How Egyptians are using an ancient Arabic script to evade censors
Egyptian and other Arab social media users have turned to an older version of Arabic script to evade censorship on Facebook and Twitter as they post about the latest conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Egyptians have been finding workarounds like posting in early Arabic script, which does not include dots, to evade algorithmic censorship on Facebook and Twitter. Websites can help transliterate their text into the old form.
Many Egyptian and Arab social media activists who have expressed solidarity with Palestinians amid Israeli efforts to displace families from Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and Israel's bombing in the Gaza Strip have complained that their posts on the Facebook and Twitter platforms were removed. Many reported being banned from posting for 24 or 48 hours or had their accounts suspended altogether.
As violence soared in the Gaza Strip between Hamas and Israel, it brought controversy between Egyptian and Arab social media activists and the social media platforms themselves. According to Fady Ramzy, an e-marketing consultant and digital media lecturer at the American University in Cairo, Facebook and Twitter algorithms have been flagging certain words and hashtags about the events in Gaza.
Ramzy told Al-Monitor that social media users have discovered tricks to avoid Facebook's algorithmic censorship. “These include an early Arabic script that quickly gained popularity among social media activists, especially in Egypt. Activists also started leaving spaces between letters in a single word or separating letters with foreign symbols or other letters,” he explained.
