or eliminated, thus enabling and justifying violence and oppression against them. 

For almost two years of intense Israeli attacks on Gaza, the mainstream media have focused on the general human toll of Palestinian lives without depth. Coverage diverts attention to political actors, while the daily suffering of millions of Palestinians receives limited attention. Palestinians are reduced to numbers, erased of names and faces, and historical context is systematically ignored, with the occupation, apartheid, and foundational trauma of the Nakba absent from the coverage.  

This article seeks to examine how Palestinians have used social media as a tool of activism to document realities on the ground and challenge dominant media narratives. It also explores the systematic digital censorship they face, the infrastructure behind that suppression, and the pressing questions for the future of Palestine’s digital memory.

Digital Censorship: “We Went Back a Million Steps”

Social media has the potential to be a powerful tool for empowerment and resistance. challenging biased narratives about Palestinians in Western mainstream news outlets; however, it still faces systematic censorship, especially when it comes to Palestinian voices and content.

In a conversation with Jalal Abu Khater, Advocacy Director at the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media-7amleh, he explains how, during Israel’s 2021 invasion of the Palestinian city of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem and the brutal war against Gaza, Palestinians witnessed a collective power that manifested in a wave of social media activism, which began on TikTok, where videos documenting scenes of resilience and solidarity went viral. This TikTok wave revealed the power of digital platforms to amplify the voice of Palestinians and reclaim the Palestinian narrative.

This momentum was quickly followed by increased censorship and suppression, particularly on Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, where Palestinian content was consistently hidden, deleted, or shadow banned. Palestinians living in the 1948 territories also faced arrests, intimidation, and surveillance by Israeli forces, with task forces targeting those who used social media to speak out. 

A report published by 7amleh examines the impact of biometric monitoring and digital surveillance in Jerusalem through interviews with Palestinian Jerusalemites. Those interviewed reported that Israeli CCTV and digital surveillance increased following the violence in April and May of 2021. This intensified monitoring has severely undermined Palestinians’ civil and political rights, restricting their movement, violating their privacy, and limiting their freedom of expression both online and offline.

Describing the current state of censorship, Abu Khater says, “We went back a million steps.” Since October 7, efforts to restrain censorship of pro-Palestinian content have seen a sharp decline, despite prior pressure on large digital companies and their pledges not to silence pro-Palestinian voices. Meta platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, have reimposed restrictive practices, monitoring and suppressing pro-Palestinian content, with content being systematically removed, shadow banned, or hidden, even when it included common language such as the word “Palestine”. 

Palestinians living within the 1948 territories face a multilayered form of censorship that includes a lack of digital safety, intensified surveillance, and systematic intimidation. There are Israeli task forces dedicated to monitoring and targeting those who use social media to speak out, leading to arrests, threats, and ongoing harassment.

In contrast, as Abu Khater explains, hate speech in Hebrew, often targeted at Palestinians, continued to spread almost freely without any significant censorship. On March 12, 2025, 7amleh released its annual report, Racism and Incitement 2024, documenting an alarming increase in digital hate speech and incitement against Palestinians, particularly on X (previously Twitter) and Facebook. According to the findings, 12,482,041 pieces of content in Hebrew, identified as violent or hateful, were documented throughout 2024, demonstrating the increasing use of digital spaces as tools for hostility and incitement.

Recent reports by DropSite News have confirmed long-standing concerns raised by 7amleh indicating a high rate of content removal requests from Israeli authorities and a corresponding suppression of pro-Palestinian content on Meta platforms. Leaked internal data reveals that since October 7, 2023, Meta has complied with 94% of Israeli government takedown requests, leading to over 90,000 removals and the suppression of tens of millions more through automated systems. 

With social media having the potential to be a tool for empowerment and resistance, in reality it still faces coordinated attempts to silence Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, which is alarming. However, many Pro-Palestinian social media users have found creative ways to bypass censorship, which was intensified when speaking politics, often by tricking the algorithm with coded language by swapping letters for numbers and symbols, like “G@za” or “P@l3st1ne”, or by mixing English with Arabic letters, while many use other symbols and emojis like the watermelon emoji, which has become a global symbol of Palestinian solidarity. 

Seeing Gaza Through The Eyes of Palestinians

In Gaza, Palestinians have used platforms like Instagram and TikTok to document the destruction, hunger, and loss, exposing atrocities that might otherwise be buried beneath the headlines. At the same time, they shared moments of resilience, community, and fleeting joy, putting a human face to statistics and reminding the world that behind every number is a life. 

Fatima Hassouna, a photographer and storyteller, once wrote on her social media: “If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just breaking news or a number in a group; I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.”

Tragically, in April 2025, Fatima and ten family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit their home in northern Gaza.

Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, many Palestinian voices on social media have gained hundreds of thousands of followers, building strong connections with audiences worldwide. One powerful example is Bisan Owda, whose videos provide firsthand accounts from Gaza and have become a key source of information for international audiences. As one of the key voices recording this genocide, Bisan won the News and Documentary Emmy Awards for her work, which became a symbol of activism and survival. In her own words, Bisan highlights how, despite attempts to silence Palestinians, those telling their own stories can now reach the world through multiple means of broadcasting.

Other content creators, such as ten-year-old Renad Atallah, offered a different glimpse into life under siege and war. Renad, who dreams of becoming a professional chef, shares videos of herself preparing “donated” food outside her family’s tent. Despite the brutal conditions around her, she smiles as she demonstrates how to cook her favorite dishes with the limited ingredients available.

On another front, journalists and citizen journalists are on-the-ground witnesses who have taken it upon themselves to document the horrors of genocide as it unfolds. Through their lenses, they are archiving, documenting truth, exposing injustice, and demanding that the world bear witness.

This is not an attempt to romanticize the tragedy or soften the brutality of war. Rather, it is a reflection on the complexity and depth of Palestinian life, shared by Palestinians themselves, on their own terms. While mainstream media often frames Palestinians through the lens of “conflict” and “complexity”, Palestinians on social media show themselves simply and powerfully: raw, unfiltered, and undeniably human. They are not statistics. They are not political talking points. They are simply humans! 

Over the past two years, despite the systemic censorship, these digital spaces have made Palestinians more visible, creating a sense of collective intimacy and shared burden that connects people worldwide in solidarity with Palestine. Social media has become a platform for real-time updates and human connection, driving global empathy and fueling activism that has translated into boycott campaigns, student encampments across the United States, and calls for justice, an end to violence, and long-term structural change. Much of this momentum has been driven by Gen Z.

In his study “Connecting the Dots: How Gen-Z Is Re-establishing the True Story of Palestine”, scholar Mohamed Buheji explains how Gen-Z, the primary social media audience, is reshaping the narrative. For many in this generation, the Palestinian cause is inseparable from wider global justice struggles—from anti-apartheid South Africa and Black Lives Matter to Indigenous rights movements. Those who stand with Palestine often see it as part of a larger fight for self-determination, liberation, and human rights.

With this framing, the Palestinian cause becomes what African-American activist Angela Davis once described as a “moral litmus test for the world.” This perspective helps global audiences recognize familiar patterns and situates Palestine within a broader moral and political struggle for justice. Solidarity with Palestinians is not symbolic or exceptional; it is solidarity against recurring systems, structures, and histories of oppression. What happened to Indigenous peoples in North America centuries ago, through war, forced displacement, disease, cultural erasure, and genocide, should never happen again. Today, it is the Palestinians who face these same attempts at erasure.

Palestine’s Digital Memory… What next?

As time passes, a persistent question remains: what comes next? Hundreds of pieces of digital content from Palestine are scattered across online platforms, vulnerable to deletion, distortion, or disappearance. How do we preserve this archive? How do we protect it, organize it, and ensure it grows rather than fades?

Preserving this digital history is a collective responsibility. It requires coordinated efforts to build an organized online archive supported by libraries, universities, research centers, and institutions committed to documenting war crimes and historical memory. Each piece of content must be catalogued with intention so that the documentation of war, survival, and daily life under occupation remains accessible and meaningful.

These digital records are a form of witness, echoing Fatima Hassouna’s call for a “loud death”. A story that should not be buried by time or place. By preserving and sharing these experiences, we honor those who lived through this moment and ensure their stories are not lost but remembered, seen, and acted upon.

The post “If I Die. I Want a Loud Death”: Reclaiming The Palestinian Narrative Through Social Media appeared first on Untold.

***

It is a cold, rainy day, and I am hurrying over to a bus station next to the university campus where I teach to reach Berlin’s Central Train Station on time. Luckily, the bus station is close by, and after two minutes of walking, I arrive. Suddenly, a vehicle stops abruptly in front of the station.

It appears as if the van is out of fuel; it is not the city bus, but a private cleaning company service van. A man steps out in a hurry. It is unusual for a vehicle to park at a bus stop. Its unusualness and unexpectedness caught those waiting for the bus off guard, including me. The driver sharply diagnoses the station’s glass panes, turns his head up towards the time screen, and then adjusts his neck and head posture to check the ceiling as if he is looking for someone or something specific dangling from it.

It turns out that he is looking for pro-Palestinian stickers and posters. The unexpected action made me wonder why someone would want to make sure to remove Palestinian posters and erase their traces.

Graffiti writing and stickering as a game of (in)visibility

Authorities’ removing graffiti, stickers and other related forms of self- and collective expression is no exception in street art politics. It is a game, as graffiti writers and muralists describe it, where what is written, pasted or stencilled on the wall is ephemeral. If not the authorities, then ‘ordinary people’ would tear their opponents’ stickers off or cover their graffiti writings by spraying or splashing paint or stickering over them, crossing them out, adding a word or a symbol to alter the meaning to their favour.

For instance, many Israel supporters add “from Hamas” to “Free Palestine” [Fig. 3], or draw a ‘triangle’ on top of an already painted ‘flipped triangle’ to form the Star of David instead of Hamas’ inverted red triangle (IRT) icon.

Palestine supporters might also put a stickered watermelon over the word “Fuck”, leaving only “Hamas,” or merging the Star of David into the Swastika to create a parallel between Zionism and Nazism – a design of the Lebanese typographer Pascal Zoghbi.

Zoghbi’s design is widely seen in Germany through the murals of Musa La Rage . This process of removal, covering, editing, and commenting on each other—especially on the Palestinian side, whose voice is contested in Germany—reflects broader issues of visibility and grievability. These scriptural and visual acts serve as crucial diaries for understanding resistance and solidarity at a time when pro-Palestinian voices are not only underrepresented in German and Western European media and art galleries, but also suppressed on social media by pro-Israel actors. This includes Instagram “civil watch” accounts dedicated to pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian graffiti in Berlin, whose users even tag Interpol in the comment sections of Palestinian posts.

These practices take particularity in Germany, especially in Berlin, where we see that street forms of solidarity with Palestine are not only removed by pro-Israel supporters but also by the German police, whose brutality goes beyond the dimensions of legality.

How can we understand this act of contracting a worker to “clean the station”? How does this “cleaning process” relate to Germany’s stance on Palestinian solidarity against the Israeli occupation?

Since 2008, Germany has declared unconditional support for Israel as part of its Staatsräson (the Reason of State). This political philosophy is based on the promise of “Nie Wieder” (Never Again) to address and honour the cultural memory of the six million European Jews who were killed during the Holocaust by the Nazis.

Accordingly, any debate about Jewish people, Israel and Zionism must go through this canon.

Resisting the guilt and extending griveability

Nevertheless, Palestinian street solidarity resists this reasoning. Aesthetically, the place chosen for stickers, graffiti writing, and painting is not solely a matter of visibility – a spot visible to people as they stand (bus station), enter (public toilet) or walk from one point to another, and preferably higher so that Israel supporters and the police do not remove it– but also of meaningfulness [Fig. 4].

For instance, many posters were hung on the East Side Gallery Wall from the river’s side (home to a few graffiti pieces and white canvases), while the names (and stickers) of Gaza and Palestine are displayed on the other side of the wall, facing the street (home to commissioned murals exhibited for tourists). Graffiti of “Free Gaza” can also be seen on the Berliner Mauer at Bernauer Straße, where parts of the separating wall are still standing with memorials, notices, looped short videos of patrolling soldiers, and pictures of the people who were killed by GDR guards while escaping from East to West Germany.

These official walls are for ‘learning’ about a dark part of German history as well as grieving the bodies and souls of those who passed away by seeing their pictures, reading their names and watching videos of East German Wall guards patrolling [Fig. 5].

Spraying Palestine or Gaza on the Berlin Wall challenges the scholarship that (Western) history has ended with the fall of the German wall, and it places Palestine alongside Germany’s own history of separation, remembrance and guilt.

History continues in Palestine. The graffiti of Palestine on the Wall memorial shows a parallel present-day Palestinian reality, which tourists would neither find informative signs on nor see in the various museums dedicated to human suffering and wall separation. Similar writing can also be found on parts of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamerplatz, where someone wrote “Palästina” twice below the metal sign of information, entitled “Dennkmal Mauer – The Wall as a Monument,” making the wall not solely a historical landmark of the past, but also a symbol of the actual wall of apartheid built by Israel in Palestine [Fig. 6].

These graffiti on the Wall of Berlin, and memorial sites extend “grievability” to Palestinians at a time when Israel has made trauma a weapon of war and while coverage of the Palestinian genocide in mainstream Western media coverage has been tightly policed and increasingly racialised.

The police as the new church

Pro-Palestinian expressions are often interpreted as antisemitic, pro-Hamas and terrorist, or at least aggressive. Germany’s practice of accusing Palestine supporters of antisemitism is a political move. Germany has long tried to de-Nazify its image to the world by organising the World Cup of 2006 and introducing the Erinnerungskultur (Culture of Remembrance) to address the Holocaust and the inhumane and unjustifiable killing of the Jewish population.

This culture of remembrance and political policy to acknowledge what the Nazis did to the Jews translates into the state’s reason as a guarantor of Jewish safety in Occupied Palestine (and elsewhere). This policy of guilt and remembrance has implicitly made the Palestinian statehood and right to return for refugees against the guilty German project of self-cleansing.

This double standard does not solely appear in the brutal police intervention, defamatory anti-Muslim and anti-Arab speech in newspapers (labelling pro-Palestinian students “Jewish haters” (Juden-Hasser), cancelling artists and the removal of solidarity aesthetics, but also shows in the reinterpretation of solidarity expressions in order to whitewash their Nazi legacy.

As an example, the debate on the use of the inverted red triangle by Palestinian supporters was triggered by local media and politicians, referring to the symbol as a “Nazi reference.” Also, a doctoral student who was holding a poster reading “NEVER AGAIN” was arrested by thirteen police officers and had their poster confiscated, accusing the student of another “Again,” a reference to Nazi-camps and the “extermination” of Jewish people [Fig. 7].

Another colleague had notified the student that the police might have a Nazi-focused interpretation based on reading the Palestinian Question through anti-Semitic German history. To avoid that, the student added “never again for everyone” in the margin of the poster. However, the police refused to accept any interpretation other than their own.

Policing aesthetics and criminalising symbols

What role do aesthetics play in a German context characterised by official support to Israel, its Staatsräson and Nie Wieder? How do the aesthetic forms of solidarity with Palestine interplay with Germany’s history and denounce its complicity with genocide? In other words, how does ‘wall washing’ relate to ‘self-cleansing’ and ‘whitewashing’?

Most police “interpretation” of pro-Palestinian signs do not happen on site, for it is already based on a textbook against anti-Semitic symbols and signs, titled “Leitfaden Zum Erkennen Antisemitischer Straftaten” (Guide to recognising antisemitic crimes) [1]. Among the many Palestinian signs, the textbook considers anti-Semitic, the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), Handhala (signifier of Palestinian personhood, displacement and exiled childhood), the key (the right to return), and Palestinian visual symbols of solidarity and resistance are put in a booklet next to fascist and Nazi signs.

Each symbol has a small text ideologically changing its meaning to make it “anti-Jew.” For instance, for Handhala, the textbook reads that this icon is “a comic book character meant to symbolise the supposedly defenceless Palestinians. [Instead,] The comics advocate violent action against Israel.”

In reality, Handhala was originally designed by Palestinian caricaturist Naji al-Ali (1938-1987), whom Israel assassinated in London, which the textbook does not mention. As for “Intifada until victory,” it reads that “the first (1987) and second (2000) Intifada were violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel. The slogan heard at anti-Israel demonstrations implies the annihilation of the State of Israel.”

This booklet was published in December 2021, and its captions are the same as those of the police, showing how ideological interpretations are supported and enacted by law against others.

Colourful rage

The Guide to Recognizing Antisemitic Crimes was published in 2021 and does not include the watermelon or the inverted red triangle, which are also treated as antisemitic by German police. Its symbolism, however, was born out of colonial artistic censorship.

Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour (b. 1947) explains that the idea of watermelon came from Israeli soldiers, who, in 1981, interrogated Mansour and two of his colleagues about why they were doing political art instead of painting ‘nice women,’ ‘nude figures,’ and ‘nice flowers,’ which they would buy from them, the police added.

“The flag was forbidden, and so were the colours, which is why we, as artists, were not allowed to use these colours. One of our friends, Issam, started arguing with the authority person, asking him what he would do if he made a flower but with those colours. The soldier became angry, saying that ‘even if it is a watermelon, we will take it and confiscate it. Do not do anything in these [red, black and green] colours.’”

On the one hand, the watermelon sign offers a new language of solidarity—one charged with joy rather than with the sorrow of the Nakba and other classical symbols that embody affective sadness. This fruit symbol reflects the spirit of resilience that has accompanied solidarity protests, offering, at the same time, new possibilities to express support in places where the icon of Handhala is considered antisemitic [Fig. 8].

This builds on the existing presence of the watermelon as a summer decorative motif—seen on ice creams, umbrellas, earrings, and many other objects—thereby challenging German censorship of solidarity with Palestine and embodying resistance itself.

On the other hand, the adoption of the inverted red triangle in protests and graffiti around the world, including in Germany, can be interpreted in two different ways.

First, the red triangle serves as a symbol of empowerment and a reclaimed emblem for most Palestinian supporters, who use such symbols to express solidarity and to symbolically challenge Israeli genocide and Western complicity.

Second, when a red triangle is painted on the walls of campuses or newspaper buildings, the authorities experience it as if it were written on their own bodies—turning graffiti into a physical act. If the (German) state uses law and policing to inscribe its power onto pro-Palestinians, by prohibiting some protests, banning the use of Arabic language in demonstrations and using violence against protestors, for example, then marking a “place of meaning” (memorial wall) or “place of authority” (police station)—even by simply writing a word (Free Palestine) or symbol (inverted triangle) of defiance on its walls—becomes, in turn, a way of writing back onto the body of that authority [Fig. 9].

In his book The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge, Frank Stern explains how “Germany — striving for sovereignty and integration into the West — was able to instrumentalise philosemitism in its domestic and foreign policy as well as a moral stance against local, deeply rooted antisemitic rightwing extremism.”

On the one hand, Palestinian solidarity bothers Germany because it always makes the state feel guilty twice; Palestinians are paying for what the Germans did to the Jewish people. On the other hand, the visibility of the Palestinian struggle and the existence of the Palestinian people with their claim to land make the post-Holocaust Jewish success incomplete. Therefore, being genocidal and complicit with the extermination of the Palestinians seems to be a ‘moral salvation’ for Israel and Germany.

The elimination of the Palestinian people would make the former’s guilt vanish (or evaporate) and make the Zionist project successful as a story of survival.

In this sense, Sami Khatib reminds us that the pseudo-question “Do you condemn Hamas?” becomes equivalent to “do you support the Western world order, its ruling ideology (Human Rights Discourse), and do you condemn the entire spectrum of Palestinian resistance, from peaceful boycotts to the Hamas attacks of October 7?” In other words, “Palestinians should accept their colonial subjugation, should not resist, and should, ideally, disappear and with them the annoyance of the Palestinian question.”

The aesthetics and writing of remembrance and solidarity of Palestine in Germany demonstrate the limits and double standards of German remembrance culture and solidarity. It shows how condemning genocide and the killing of civilians is manufactured in accordance with ideological motivations to justify one’s own history, where some humans and bodies are seen as not worthy of life because one decides to.

The post Palestine on Berlin’s Walls: Street Art, Censorship, and the Politics of Solidarity in Germany appeared first on Untold.

This machine will decide whether you can pass. If it is green you can go ahead and go to work, visit a friend or continue with your evening stroll. If it flashes red, you are turned back or detained, often with no explanation. 

For thousands of Palestinians, this is a daily ritual where their lives under occupation are often not even dictated by soldiers or politicians but by an algorithm.

In East Jerusalem and Hebron, cameras line the streets “every five metres” according to a 2023 report by Amnesty International. These cameras are equipped with the world’s most advanced facial recognition technology

“The omnipresent surveillance embodied by these cameras has created an atmosphere of fear, anxiety and repression among Palestinians, further entrenching Israel’s system of apartheid” according to Amnesty.

This new era of mass surveillance over Palestinian lives has led to a system which some rights groups are labelling as ‘automated apartheid’

Blue Wolf and Red Wolf

Across the occupied areas of the West Bank, Israeli soldiers carry smartphones which use a program called Blue Wolf. When a Palestinian approaches an Israeli army checkpoint the soldiers take a photo of the person and wait. Within seconds the app matches the face up against an extensive database which has been collected through the thousands of CCTV cameras across the city. 

The app will then light up in green, yellow or red determining whether the person can or cannot pass or whether they should be detained.

People have been misidentified as dangerous by this algorithm or have been flagged red for being caught on CCTV attending demonstrations, speaking out publicly against the occupation or being in the company of other people considered dangerous – all things which are legal under international law but have led to arrests at these checkpoints, creating a massive culture of self censorship in the occupied territories.

It sounds like a dystopian episode of Black Mirror but it is a very real situation. In an interview with Breaking The Silence, an Israeli veterans group who work to expose some of the crimes which take place in the occupied territories, an Israeli soldier claimed that “The division is running a competition to see who can enter the most new names into the computer”.

According to Amnesty International’s lead researcher on AI and human rights, Matt Mahmoudi, the Blue Wolf app includes leaderboards where units are ranked by their weekly haul of faces uploaded into the system. Soldiers who collected the most were rewarded with perks, including extra time off.

“You’re constantly put into the terrain of no longer treating Palestinians as individual human beings with human dignity” Mahmoudi told The Guardian in 2024. “You’re operating by a gamified logic in which you will do everything in your power to map as many Palestinian faces as possible…Palestinians have become numbers that have either green, yellow or red lights associated with them on a computer screen.”

These systems are only for Palestinians. Israelis moving through the same territory are exempt.

Another system called Red Wolf removes human decision making from this system altogether. It automatically scans the faces of everyone passing through a checkpoint and if a face is not recognised it automatically adds them to the database, completely removing any idea of consent. The act of simply moving around your neighbourhood or city makes you a part of this mass surveillance infrastructure.

Human Rights Watch has warned that Red Wolf represents a new phase of “frictionless occupation” where human judgement is completely removed from the process. A soldier doesn’t need to recognise you or assess who you are, a computer will decide. 

Amnesty International’s 2023 Automated Apartheid report claims that soldiers are hesitant to override the computers decision even when they know the person not to be dangerous. One soldier spoke about not letting a long-time neighbour of his pass through after the algorithm flagged them as risky.

Surveillance as Social Control

The daily impact on the Palestinian people brought on by these systems goes far beyond checkpoints. The psychological impact of living under constant surveillance and of having your freedom of movement being at the discretion of an algorithm has profound mental health impacts on Palestinians living under occupation. 

Amnesty International’s fieldwork documented how residents avoid social gatherings near Damascus Gate, where the surveillance is heaviest and how activists have abandoned attending protests after participants were later identified and harassed. Mass surveillance “undermines Palestinians rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly” according to the report.

Palestinians have spoken of the mental “exhaustion” they feel living under constant surveillance and about how simply going to the local shop is now a source of stress and anxiety. Many people have compared the lives of Palestinians in Gaza before the genocide as being similar to living in an open air prison due to the fact that they are fenced into a small enclosure and not allowed to leave. 

The lives of Palestinians in the occupied parts of the West Bank could similarly be compared to living life in a prison. Under constant suspicion and constantly being watched. 

In Sheikh Jarrah, the intensity of the surveillance rose to coincide with renewed attempts to push residents out and bring in more settlers, leading to suggestions that one of the aims of these intrusive surveillance systems is to make life so uncomfortable for Palestinians that it coerces them to leave their areas by their own accord.

Who is Behind These Systems?

There are some quite familiar names behind this mass surveillance infrastructure. Amnesty traced the equipment being used to make the surveillance infrastructure to the Dutch firm TKH Group. In 2024 a Dutch investment fund, ASN Impact Investors, demanded that TKH adopt human rights safeguards or face sanctions within a year. 

“Supplying hardware or software that can be used to reinforce apartheid, which is a crime against humanity, must not be tolerated under any circumstances”. Amnesty’s Mahmoudi said at the time.

Hewlett Packard provides much of the biometric systems used at checkpoints. Hikvision, a Chinese manufacturer, supplies the cameras. A recent joint investigation by The Guardian, 972 Magazine and Local Call revealed that Microsoft Azure’s cloud was being used by the Israeli military to intercept and store “millions” of Palestinian phone calls. This has obviously caused huge concern to see one of the world’s biggest tech companies assisting in upholding this system of automated apartheid.

These revelations all underscore the fact that this is not a local system being upheld in isolation by an occupying force but is actually a global supply chain being supported by western investors and tech giants around the world.

The World’s Most Watched People.

This system has led to Palestinians being commonly described as the most surveilled population on earth. Their calls are intercepted, their movements are tracked and their social media accounts are monitored. Many Palestinian lawyers and human rights defenders were also heavily targeted in the Pegasus Spyware scandal in 2021. 

In the West Bank, surveillance drones fly overhead and cameras line almost every single street. Military checkpoints and walls dot the cities. It is a dystopian reality that would make even the most far fetched Sci-fi writers blush.

“You no longer feel like a person” one Hebron resident told researchers “you are a file, a face, an entry in a database”

Israel’s Response

The Israeli army has defended these measures as “necessary security and intelligence operations”. In their view this technology can actually reduce friction by minimising direct soldier-civilian encounters whilst enhancing their ability to identify potential terrorists. Supporters of this system argue that if it saves lives, it is justified.

Human Rights groups have countered that this surveillance is deployed selectively and is not neutral. It is integrated into a wider system of segregation and, according to Amnesty, “These systems of mass and discriminatory surveillance violate the rights to privacy, equality and non-discrimination”

Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories have all described Israel’s system as apartheid which is a crime against humanity under international law. Mass surveillance is a pillar of that system. 

Global Stakes

What happens in Palestine is not isolated from the global situation. Much of these surveillance tools, from spyware to facial recognition systems, are being exported worldwide. Police departments in Europe and the United States are now utilising similar technologies on a smaller scale. 

Palestine can be seen as a laboratory where these technologies are being tested on a population that has no power to object, before being marketed globally.

This automated apartheid could spread to other countries and be utilised on other marginalised groups. Western governments’ increasing turn towards automated systems and facial recognition technologies makes one beg the question if what is happening now in the occupation of Palestine will soon be the future of policing globally.

Palestinians cannot move around their cities without constant reminders that they are not free. They are constantly being watched and have few safe spaces to gather anymore. The system of automated apartheid is not just about an occupying government mistreating a local population but about reducing human beings to data points on a computer. 

Dehumanisation is the 4th stage of the United Nations’ 10 stages of Genocide. Israel is currently being accused by a number of international bodies of committing a genocide in Gaza.

The world’s most surveilled people are currently living under the gaze of one of the world’s most powerful militaries and unless global action is taken to ensure that these rapidly advancing technologies are only used and developed in a way that respects human rights, the unblinking eye fixed on Palestine could be turned on the rest of us very soon.

The post Automated Apartheid: How Palestinians Became the World’s Most Surveilled People appeared first on Untold.