Social media accounts of Palestinians desperate for funds are being flagged as spam

The Guardian

5 days ago

Hanin Al-Batsh estimates she has signed up for more than 80 Bluesky accounts in the last six months.
Like hundreds of other Palestinians struggling to buy or even find food in Gaza, Al-Batsh uses Bluesky to promote her crowdfunding campaigns, hoping to raise enough money for flour and milk for her children in a given week.
Her posts on the text-based social network have grown increasingly desperate as Israel tightens its grip of the Gaza Strip, forcing millions into starvation.
'Hello friends, my children have become weak, have lost weight, are malnourished, and have very low iron levels,' Al-Batsh's latest post reads.
Images the young mother shared with the Guardian show her two sons, one-and-a-half-year-old Ahmed and three-year-old Adam, sprawled out on a makeshift bed on the floor of the warehouse where they are sheltering.
As hunger is spreading rapidly through Gaza, and aid remains inaccessible to many, Palestinians are turning to crowdsourcing campaigns hosted on sites like GoFundMe and Chuffled as a lifeline.
But as they seek to get the word about their campaigns out in the world via social media, their accounts are frequently shut down or marked as spam. That's especially the case on Bluesky, the young Twitter alternative popular in Gaza.
Bluesky has deactivated nearly all of Al-Batsh's accounts after just a few days, she said. The longest she has been able to hold on to one is 12 days.
When the social network marks one account as spam, she creates another one, hoping to reassure potential donors that she is not a bot.
The shutdowns, therefore, ironically force her to resort to exactly the behavior that Bluesky, in its effort to combat bots and scams, is seeking to root out: batch following and then repeatedly tagging the same people who engaged with their previous accounts.
Al-Batsh no longer tags people in every post after a stern email from Bluesky, hoping to abide by the platform's rules. 'But now no one can find my posts,' she said.
In other words, in an act of desperation, these Palestinians often do operate like bots. With every fresh account, it becomes harder for people like Al-Batsh to shake the accusation. Low follower counts and posts that repeatedly tag others en masse are often tell-tale signs of a bot.
Recently, though, a grassroots answer to the problem has emerged. Since May, new Bluesky accounts Al-Batsh has made have something new: all her posts end with a green checkmark emoji and the phrase: 'Verified by Molly Shah,' a reference to a Germany-based lawyer-turned-activist who has been independently verifying Gaza crowdfunding campaigns.
There are a handful of other volunteers doing the same work on Bluesky. And similar efforts exist on other social media platforms. Some are even run by entire teams of volunteers: there's GazaFunds and Radio Watermelon on X and Instagram, and Gaza Vetters on Tumblr.
Still, Shah said, she wished there was a better system in place. 'This centers me too much,' she said.
Shah has been on Bluesky since the early days of the relatively young platform's life, when she had only about 7,000 followers and knew of only one person from Gaza with a Bluesky account, Jamal.
That's how her verification project started: she had encouraged Jamal, a friend of a friend, to open a Bluesky account and shared his posts on her own profile, hoping to bring attention to his crowdfunding campaign in 2023. It worked. Jamal raised enough money to leave Gaza.
Shah's verification project snowballed as more people in Gaza joined the social network. Many reached out to her, hoping she'd share their campaigns with her now 57,000 followers. She began asking for information about the individuals or families in the campaigns before sharing them, and that's how her guerrilla authentication network got its start.
Today, Shah has a spreadsheet of more than 300 accounts she's vetted and verified. They use the same badge of authentication as Al-Batsh, 'verified by Molly Shah', in their posts and profile pages. The stamp doesn't always prevent a Bluesky account from being flagged as spam by the company's systems, but her hope is that it will help other people on Bluesky confirm that the person behind the account is genuine.
'The verification seems to help people recognize that they're real people,' Shah said. 'I just want people to get to know Palestinians. To me, I don't think of it as fundraising as the main goal, though I'm happy to help them do that. I think of it as [combatting] the persistent and insistent dehumanization of Palestinians.'
The vetting process isn't standard, Shah said, and can include doing a video call, having someone Shah has already vetted or knows personally to vouch or viewing documentation that proves their identity and shows that they're still in Gaza. All of this takes time. Al-Batsh said she waited two months before she heard back from Shah. Occasionally, Shah will come across a person pretending to be in Gaza or misrepresenting their situation in other ways. For the most part, the people who reach out to her are in fact real people in Gaza in need of help.
Gaza has reached catastrophic levels of famine, according to aid and human rights organizations, which raises the stakes of each fundraising campaign and even each post on Bluesky. Duaa Al-Madhoun, another mother in Gaza trying to feed her three children, said she, too, has had dozens of her Bluesky accounts deleted. Buying flour, milk and diapers cost her $100 a day when those items are available. Lately, diapers and milk have been harder to find, she said, and she'll go some days without eating so that she can feed her children.
'My child wears nylon bags, no diapers. He suffers from diaper rash,' Al-Madhoun said. 'Food is scarce and very expensive. If food is available, I just eat some rice.'
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The impact of a fundraiser can be near immediate, according to Nat Calhoun, who aids several families in Gaza with their campaigns. In one case, Calhoun said, a family they are in touch with in Mawasi, Khan Younis, reached out to them about an older woman in their town who had not eaten for several days. They were able to raise $110 to buy her flour and transferred the money to her the next day.
'It can be instantaneous,' Calhoun said. 'I don't think people realize that your help can make an impact in a day.'
To receive the money collected through fundraisers, Palestinians need to work with a 'receiver', someone outside of Gaza who sets up the campaign and collects the money on their behalf and wires the money through their banks. That's because the platforms use payment processors that do not operate in Gaza.
The system has meant that Palestinians have been required to place a great deal of trust in these middle actors, who are people they've never met.
It also means the campaigns, and the Palestinians relying on them, are vulnerable to scams.
Calhoun and Shah say many of the scams they do see exploit and victimize Palestinians.
Al-Batsh's first campaign was hosted on GoFundMe by a woman who listed her location as Tucson, Arizona. The campaign raised nearly $37,000. Al-Batsh received about $34,000 before the campaign host told Al-Batsh that she had trouble logging into the campaign. 'I never received the rest of the money,' Al-Batsh said.
'It breaks my brain to think about,' Calhoun said. 'It's frustrating because the people in Gaza can't make their own fundraisers. They're at the whims of somebody else and they have to trust somebody to do good by them.'
A spam label on Bluesky is enough to deter donations. Ad hoc verification systems like Shah's provide some level of guarantee that the money people are donating will actually help someone in Gaza rather than a bot farm or scammer.
When Shah shares a campaign, it makes a difference. Al-Batsh's campaign has received 10 donations ranging from $5 to $505 in the two days since Shah shared her post. Before that, she was averaging two to three donations a day, if that.
Though her verification network has helped some Palestinians maintain their online lifelines, Shah says it's not a sustainable system. She is overwhelmed with requests and had to decide to share only one account a day.
In the meantime, thousands of Bluesky users have signed open letters and made public pleas asking the company to improve its moderation practices.
'We understand that some Gazans post in a way that may trigger some of Bluesky's internal automated spam rules when posting fundraising links,' one of the open letters, with 7,000 signatures, reads. 'However, treating a group of extremely vulnerable people the same way that the platform treats t-shirt bots and phishers is not only incredibly cruel, it has also exacerbated the situation of desperate people just attempting to survive.'
Bluesky said in response to the open letter that the company was 'committed to ensuring' people in Gaza 'can be heard' on the platform. However, it continued, some of the behaviors of these accounts violated community guidelines, and it encouraged users to 'focus their efforts through authentic accounts'.
Bluesky did not respond to a request for comment.
'We can't get every moderation decision right, which is why we maintain an appeals process,' the post continued. Shah and others connected with people in Gaza say few people get a response from the company when they file an appeal. It remains difficult for Palestinians to maintain their accounts for more than a few days.
Bluesky had an opportunity to improve its moderation system in the early days of the war in Gaza, when there were fewer people on the platform, Shah said. She wishes they had taken it.
'It sounds like Bluesky is saying: 'We're getting rid of spammers,' but really what they're getting rid of are people who are desperate,' she said.