The story of our communities belongs to us — not to algorithms, not to billionaires, not to surveillance platforms built to monetise our attention and sell our data. We are building the alternative.
This is Issue #001.
Understanding the Crisis
The Problem: What-So What-Now What
We did not leave the big platforms out of fashion. We left because the evidence demands it — and the numbers are now undeniable.
For Muslim communities, racialised communities, and political dissenters in particular, this surveillance is not abstract. The US CLOUD Act means US-hosted platforms can be compelled to hand over user data to government agencies — including the data of Australian subscribers — without notification. Australia's own TOLA Act (2018) gives intelligence agencies sweeping powers to demand data and gag technology companies from disclosing it. The platforms you use daily are a potential surveillance infrastructure.
The Documented Evidence of the Suppression
How the Digital Monarchists Silence Dissent
The suppression of dissenting voices is not limited to conflict coverage. Faith-based content, indigenous voices, and political dissent from the Global South face the same algorithmic headwinds. Every number below is sourced from Human Rights Watch, the BBC, Access Now, GLAAD, and platform transparency reports.
As Professor Safiya Umoja Noble argues in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York University Press, 2018), search and recommendation algorithms are not neutral — they embed and amplify existing power structures, marginalising the communities that most need visibility. The code is not objective. It reflects the values and biases of those who write it — and those who fund it.
The bitter irony: Meta removed protections for marginalised communities in the name of "free speech" — while having been documented suppressing those same communities throughout the previous year. This is not free speech. It is selective speech, calibrated to political and economic power.
Platform Suppression — By the Numbers (2023–2025)
Multiple independent sources · All documented, all sourced
Meta
Instagram
Facebook
1,049 of 1,050 documented suppression cases involved peaceful pro-Palestinian content — from 60+ countries in Oct–Nov 2023. Human Rights Watch called it “systemic and global.” Hundreds more cases were reported after the analysis closed. The single case involving pro-Israel content was the only exception.
→ Human Rights Watch, “Meta’s Broken Promises”, Dec 2023 · hrw.org
BBC
Report
Dec 2024
Palestinian news outlets saw engagement drop 80% on Facebook over the year following October 7, while Israeli outlets grew 40% in the same period. Leaked documents from Meta employees confirm the platform launched a deliberate crackdown on Palestinian users’ comments — which Meta confirmed, claiming it was a response to “hateful content.”
→ BBC Investigations, December 2024 · bbc.com
Digital
Rights
Watch
As of July 2024, Digital Rights Watch had recorded over 1,350 documented instances of online censorship of pro-Palestinian voices across YouTube, Meta, and X — including account restrictions, content deletions, and user suspensions. The suppression of faith-based and Global South voices follows the same documented pattern.
→ Digital Rights Watch, July 2024
Meta
2025
Rollback
In January 2025, Meta ended third-party fact-checking and weakened hate-speech policies globally — framed as “free speech.” A GLAAD survey of 7,000+ users from 86 countries documented a sharp rise in hateful content, increased self-censorship, and deepened vulnerability for marginalised communities.
→ GLAAD Social Media Safety Index, June 2025 · glaad.org
X
Twitter
2024
10.6 million posts removed and 5.3 million accounts suspended in six months. X complied with 68–80% of government removal requests — including 46,648 requests from Japan and 9,364 from Turkey in H1 2024 alone. The platform once marketed as the “free speech” alternative now executes state censorship at scale.
→ X Transparency Report, 2024
YouTube
Google
75% of videos removed by YouTube are taken down before reaching 10 views — by automated AI with no human review. 94% of flagged content is detected by algorithm, not by users. Entire categories of content — conflict coverage, political dissent, indigenous testimony — are suppressed at scale before any audience sees them.
→ YouTube Content Enforcement Report, 2024
Global
2024
296 internet shutdowns across 54 countries in 2024 — a record high. At least 25 countries blocked social media platforms entirely to suppress dissent. Africa alone lost $1.5 billion to internet shutdowns in 2024, with the economic and human cost falling hardest on the communities least able to bear it.
→ Access Now #KeepItOn Report, 2025 · accessnow.org
Human Rights Watch — “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content” · hrw.org
Access Now — “#KeepItOn: Internet Shutdowns in 2024” · accessnow.org
GLAAD — “Social Media Safety Index 2025” · glaad.org/smsi
BBC Investigations — “Facebook’s treatment of Palestinian and Israeli content” · Dec 2024 · bbc.com
Noble, S.U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression. NYU Press · nyupress.org
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books.
Where Are We Going?
Non-Traditional Media Is Where the Future Lives
Audiences no longer trust institutions — they trust people whose names they know, whose perspectives are declared, whose conflicts of interest are visible. 59% of Australians say they are willing to pay for news podcasts — more than any other format — because podcasting is long-form, intimate, and subscription-native. Listeners choose to be here. No algorithm pushed them.
Media scholar W. Russell Neuman of MIT argues that the civic information crisis of our time will only be solved by collective civic action and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing — not by institutions, not by algorithms, but by communities who organise around trust. The Dcolonize Project is that community. This newsletter is that action.
Data Sovereignty: Reclaiming What Is Ours
Data sovereignty is the principle that communities have the right to govern the collection, ownership, and use of data about themselves. For indigenous communities, this concept has been articulated most powerfully by FNIGC (First Nations Information Governance Centre) through the OCAP® principles — Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession. The principle is universal: the data generated by a community should serve that community, not to profit from it.
Reference: Neuman, W.R. (2022). 'Networked Trust and the Future of Media.' Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 151(4), 124–141. MIT Press. · Edison Research (2025). Infinite Dial 2025.
The collective migration away from surveillance-based platforms is not defeatism — it is strategy. Every email subscriber you move to a self-hosted list, every podcast listener who follows your RSS feed, every community member who bookmarks your self-hosted website rather than your Facebook page, is an act of digital sovereignty.
Ghost — Independent non-profit foundation used for hosting our website. No VC. No algorithm. Our newsletter is owned entirely by us.
Odysee — Odysee is powered by open-source LBRY technology and offers creators a more independent path for publishing video content than conventional streaming platforms like YouTube and Rumble.
Castopod — Open-source, EU-funded, Fediverse-native podcast host. Your RSS feed, your data, forever. Any Mastodon user can follow your podcast directly. [*Our strategic roadmap].
Finally, This Is the Moment!
Without You, We Remain Slaves to the Tech Monarchy!
The numbers above are not abstract. 1,049 peaceful voices silenced on Meta. 5.3 million accounts suspended on X. 296 internet shutdowns in a single year. 75% of Australians are unable to trust what they read online. This is the world we live in — a world where a handful of billionaires decide whose voice matters and whose disappears.
Independent media cannot survive on good intentions alone. The platforms suppressing dissenting voices are funded by billions in advertiser money and venture capital. They will not stop — unless we build something powerful enough to make them irrelevant. This is a social movement.
Social movements only succeed when enough people decide that the cost of participation is less than the cost of staying silent. The cost of staying on Big Tech’s rented land is our data, our community’s voice, and ultimately our freedom.
When you become a paid member of the Dcolonize Project, you are not buying a subscription. You are funding the infrastructure of resistance — studio equipment, server costs, production time, and the operational independence that keeps this platform alive, ungoverned, and answerable only to its community.
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