Platform necropolitics: content moderation and censoring of pro-Palestinian voices on social media

The violence of the May 2021 Israeli–Palestinian conflict revealed the significance of social media platforms as spaces for Palestinians to publicise instances of human rights violations, conflict, and dispossession. It also highlighted the implications of asymmetrical content moderation processes and platform policies that led to the removal of this content and re-obscured the Palestinian struggle. I develop the notion of platform necropolitics and demonstrate its theoretical resourcefulness through an examination of pro-Palestinian censorship during the May 2021 Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Platform necropolitics manifests through the corporate and sovereign logics of platforms that violently police the boundaries of speech and space – determining who has the right to speak and who has the right to appear as a legitimate digital citizen, and who does not – and that take as their object the articulations of digital subjects and enact their ‘right to kill or let live’. Exploring the tensions of digital media technologies as spaces that we live with, in, and through, considering platforms as political and material actors that determine and condition the social, political, and material (in)existence of digital subjects, I examine how platforms enact forms of necropolitical power though corporate and machinic logics that simultaneously extend and reproduce the necropolitical power of the Israeli state.