The Palestinian digital struggle is a daily, skilled, and collective effort to carve out and defend a space for legible existence against systems designed to render it invisible. Right now, Palestinian digital projects exist in a liminal space between the effort to fix systems from inside and the instinct to leave them behind.

The following casualty database story perfectly illustrates the microcosm of this bind:

The project began the way many urgent Palestinian tech efforts do: with a practical need and a small group of people who decided not to wait.

In October 2023, as Israeli attacks on Gaza intensified, journalists, researchers, and ordinary people kept asking the same question: where could they find a reliable, up-to-date record of the dead? The Gaza Ministry of Health released daily casualty figures, but the information scattered quickly across posts, PDFs, screenshots, and news reports. Links broke, numbers shifted, and sources disappeared down timelines.

A group of volunteer engineers and researchers — many connected through Tech for Palestine (T4P) — decided to build something simple: a live, searchable database that mirrored the casualty lists, linked entries to sources, and updated daily. The project ran as a standalone website hosted on commercial cloud infrastructure, but its reach depended on links shared across major social media platforms. It avoided commentary and slogans. It focused on names, ages, dates, and references.

They built it fast — hosting live in days, interface plain, goal pure clarity. For a brief period, the project worked exactly as intended. Journalists cited it. Researchers bookmarked it. Activists shared it. Palestinian loss became legible in a way it rarely is — organized, traceable, difficult to dismiss.

When Visibility Becomes Liability

As the project drew wider attention, the conditions of its reception on social media platforms changed.

The website itself remained online, but on major social media platforms, links to the site stopped previewing reliably and reached fewer people, even as no clear explanation appeared. At the infrastructure level, the commercial hosting provider and payment processor sent automated notices that heightened review and pointed to “sensitive content,” followed by requests for clarification of notices that did not specify what required adjustment. Because the project depended on these external services for hosting, payments, and visibility, it could continue to exist while becoming progressively harder to share, harder to support financially, and harder to sustain.

The team responded methodically. They rechecked sources. They added disclaimers. They adjusted wording that already avoided politics. They set up mirrors. They spent nights rewriting documentation instead of improving the database.

Instead of building, they had to put their energies into maintenance. Just keeping the project alive demanded constant attention. Every update carried the risk of triggering another review, suspension, or takedown by service providers whose rules remained vague and unevenly enforced. Every surge in traffic increased that risk, turning visibility into a liability rather than a success. The emotional weight of working with casualty data added to the strain, but the exhaustion came mainly from the ongoing hassle of keeping the project acceptable to systems it did not control. In digital activism, the real drain is the bureaucratic, technical, and psychological labor of appeasing opaque, unaccountable corporate systems.

The site never formally disappeared. It remained online in fragments and backups. What disappeared was its viability as a stable, openly shared public resource. Some volunteers stepped back quietly; others stayed involved but stopped speaking about the project publicly, treating discretion as another form of maintenance.

Shadowbanning as a Systemic Pattern

The narrative above reflects a “shadowbanning” pattern seen in several Palestinian documentation efforts — including live, volunteer-built casualty databases that emerged after October 7, 2023, as well as longstanding informational efforts like If Americans Knew, which organizes broader casualty data and contextual information on Israeli attacks.

At the same time, users on major social media platforms began sensing changes in how posts linking to Palestinian casualty documentation circulated. Links traveled unevenly and appeared with platform warnings, which reduced the site’s reach and nudged conversations into private channels and other spaces where sharing Palestinian information felt more sustainable. As builders worked to keep a public record accessible, users gradually eased away from the platforms that made circulating that record increasingly difficult. Both builders and users responded to the same pressure, though they encountered it from different angles.

Even the discussion of exit is quickly reframed by Western media in the familiar, morally charged language of “antisemitism.” In an interview conducted by Quinn LeClair and circulated on UpScrolled, the risks facing the platform are described in these terms, shifting attention away from the ordinary mechanics of suppression — algorithmic demotion and financial service chokepoints — and recentering the debate on the oppressor’s moral frame.

Reform as Time-Buying

This is the space where Palestinian digital work now lives: between the effort to fix systems from inside and the instinct to leave them behind.

Organizations like Tech for Palestine, a network that brings together technologists to support Palestinian digital projects, coordinate skilled labor, share technical knowledge, and help ideas become working websites, databases, and platforms. This work helps people who would otherwise remain isolated collaborate and allows Palestinian-focused projects to function and appear credible inside dominant digital systems — social media platforms, hosting services, and professional tech environments — where such work often carries risk.

For a time, this approach delivers visible results by absorbing pressure and keeping Palestinian speech present within systems that are politically hostile to it. Reform ecosystems value legibility. They rely on recognizable forms — nonprofits, incubators, professional norms, ethical language. These forms open doors, but they also shape expectations.

However, the techies involved in T4P also understand that this strategy buys time rather than lasting security, which helps explain why the same networks have supported paths toward exit from mainstream social media platforms, including alternatives like UpScrolled, launched in mid-2025 as an Australian-based app for microblogging and short videos that began as an incubated project within that ecosystem.

Exit and the Transfer of Risk

Exit shifts responsibility to builders who must now take on uptime, governance, moderation, and legal exposure. This is now the burden UpScrolled is shouldering.

Watching this unfold raises a shared question: if the path out is shaped by the path in, what does exit actually mean? How much of the system’s logic travels with projects built by people who learned to survive it?

UpScrolled is a hybrid exit project in the sense that it has already inherited habits formed inside a reform ecosystem. Early support makes survival possible. It also delays the moment when full independence becomes unavoidable. Crossing that threshold requires a second break — structural and social. It means absorbing risk directly rather than distributing it across institutions.

As exit projects grow, they stop reading as experiments and start reading as substitute spaces that must exercise control over infrastructure and governance. They must navigate funding that shapes behavior and legal exposure.

The Limits of Pure Exit

Trying to fix big tech platforms from the inside can give Palestinian digital projects some temporary breathing room, but leaving to build your own alternative demands far more time and energy in the long run. Reform buys time. Exit consumes it. This explains why exit often feels provisional even when its principles are clear. The obstacle lies in exposure.

Calls to build everything from scratch often assume a scale of power that does not exist here. UpScrolled operates inside a global system it cannot leave all at once, because it lacks sovereignty, protected markets, and time. (It’s not China!)

This reality reshapes what exit can mean.

The “hybrid” state of this app may be permanent. Sustainability will mean practical moves ahead — like adding desktop access so more people can join comfortably and exploring optional community-backed funding — while staying true to the no-shadowban core.

Users as Endurance Infrastructure

At the end of this story, we must return the focus to the users.

People are streaming into UpScrolled with urgency and expectation. Its corridors are now crowded. Support teams are working at speed to patch problems as they surface. The experience feels uneven and unfinished, but it also feels alive.

Users like me arrive shaped by years of constraint elsewhere. We want continuity. We want our words to travel. We want to speak without recalculating every sentence. What we are encountering now looks like a worksite under strain, stressed by its own growth.

As users, we need to be aware that rapid growth on an exit platform like UpScrolled is messy and stressful. Yet it is that very traffic that transforms it. We are not just consumers; by persisting through the glitches, we become stakeholders. Our presence shifts pressure from the builders to the platform’s infrastructure, forcing it to evolve. We are performing the same endurance labor that Palestinian digital workers have always been forced into.

That persistence can take small, concrete forms: reporting glitches through in-app feedback, joining early volunteer moderator pilots, or giving input on feed experiments as the team refines its transparent, chronological ranking and human-led moderation. Platforms learn what they need to survive only when people use them under real conditions.

For builders, the rush drains energy. For users, it tests patience. For both, it marks the first moment when exit begins to function as more than an idea. Staying present during this phase reflects that recognition.

Unlike the earlier exhaustion — where energy was endlessly spent on maintenance, appeasing opaque systems, and rewriting documentation just to stay alive — this drain is different. It is productive. It comes from real growth, from people actually using the platform under pressure, from the work of building something new rather than endlessly patching the old.

UpScrolled operates without state protection or monopoly insulation. It operates with people willing to inhabit it while it strains. That presence does not resolve the structural problem traced here. It buys time. It converts fragility into use. It gives exit a chance to thicken into something harder to absorb into the existing system.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. Visit the author’s blog.

She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: Reform buys time. Exit consumes it. This explains why exit often feels provisional even when its principles are clear. The obstacle lies in exposure. (Source: Rima Najjar)

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