AMMAN — Local radio station Radio Al Balad has
reported that their account on popular video sharing platform
TikTok has been
permanently deleted. The account had over 73,000 followers.
اضافة اعلان
The station’s editor-in-chief, Mohammed Ersan,
took to Twitter to report on the deletion, which he attributed to their posting
of pro-Palestinian content.
“Our account was deleted after publishing
peaceful sit-ins in solidarity with the Palestinian cause,” said Ersan in a
message to
Jordan News. “We are a media channel and our role is to report and
cover events.”
“We fear that deleting our account comes as
part of a campaign to cover Israel's crimes in Palestine and the bias of
TikTok,” he added. “We have not violated
TikTok’s standards. All the videos we broadcast are subject to professional and
ethical journalistic standards.”
The radio station and its website are supported
by the
Community Media Network (CMN), a not-for-profit organization that
manages media and cultural projects throughout Jordan.
This is not the first time the station has
encountered trouble with their content. Ersan said that their account was also
deleted, albeit only temporarily, during the teachers’ sit-ins in the summer of
2020. Jordanian teachers held large protests after police raided the Teachers’
Syndicate headquarters. “As you know, there was pressure on the media to stop
publishing the news of the teachers' union,” Ersan said.
Ersan told
Jordan News that his team contacted
TikTok to ask for the permanent deletion to be reviewed. In a message shown to
Jordan News, TikTok responded: “After further review, your account will remain
permanently banned due to a violation of our Platform Security Policy.”
“Social media companies continue to suspend
accounts without justification: Users are not informed of the reason behind the
suspension, and the suspension often happens in a policy void,” said Raya Sharbain,
program coordinator at the
Jordan Open Source Association (JOSA), which
advocates digital rights. “More importantly, people are not given the
opportunity to appeal the decision, closing all doors to account recovery.”
“This is a trend we've seen in many countries
in this region, from Palestine to Syria, Egypt to Tunisia, whereby accounts
belonging to human rights defenders, activists, and independent media get
suspended suddenly with no chance of resuming their operations online,” she
added.
“Countries in this region already suffer from
an eroding civic space, so when platforms mirror the repressive behavior of
governments, they're further suffocating our freedoms.”
Previously,
Jordan News has reported on the
censorship of pro-Palestinian activists on social media platforms such as
Facebook and Instagram. International media outlets have also reported on
allegations that TikTok specifically censors political content.
According to Palestinian journalist Daoud
Kuttab, the founder of CMN, the deletion of Radio Al Belad’s account
exemplifies the power private tech companies have accumulated. “The tech giant
companies have basically taken over the vast majority of the media landscape,”
he told
Jordan News, noting noted that while some social media outlets and tech
companies are dealing well with this power, “others seem to be abusing it.”
Kuttab also pointed out that most social media
outlets do not differentiate between professional journalists and personal
accounts when regulating content, which can lead to the seeming censorship of
media outlets.
He also criticized the automated complaints
systems some platforms use. Targeted campaigns of social media users may go
after a certain account, drowning it in complaints to the platform until the
account is deleted, regardless of whether it actually violates the platform’s
rules.
Ersan said in his tweet that they were “afraid
that they are responding to reports from government officials or pro-government
people and have not looked into the content we are posting”. But in his remarks
to
Jordan News later, he played down this possibility.
However, Sharbain noted that TikTok’s
moderation policies are a “black box” and it is not clear that TikTok uses this
technique for choosing which accounts to delete. It is difficult to gauge why
the account was taken down without a direct comment from TikTok.
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