Activists and media professionals have condemned attempts by social media platforms to control access to free and reliable content on the attacks by Israel on Palestine. On Wednesday morning, YouTube had, in the midst of this, added an age restriction to Al Jazeera Arabic’s live stream.

Al Jazeera reports that a message appeared on its Arabic YouTube page early on Wednesday, saying that its content may be inappropriate and that viewing the live stream required verification of the user’s age.

Earlier this month Facebook and Instagram were criticized for removing content and accounts sharing events in Sheikh Jarrah, the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood where Palestinian families are being forcibly dispossessed of their homes.

Meanwhile, the Verge, a US-based technology news website, reported that a group of Jewish Google employees, under the umbrella group ‘Jewish Diaspora in Tech’, had sent a letter to Google’s management, in which they requested Google increase its support of Palestinians. The group reportedly asked Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, to release a statement condemning the attacks in Gaza and the West Bank.

In the letter, Pichai was asked for “direct recognition of the harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence”. It further requested that Google leadership make a statement, adding: “ignoring the destructive and deadly attacks faced by Palestinians erases our Palestinian co-workers.” The letter also asked the Google leadership “reject any definition of antisemitism that holds that criticism of Israel or Zionism is anti-Semitic.”

Latest news reports, however, indicate that YouTube removed the just recent age restriction to Al Jazeera Arabic’s live stream. The company said in a statement that, “Al Jazeera Arabic’s live stream was briefly age-restricted because of graphically violent content, but the age-restriction was lifted after the graphic content was no longer present.”

Umm Muhammed Umar