Silencing&Surging: A Layered Ecology of Algorithmic Repression and Resistance in the Gaza Escalation

Abstract

During the 2023–ongoing Gaza war, Palestinian advocacy on social media has faced rapid removals, downranking, and account sanctions. In this contribution, we offer a layered analysis of how people endure and counter this repression across affective, mechanistic, and material dimensions. Using patchwork ethnography over 295 first-person testimonies and 85 NGO/press documents, we identify a recursive Contest Loop: hostile mass-report brigades and automated enforcement that spur supporter “appeal brigades,” mirroring, and migration. Findings are organized as a three-layer ecology—Invisible Scars (whiplash, shadowbanning as probabilistic throttling, self-censorship), Dueling Brigades (frictions, coordinated reports, supporter procedures), and Feed-to-Street Ripples (fundraising, evidentiary preservation, livelihoods). Conceptually, we extend platform-assemblage thinking with a Resistance Assemblage: ad-hoc technical, emotional, and legal mutual-aid infrastructures that keep visibility alive under sanction. We contribute: (1) an event-centered, experience-near account of co-produced moderation in conflict; (2) two integrative lenses (Contest Loop, Resistance Assemblage); and (3) design/policy directions, including collective-appeal dashboards, and evidentiary safeguards that separate archiving from distribution.

Citation

Houda Elmimouni, Sarah Rüller, Yarden Skop, Norah Abokhodair, Konstantin Kosta Aal, Tashfia Fatema, Mahmoud Fawzi, Ghadeer A. Awwad, Walid Magdy, Volker Wulf, and Peter Tolmie. 2026. Silencing & Surging: A Layered Ecology of Algorithmic Repression and Resistance in the Gaza Escalations. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 181, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790994