In recent years, increasing numbers of Palestinians have reported having their right to freedom of expression suppressed by social networking platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and YouTube. In 2019, some organizations documented as many as 1,000 violations including the removal of public pages, accounts, posts, publications, and restriction of access. However, few studies have explored the different dynamics, reasons, and effects behind these violations against the Palestinian digital content, in particular regarding YouTube. This research was designed to explore YouTube’s policies and practices towards Palestinian digital content on YouTube, and whether YouTube policies are aligned with human rights in general, and how they are applied to Palestinian content.

... These research findings reflected that YouTube policies and practices are not aligned with human rights in general, and Palestinians’ human rights in particular. YouTube’s policies and practices have several effects on the human and digital rights of Palestinian YouTube users as well as civil society, tech companies, policymakers, human rights activists and defenders, social media users in general, as well as academics and researchers.