Pro-Palestinian TikTok Creators Aren't Backing Down

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been greeted with similar messages every time I’ve opened TikTok. I don’t know exactly how this content found me. Sure, I’ve been following Palestinian activists on X for a few years now, but TikTok has always been my go-to platform for unpolitical, unplugging-my-brain sort of content. Ever since Oct. 7, pro-Palestinian creators have been flooding my feed, often showing perspectives on the crisis that are not represented in mainstream media.

There’s Bisan, Plestia and Motaz – all young journalists from Gaza filming life in the strip during the war, without shying away from sharing their own emotions (Plestia has recently fled Gaza). There’s Nuha, Subhi, Moe, Salma, Sarah Magdy, Awa Sanno and Wally Rashid – creators outside of Palestine reporting on breaking stories and on the history of the conflict. Maliha, Tony Vara, Lee, and James are all activists sharing strategies and organising through the platform. There's also Jourdan Johnson, Shumirun Nessa and Ahmad Alzahabi – creators gaming TikTok's monetisation programme to raise funds for Palestinian NGOs. And there’s Katie, Clio, Max Miller and Sim Kern – Jewish creators speaking out about Zionism. The list is simply too long.

This explosion of pro-Palestinian voices on one of the world’s largest social platforms has not gone unnoticed. With hashtags like #freepalestine garnering over 30 billion views, politicians in the US have accused TikTok of inciting hate and even called for a full ban. In response, TikTok issued a press release explaining that their algorithm “doesn’t take sides”: Their young user base simply tends to support Palestinian issues more than older generations, a finding backed by other independent polls.

Both TikTok and Meta have been under enormous pressure from the U.S., the EU and Israel to remove content allegedly containing disinformation or hate, and both platforms have overwhelmingly complied. As of Nov. 5, TikTok said it had taken down over 925,000 videos and closed over 14,000 livestreams – and the numbers have only risen since then.

“It’s like we’re building a whole alternative media to inform people about this crisis,” says creator Awa Sanno, 26, who is originally from Gambia but is now living in New York. Before Oct. 7, Sanno was already posting TikToks about fashion and life in the city, but then decided to make content about Gaza.

“Honestly, I started talking about it because I was so enraged, so angry,” she tells VICE. “I saw the Palestinian struggle as an extension of what happened to Black people in colonial times. To me, this is a fight for every oppressed group around the world, past and present.”

Sanno was introduced to Palestinian activism by friends years ago, but the recent escalation of violence made her decide to speak up now. “As Muslim women, we know our history, we know this pain,” she says. “The Western media have literally perpetrated myths about us our whole lives. And honestly, with this whole Palestine situation, I feel like all of us unconsciously rose up because of that. We’re debunking all of these stereotypes about Palestine and about us at the same time.”

Sanno said her content has been repeatedly flagged and taken down for violating TikTok’s policy. But overall, her experience on the platform has been positive. “TikTok is a godsend,” Sanno says. “You can just be yourself and speak your mind, and your content will literally find people who relate to you.”

Within weeks of posting about Palestine, her average view count jumped from a few hundred to tens of thousands per video. As for the hate, “Honestly, we are not phased,” she says. “We are going to continue to speak about Palestine whether on TikTok or Instagram, or to our neighbours, our friends, our family members. Allah is using us as vessels to enhance the voice of Palestinians that do not have one right now.”

Gaza-born creator Salma Shawa, 26, who’s currently living in the U.S., has a more complicated relationship with the platform. For three years she’s had a TikTok account, where she’s been posting videos about Palestinian culture and fashion.

In the summer of 2021 and 2022, Shawa went back to Gaza to see her family. On both occasions, she documented everyday life in Gaza, as well as the aftermath of Israeli bombings. Shawa says her videos have never received as much traction as right now. “It makes me feel scared it had to go this far for people to finally pay attention,” she says. “I do fear that this might become a trend where people are posting about it now but might forget in a few days or when a ceasefire is announced.”

Since Oct. 7, Shawa has noticed a huge shift in her viewers, both in terms of their numbers and of their political opinions. When she was in Gaza, she filmed some scenes on the beach and in the countryside that were met with a lot of backlash. “My comment section was horrifying: bullying, harassment, Zionists telling me, ‘You'll be beheaded if you go to Gaza with short sleeves or your hair down like that’,” she says. But in the past few weeks, the hateful comments have all but disappeared.

Shawa rarely watches mainstream media’s reporting on Gaza, as she feels insulted by the frequent associations between Palestinians and terrorism. In her opinion, social media portrays a much more accurate picture of what the situation in Gaza is really like. “Women have really been at the forefront of what’s happening on social media,” she says. “Women in Gaza are so hard-working. They are going out at night, filming during bombings, pulling people from the rubble, working side by side with male colleagues. It’s becoming very difficult for Israeli and American Zionists to claim that women in Gaza are oppressed and to leverage these claims for invasions and bombings.”

I spoke with two researchers who have studied Palestinian activism on social networks – Laura Cervi, associate professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Ali M. Abushbak from the Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi – about whether female pro-Palestinian creators are truly overrepresented on the platform. They tell me they aren’t sure, no scholar has ever looked into this. Besides, I may be getting shown more female TikTokers due to personalisation factors in my own algorithm.

Both scholars agree that Palestinian activism has been forever changed by social platforms. “In the era of mass media, Israel had a pragmatic advantage in the distribution of information, while Palestinian narratives couldn’t reach global audiences,” Cervi says. But that’s changed now everyone can pick up a phone and broadcast their story to the world.

“Social media has gradually become an integral part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Palestinian resistance,” Abushbak says. “Scholars argue that Palestinians use social media because they’ve lost trust in their leaders to solve the conflict, and in the Western media to represent them fairly. That’s partially true, but there’s more to that.”

Abushbak was born and raised in Gaza. He was meant to fly back to the strip on Oct. 15 after finishing his PhD in New Delhi, but got stuck in India because of the war.

“If we look at Jewish people, they have archives about the Holocaust,” Abushbak explains. Most Palestinians in Gaza, on the other hand, are refugees from the Nakba who don’t have any written documentation about what happened to their families in 1948. “So this new generation took on this duty to save their everyday life during the conflicts as a way to build a digital archive for the future,” he says.

This journaling work is particularly important during the current war, as 56 Palestinian reporters have been killed so far, and international media are not allowed inside to gather information directly.

“Now the Palestinians want everyone to understand what they are going through, to imagine how the conflict is impacting them.”

Of course, Israeli users and activists are doing just the same. And TikTok has become incredibly popular on both sides of the social media wars, Abushbak says. “Overall, Palestinian content is still not very popular, especially when you compare it to the content about the war in Ukraine,” he adds.

But recently, the sheer scale of the destruction in Gaza has prompted people to take a more active role. “What we are talking about here is digital witnesses, people who saw something online that impacted them on an emotional level so much, they felt they had to speak up about it,” he says.

In a way, there’s nothing new about sharing content that’s personally affected you – people have been doing that since the beginning of social media. But according to Cervi, TikTok activism has something different about it. There’s a new wave of content on the platform that is quintessentially Gen Z and feels much more embedded into its specific DNA.

According to Cervi, this new type of activism was pioneered in 2019 by creator Feroza Aziz, who co-opted TikTok’s regular makeup tutorial format to talk about the alleged genocide of the Uyghur people in China. TikTok, whose parent company is Chinese, took the video down, but not before 2 million people had seen it, prompting a public outcry – and a clumsy apology on Tiktok’s behalf.

“TikTok is known for having this very obscure algorithm – nobody really knows how it works,” Cervi says. Videos that neatly fit within its most popular formats often manage to bypass these automated censorship tools. “Even more importantly, they actually reach greater audiences,” Cervi explains.

“Many Gen Zs wouldn’t actually go look for information about Palestine unprompted,” she continues. “But since these videos look just like any other makeup tutorial, the algorithmic feed of TikTok also suggests them to people who are simply interested in makeup.”

In fact, much of what’s been shared on the platform certainly feels like organic content: recipes, makeup tutorials, story time videos, floating heads commenting on an article in the background. “These are all very creative examples of algorithmic resistance,” Cervi says.

And this resistance is also visible in the strategies creators use to avoid censorship, like using watermelon emojis to refer to Palestine, intentionally misspelling certain words, filling the video description with unrelated information and much more. Most creators use these strategies, but their continued struggles with the platform to keep their content up raise questions about their effectiveness.

London-based freelance copywriter Saffana Monajed, 31, has also been using her TikTok platform to contribute to the conversation. Monajed does not see herself as an activist, but when Israel declared war on Hamas, she decided to make use of her expertise to speak up about the propaganda she observed in mainstream coverage of the crisis.

“Marketing and propaganda are two sides of the same coin,” she says. “Marketers have spent ages perfecting how to use language to instigate specific emotions. I just wanted to level the playing field, to tell even one person: ‘Beware, they’re trying to manipulate you. And this is how’.”

Monajed believes there are many different reasons why pro-Palestinian content blew up specifically on TikTok. “It’s a perfect storm of genuine, down-to-earth, early-social-media content and self-selection,” she says, referring to the fact that users can determine to some extent what is shown to them. “Youth and people of colour are often demonised by the media, so they’re more sceptical and less likely to consume it,” she continues. “This also means they’re less exposed to propaganda.”

On top of that, content about busting cultural myths has always been a part of TikTok, so videos debunking biased media reports or calling out public figures doesn’t just jump out as odd to users.

So, could TikTok step into the smouldering ashes of X and fulfil our early-2010s dreams of social media revolutions? Monajed is not so sure. “Now that we're a bit older, we've seen the way that social media evolves overtime,” she says. “YouTube started off the same way as TikTok – people used to record on their webcam, they didn't have funky tools, it was very rough and raw.”

With the advent of Adsense, things changed. “Now to get a viewer interested on YouTube, you need to be very professional,” she says. “The content got more manufactured and people started pushing products.” And when users are incentivised to make more brand-friendly content, political opinions that threaten profit margins tend to become less welcome.

This era of TikTok might not last forever, but the global solidarity movement that has come out of it is remarkable – maybe even historic. Never before has Palestinian advocacy reached so many ears and eyes. And it all comes down to the ingenuity, creativity and tireless work of hundreds of young creators, quietly filming in their rooms, putting their faces out there to speak up about what they truly believe. No amount of censorship can shut all of them down.