2025 Theses Master's

The Role of Social Media in Pro-Palestinian Human Rights Advocacy: Overcoming Digital Orientalism and Amplifying Marginalized Voices.

Al Mousawi, Fatima

This thesis examines the transformative role of social media as a platform for pro-Palestinian human rights advocacy, exploring its potential to challenge entrenched orientalist narratives and amplify marginalized voices. The research is within the larger scholarly discussion on digital activism and human rights. It investigates how pro-Palestinian advocates make counter-narratives to the structural bias and suppression through algorithms in digital spaces.

This study critically assesses the opportunities and limitations of digital platforms for social activists in navigating complex socio-political contexts by using qualitative content analysis and manual sentiment evaluation of three key important advocacy campaigns – the Great March of Return (2018), the Sheikh Jarrah Protests (2021), and the Rafah humanitarian crisis (2024). Based on Edward Said’s fundamental theory of orientalism and its modern understanding as digital orientalism, this thesis explores whether or not colonial and racialized power apparatuses are perpetuated through social mechanisms such as platform governance, content moderation, and algorithmic prejudice.

The findings establish that while social media has served as a vital instrument for enabling visibility and mobilization of marginalized communities, one that has never been available before, it has simultaneously imposed multiple limits on mobilization, which are defined by geopolitics of power and commercial interests. This research intends to offer due consideration to the changes taking shape in the securitized field of digital activism, narrative control, and systemic challenges faced by pro-Palestinian advocates in contributing to the human rights scholarship. It emphasizes how digital inequalities must be recognized and acted upon and recommends improving activists’ ability to harness digital platforms for building justice, representation, and long-standing political impact.