On getting deleted from social media

How censorship reaches from the ground in Palestine to the microphones in the west

Getting deleted off a social media app is like winning at a video game, cause it causes you to level up. It’s a graduation of sorts, a social media influencer with too much influence. It reminds me of the high rollers who get bounced out of casinos because they keep winning too much money. They know it’s coming its just a matter of time.

I’ve learned so much from getting deleted off Instagram three times total now. First in 2021, The Palestine Pod page disappeared, we lawyered up through Pal Legal and got the account back almost immediately. We had a “sympathetic representative” from the company tell us our account got caught in a digital checkpoint by mistake. Everything is by mistake, nothing by design. It seems like the only design is mistakes. Digital checkpoint, you say? They’ve got Jewish supremacy that extends online.

The second time I lost my account was May 28th, 2025 the day I was supposed to release my first comedy special, The Challal Special, which is free on YouTube. I lost my main account of nearly 100K followers. I immediately started reaching out to the journalists I’ve known and worked with over the years. A long-time comrade, OMAR ZAHZAH who wrote about us getting censored in 2021 took up the task immediately and for him I’m eternally grateful. He pitched a story to Mondoweiss that came out July 1st and by July 2nd my backup account with 12K followers was also disabled. I’m also eternally grateful to accounts like Eye on Palestine, Palestine Pixel, , The Sameer Project, Watermelon Brigades, Seaster Jones, Amanda Seales, Mish Mish and Wissam Nassar who came to my assistance, realizing the story was larger than just any single comedian being censored.

I was likely targeted again by Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel and Jewish Diaspora policy chief. Because in the Mondowiess interview I compared her to the Nazi Minister of Information, Joeseph Goebbels. I made this comparison because she controls what the people hear and see, what we think and feel. She decides what information is suitable for public consumption and what goes to a dark place people never hear about. Seems like I called her bluff, and she proved me right.

The foremost victims of her censorship are not comedians or influencers in the west. It’s Palestinian journalists on the ground who are trying to report the war crimes daily and they’re being targeted with drone strikes, and then their uploads fail as they try to tell the world about it. Their posts are targeted for deletion, and their accounts censored for trying to speak up. Palestinian, Pulitzer Prize winner Mosab Abu Toha had his SubStack account censored recently and called it out on X.

The infrastrcture of censorship is so vast, so odious, that it spans from the journalist on the ground in Palestine all the way to the standup comedian in the West who vocally criticizes the genocide. It’s the same hand that squeezes both of our throats closed as we try to undercut the zionist narrative.

I so appreciate the outpouring of support I’ve received from people in Palestine, particularly the journalists and artists there. I message with my friend Mish Mish a clown in the Gaza circus every day. When he first heard about my deletion, he was worried there would be an interruption to our established communication pattern. I also heard from Wissam Nassar, an award-winning photo-journalist in Gaza. He understands how frustrating it is to have your account taken down. I’ve helped him regain his account before. The words of these lions help sustain me at a time when it feels lonely.

I will say I’ve received some nasty feedback from western influencers who provide “advice” about what they’d do if they lost their account. It’s no need. It’s not something they’ll ever experience as they don’t post anything disruptive. Their entire lives are advertisements for capitalism and consumption so I don’t think they’ll ever have the issue.

Ultimately, what I’ve learned is there is way more power in my voice than I thought, and that’s true for everyone of us. If we all spoke up in a way that made Meta executives uncomfortable, we would become an ungovernable society. It’s only because so few of us are willing to take principled stances that the repression and censorship has its desired impact.

It’s as Malcolm X always said, “we’re not outnumbered were out organized.”