Visibility or Invisibility: Does social media help or hinder pro-Palestine university camps?

On a dusty and warm May afternoon, I made my way to the pro-Palestine encampment at Manchester university. It was larger than I had expected, with tents stretched in rows along either side of the lawns. There were pockets of students, gathered around and chatting, and mostly, the atmosphere was calm. 

I had arranged to meet a student at the welcome tent but I didn’t have a name or any background. Everything was managed to protect the safety and security of students. I was about to find out - from what?

Rejection of traditional media

In May this year, university encampments began to spring up around the UK, in protest to Israel’s war on Gaza that has so far claimed more than 37,000 lives. The latest assault, that has gone on for eight months now, follows the Hamas attack on Israel last October that led to the death of over 1200 Israelis. But the history of the conflict and Israeli occupation stretches back much further.

Building on the movement already sweeping across the United States, students in the UK are demanding that universities disclose details about their investments, and divest from companies that have involvement in Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories.

What started out in a dozen or so camps in the UK has now spread to over 30 across the country. Each that I contacted had one thing in common; extreme caution towards the press.  

Connecting with camps in Bristol, Leeds, London and Manchester, I realised that each had a similar protocol; a designated media contact whom you engage with first on messaging apps like WhatsApp. They further connect you with students comfortable to speak with you, and often students who have received some media training. 

A certain vigilance regarding access for journalists was evident, rooted in concerns about how the encampments may be reported on. Camps have frequently denied access to the UK's mainstream and tabloid press. When they do engage, they seem to do so tactically. 

Analysis of the Western media coverage of the pro-Palestine encampments shows that the students’ unwillingness to engage with the press is not without reason. In her piece for The Conversation, Danielle K. Brown, Professor of Journalism at Michigan State University, explains how the tendency is to focus on spectacle rather than substance. Also, the mainstream press can base much of its reporting on statements and quotes from official sources, leveraging their narratives more than those coming from protestors themselves. 

Asked if they trusted mainstream media to report on the pro-Palestine encampments, Benji, one of the students from the Leeds camp replied, “I trust them to report on it. I just don't trust that the report is going to be a very fair representation.” This sentiment was echoed across all the camps I visited. 

I analysed the top 20 most popular stories circulating on social media* related to UK university pro-Palestinian camps and found that in May 2024, much of the trending coverage was coming from alternative news outlets like the Middle East Eye. The few news reports from the likes of the BBC and The Evening Standard, were less popular in terms of social media shares and engagement.

The same is true in the United States where alternative or fringe outlets are gaining the most interactions on platforms like Facebook and Twitter for their coverage of the US camps.

This shows at least an online preference for alternative outlets covering the issue over traditional media coverage.

Mistrust, censorship and surveillance: Pro-Palestine students wrestle with how to mobilise in the modern age

Students from Pro-Palestine camps across the UK tell us how they are using technology to mobilise and protest against the war on Gaza.

The Citizens DispatchManasa Narayanan

The fear of repercussions

Beyond being misrepresented, for those willing to be interviewed, there are other serious consequences to consider before granting access to journalists. 

“Students have seen what happened in Harvard and other [US] campuses where students were getting doxxed for speaking out,” says Dr Joan Donovan, a leading Sociologist and Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. 

In various campuses across the United States, students have been silenced and penalised for being involved in the pro-Palestine movement. Columbia University and George Washington University have both suspended Students for Justice in Palestine, a coalition that has been involved in organising student demonstrations since the war began in October. 

And while Colombia University has been intolerant to the pro-Palestine camp, it allowed groups to carry out open, large-scale doxxing on its campus against its own students and staff. Names and pictures were advertised in order to defame pro-Palestinian protestors and sabotage their education and careers. 

It is this series of events that eventually prompted US students to be more careful about media attention, and set rules around students’ faces being photographed. This is reflected in the cautious approach taken by UK students, when the encampments began in May. But limiting press access could not prevent unwanted attention of a different kind.

The Far-Right: “They go where the story is”

Travelling around the university camps, I discovered an alarming pattern of physical and online harassment from far-right agitators - who are going to the camps and filming. 

Generally, these individuals capitalise on any opportunity to create a “culture-war”, exploiting issues like immigration and targeting migrant hotels among other things. They have now moved to create content around the pro-Palestine camps and demonstrations, likely because it is a contentious issue that they are able to monetise online.

The goal is to get the faces of students on camera; forcing protestors to stay masked up because of fears of getting doxxed and targeted online. Even if students or local residents ask them to stop lurking and filming them, they refuse. Videos are uploaded to YouTube with provocative titles, and are watched by thousands. The comments sections become a breeding ground for hate.

“The thing I'll say about studying far right or extreme right wing media is that they go where the story is. Their messaging is never entirely consistent because one of the things they make content out of - is whatever is happening in news that they can use to support their particular ideology or worldview,” says Dr. Donovan

In the US, a right-wing media outfit called Accuracy in Media carried out physical and online targeting campaigns against students and staff members who have been part of the pro-Palestine movement at Harvard, making their names and pictures public, defaming them as “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” The group carried out doxxing in multiple other campuses and also built websites to target students and staff.

In Manchester, figures like Joe Gough, who runs the YouTube channel Joe Vloggs, along with his wife and other friends, visited the pro-Palestine camp - filming, attempting to provoke protestors. 

In Leeds, it is individuals behind a page called News Now Yorkshire, claiming to be independent media, who visited and filmed pro-Palestinian members of the camp. They follow the same model of intrusive filming, with the videos accumulating hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.

In addition to far-right figures, there have been several instances where other anti-Palestine groups or individuals have targeted camps. This happened at all of the universities that I visited. 

At Manchester University, over the last month, an Instagram account has popped up that is targeting Jewish students on campus. This page targets a group called Jewish Students' Kehillah, which is a community of Jewish students and staff that have anti-Zionist views, and are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and/or are part of the university encampment. 

So alongside fears of being misrepresented in the press, risks of being doxxed, and experiencing online harassment, can protestors at least trust Big Tech companies to have their backs? Sadly, it seems not.

Shadow bans and suppression

“Although social media is an opportunity for people to self-publish, it's also increasingly clear to most people that it has got such severe problems that its potential for liberatory uses is totally undermined. And I think it looks more undermined by the week,” says Clare Farrell, Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion, an environmental movement. 

Encampments favour Instagram to raise awareness and connect with supporters. Each camp has its own dedicated account that they use to relay information about what's going on in the camp and how to get involved, but relying on Instagram has come with its limitations.

Over the months, as students have continued to mobilise and protest, they have noticed that their Instagram accounts have gone through periods of shadow bans - when a social media platform blocks or puts limits on engaging with a user's content. 

“If you post too much pro-Palestinian content, it will get you shadow banned,” said a student I spoke to at the Leeds camp. “I’ve noticed on both our coalition account and on my own personal one. You have to take a few days of not posting, you know, to un-shadow ban yourself, and get your views back.”

Asked how one would know if their account is shadow banned, he explained that on his personal Instagram, if he posted a lot about Palestine, views on stories would drop from “400-500” to something like “80-90”. This was true for the encampment’s Instagram as well, where views would go down from something like “1200” to “300”. 

Students I spoke to in Manchester and Bristol also mention periods of unusually low engagement. Investigations on the subject of shadow banning like this one from The Markup have found evidence of content being downranked by the algorithm, comments being hidden, hashtags suppressed and other forms of censorship that matches the anecdotal experiences of students.

“Many of these movements have been utilising Instagram as their public-facing communications. They have been doing so for years prior to October 7th. Students For Justice in Palestine is a very long running organisation at most universities. And so to see those accounts suppressed now is a political decision made by Instagram,” says Dr Donovan.

In fact, a Human Rights Watch report found that in a sample of 1050 pieces of content related to the Gaza war that Meta had taken down or suppresed in October & November last year, 1049 of them were pro-Palestinian and found to be peaceful. Only one of the removed posts was pro-Israel. Censorship included “removal of posts, stories, and comments”, “suspension or permanent disabling of accounts”, “restrictions on the ability to engage with content”, “restrictions on the ability to follow or tag other accounts” “restrictions on the use of certain features, such as Instagram/Facebook Live” and “shadow banning”. The research points to disproportionate and excessive censorship of views in support of Palestine and in opposition to the war on Gaza.   

Recently a former Meta employee, who worked at the company as an engineer, filed a lawsuit against the company for firing him for his attempts to fix bugs responsible for the suppression of pro-Palestinian content on Instagram. Earlier this year, around 200 employees wrote an open letter to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg raising concerns about the censorship of Palestinian voices in the company.

Dr Donovan says that Meta’s current move with pro-Palestinian content resembles what Facebook did back in 2013 during the Monsanto protests. Monsanto is a company that produces genetically modified food. The anti-Monsanto movement had various Facebook groups they used to organise at the time. 

“Overnight, all of the local pages about the Monsanto protest just disappeared on Facebook. So you know, a couple hundred thousand followers all gone in an instant. It was claimed that the titles of the groups violated the copyright of Monsanto by using the term Monsanto. And that's why the pages were taken down.” 

These instances show how movements in the digital age are now increasingly at the mercy of the politics and whims of Big Tech companies. This is possibly one of the major reasons behind movements now adopting a cross-platform approach to mobilisation, with a preference for end-to-end encrypted platforms like WhatsApp and Signal instead of relying solely on public platforms like Instagram, Facebook and X. 

Protests powered by messaging apps 

Most of the camps in the UK are using messaging services like Signal and WhatsApp to communicate within the camp. Some run groups on Telegram. They also use these apps to connect with those outside the camp, particularly local community members. Providing updates helps protestors to build critical, loyal supporters who physically show up to actions. This is something they can exercise some control over and seem to prefer over building a larger public-facing movement. 

“When we have emergency demonstrations or when we would like to get as many people with eyes on something as possible, it’s been absolutely great for that. Because we have had cases where we'll put a post for a demonstration happening in a couple hours and we can still get those people in,” says a student from Manchester camp about using social media, particularly in relation to reaching the local community via messaging apps.

Students in some camps prefer Signal for its added level of safety, where they are not required to part with information like their phone numbers, and can run their account using aliases. This is critical since there is a level of continued concern about either facing punitive measures from the university or being doxxed by outsiders.

Has social media really saved the day?

Since the start of the pro-Palestine student movement last October, students across campuses have used social media to mobilise and tell alternative stories, and to highlight aspects around the Gaza war that traditional media has either failed to report on, or reported on in an incomplete or irresponsible fashion. So it has certainly proven useful to students. 

But when it comes to running a larger public-facing campaign, its effectiveness has been limited, largely owing to issues of censorship and risks to the safety of students. 

With the growing threat of the far-right and other detractors using and abusing social media spaces, it has proven impossible for students to have a fully open, public-facing movement. They have relied upon physical spaces to gather, have conversations and organise. But as universities crack down on physical spaces and the freedom to resist, what will happen to student movements like these?

In Oxford for example, the university itself called the police to arrest students who were staging a sit-in. The police rather aggressively and violently removed students, who had actually agreed to move out of the space. Familiar scenes for those who witnessed similar in the US. Students at Newcastle University have also had to face the police.

In all of this, it has been the encrypted messaging apps that have proven to be the most useful for the student movement both in the UK and in the US, in helping to mobilise and rally local communities. But in the face of universities cracking down on physical spaces, and platforms like Meta censoring content, can messaging apps alone fill the gap?

These are important questions because not only do they dictate the fate of the pro-Palestinian student movement, but also other critical social movements around the world. 

We reached out to Meta for comment, in relation to the disproportionate censorship of pro-Palestinian voices on its platforms. The company did not respond to any of our claims or questions, but simply sent us one of their newsroom posts about content moderation in relation to Israel and Palestine, the last update on which was in December last year. 

We also reached out to Joe Gough, News Now Yorkshire and the page, Jewish Students Vanillah. News Now Yorkshire just sent us a link to one of their YouTube videos filmed at the Leeds pro-Palestine camp, and the other two did not respond at the time of publishing of this article.

*Social media analysis was done using Newswhip, and only includes posts gaining traction on Facebook and Twitter.