Techno(geo)politics of erasure: visibility, violence and the digital battlefield of Palestine

This article examines how social media platforms operate as infrastructures of e-policing that reproduce colonial, racialised and gendered hierarchies in historic Palestine. Focusing on the 2021 Palestinian uprising and its escalation into the computationally enabled genocide in Gaza from 2023 onwards, it argues that companies function as corporate security actors that translate geopolitical asymmetries into algorithmic and procedural form. The article develops techno(geo)politics from Palestinian digital politics scholarship to name the co-production of geopolitical power through digital infrastructures. It traces how content moderation, internet referral units, automated classification and cloud infrastructure govern visibility, legitimacy and disposability. Empirically, the article analyses the 2021 Palestinian uprising as the moment in which this mechanism becomes visible through state referrals, dangerous organisation policies, Arabic-language over-enforcement, Hebrew-language under-enforcement and gendered suppression. It then shows how the 2023 genocide in Gaza reveals an escalation from platform governance of Palestinian digital life to computational warfare. It contributes to debates on corporate power, critical geopolitics and digital governance by showing how infrastructures of communication become infrastructures of domination.