The year 2011 marked a turning point in the SWANA region, with anti-government uprisings and protests leading in many countries to significant regime change, institutional destabilization, and power vacuums ranging from democratic transitional phases or the rise of more brutal or new authoritarian regimes to full-scale wars.
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”.
