During the 2023–ongoing Gaza war, Palestinian advocacy on social media has faced rapid removals, downranking, and account sanctions. In this contribution, we offer a layered analysis of how people endure and counter this repression across affective, mechanistic, and material dimensions. Using patchwork ethnography over 295 first-person testimonies and 85 NGO/press documents, we identify a recursive Contest Loop: hostile mass-report brigades and automated enforcement that spur supporter “appeal brigades,” mirroring, and migration. Findings are organized as a three-layer ecology—Invisible Scars (whiplash, shadowbanning as probabilistic throttling, self-censorship), Dueling Brigades (frictions, coordinated reports, supporter procedures), and Feed-to-Street Ripples (fundraising, evidentiary preservation, livelihoods). Conceptually, we extend platform-assemblage thinking with a Resistance Assemblage: ad-hoc technical, emotional, and legal mutual-aid infrastructures that keep visibility alive under sanction. We contribute: (1) an event-centered, experience-near account of co-produced moderation in conflict; (2) two integrative lenses (Contest Loop, Resistance Assemblage); and (3) design/policy directions, including collective-appeal dashboards, and evidentiary safeguards that separate archiving from distribution.

Social media platforms have become a double-edged sword for human rights activism, simultaneously offering a stage and facilitating wide-reaching communication and connection, while also imposing censorship through stringent and opaque content governance. This study focuses on the over enforcement of content moderation on social media platforms, affecting activists who tried to engage online publics with issues of forced evictions and displacements in Sheikh Jarrah (SJ) and Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem in May 2021 --- a critical juncture in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. By analyzing responses from a survey of 201 users who reported experiencing censorship, and interviews with 14 political influencers and activists, we uncover how these individuals navigate the intricate landscape of social media censorship. The findings reveal a continuum of different ways of responding to censorship, from self-censorship to proactive advocacy of policy change, that highlight the ingenuity activists can employ to bypass content restrictions. This research not only contributes to our understanding of the interaction between social media's technical affordances and activist responses but also discusses broader implications for the design and governance of digital platforms in supporting democratic discourse and human rights activism in conflict zones. This study enriches the ongoing dialogue about social media's dual role as both a facilitator and a controller of public discourse, emphasizing the need for platforms to consider the profound impacts of their technical and policy decisions on global activism.

Social media technologies have been empowering to some human rights activists, providing a platform for exercising free speech and mobilization. However, many activists have voiced concerns and shared experiences they understand as considerable censorship on these platforms, under the guise of content governance. In an effort to increase the understanding and transparency of content moderation practices during conflicts, this study investigates the perceived reasons for censorship as understood by activists and the explanations made visible to activists by social media platforms, if any were given. Our case study to examine these platforms-activists relations is the events which occurred in May 2021 in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which was a significant moment in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and garnered international attention. The over enforcement of content moderation faced by Palestinians and their allies during these events on social media raised concerns about freedom of speech and the role of technology in activism. Our study deepens understanding through findings from a survey of 201 social media users who reported potentially unfair moderation decisions, and from 12 interviews with political influencers to grasp the broader implications of content moderation on activism. The findings of this study indicate a substantial disparity between the official explanations made visible to the activists by the social media platforms, and the reasons as perceived by users. This has significant implications, both socially and for social media platforms -- as CSCW and Group work environments --- on activist groups and the potentialities of democratic discourse. This study serves as an important contribution to the debate on the role of social media content moderation in human rights activism, particularly in conflict zones.

It is widely acknowledged in HCI that culture is embodied in many aspects of an individual's identity and interaction with technology. Whilst existing cultural models have been criticized for providing a deterministic view of culture, alternative methods for incorporating culture in design remain scarce. We introduce the use of Qualitative Secondary Analysis (QSA) as a bottom-up approach to construct a richer and more dynamic understanding of culture to inform our best practices in Cross-Cultural Design. We demonstrate the use of QSA within a culturally specific context, namely Saudi transnationals. We draw upon two case studies (with 55 participants) to investigate the cultural factors underpinning our participants views. We conclude with a reflection on key affordances and challenges of QSA, illustrating how QSA can be leveraged to unravel otherwise overlooked knowledge present in many qualitative HCI studies.

While social media offer users a platform for self-expression, identity exploration, and community management, among other functions, they also offer space for religious practice and expression. In this paper, we explore social media spaces as they subtend new forms of religious experiences and rituals. We present a mixed-method study to understand the practice of sharing Quran verses on Arabic Twitter in their cultural context by combining a quantitative analysis of the most shared Quran verses, the topics covered by these verses, and the modalities of sharing, with a qualitative study of users' goals. This analysis of a set of 2.6 million tweets containing Quran verses demonstrates that online religious expression in the form of sharing Quran verses both extends offline religious life and supports new forms of religious expression including goals such as doing good deeds, giving charity, holding memorials, and showing solidarity. By analysing the responses on a survey, we found that our Arab Muslim respondents conceptualize social media platforms as everlasting, at least beyond their lifetimes, where they consider them to be effective for certain religious practices, such as reciting Quran, supplication (dua), and ceaseless charity. Our quantitative analysis of the most shared verses of the Quran underlines this commitment to religious expression as an act of worship, highlighting topics such as the hereafter, God's mercy, and sharia law. We note that verses on topics such as jihad are shared much less often, contradicting some media representation of Muslim social media use and practice.

Websites and applications that match and connect individuals for romantic purposes are commonly used in the Western world. However, there have not been many previous investigations focusing on cultural factors that affect the adoption of similar technologies in religiously conservative non-Western cultures. In this study, we examine the socio-technical and cultural factors that influence the perceptions and use of matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia. We report the methods and findings of interviews with 18 Saudi nationals (nine males and nine females) with diverse demographics and backgrounds. We provide qualitatively generated insights into the major themes reported by our participants related to the common approaches to matchmaking, the current role of technology, and concerns regarding matchmaking technologies in this cultural con-text. We relate these themes to specific implications for designing marital matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia and we outline opportunities for future investigations.

Current research demonstrates that when people engage in social photo sharing, they are mindful of how audiences perceive and interact with their photos. We extend this vein of inquiry to focus on photo sharing in the context of the Arab Gulf. We provide insight into how this activity is practiced in a region governed by strict adherence to cultural norms and Islamic traditions that dictate how to "appropriately" share content in digital settings. In particular, we look at the relationship between photo sharing and its effects on identity and self-presentation. To understand how Saudi and Qatari participants represent themselves through photo sharing applications, we conducted 42 face-to-face interviews. Our results reveal that Arab Gulf users engage in photo sharing practices that construct a collective self, distinct from an autonomous self. This collective self often trumps the autonomous self in shaping photo sharing practices.

Theories of privacy and how it relates to the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) have been a topic of research for decades. However, little attention has been paid to the perception of privacy from the perspective of technology users in the Middle East. In this paper, we delve into interpretations of privacy from the approach of Arab Gulf citizens. We consider how privacy is practiced and understood in technology-mediated environments among this population, paying particular attention to the role of Islam and cultural traditions in constructing norms around privacy. We then offer culturally sensitive design principles and suggestions for future research that incorporates previously unexplored characteristics of privacy, which play a role in how users navigate social media.

Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we considered one specific social botnet in Twitter to understand how it grows over time, how the content of tweets by the social botnet differ from regular users in the same dataset, and lastly, how the social botnet may have influenced the relevant discussions. Our analysis is based on a qualitative coding for approximately 3000 tweets in Arabic and English from the Syrian social bot that was active for 35 weeks on Twitter before it was shutdown. We find that the growth, behavior and content of this particular botnet did not specifically align with common conceptions of botnets. Further we identify interesting aspects of the botnet that distinguish it from regular users.

This is a progress report on a case study of cyber-security at mega-size companies and its importance to the financial and operational well-being of the company. Our investigation focuses specifically on Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company. The company was the target of a severe cyber-attack on August 15, 2012 that paralyzed their business network for several months. We analyze the company's response to the attack and examine its current policies with regard to cyber-security. Our goal is to answer the main research question: How the Saudi Government, the primary stakeholder of Saudi Aramco, reacted and responded to the attack and how this response conforms to current cyber-security standards. The objective is to develop a best-practices benchmark of cyber-security that provides guidelines to be utilized by Saudi Aramco and similar companies.