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Paper short abstract

How is the Palestine Exception encoded in platform infrastructures? Drawing on discourse analysis and research on automated moderation, I introduce 'infrastructural realization' to show how algorithmic systems instantiate geopolitical imaginaries, foreclosing pro-Palestinian speech.

Paper long abstract

The systematic suppression of pro-Palestinian speech on major social media platforms represents a technologically mediated extension of the Palestine Exception into algorithmic governance — the same logic that blocks legal and decolonial recourse now encoded in the infrastructures that govern global speech. This paper draws on two empirical bodies of work: collaborative research on public discourse surrounding the moderation of Palestine-related speech (El Mimouni et al., 2024; Abokhodair et al., 2024), and research on automated moderation infrastructures, including institutional documentation and interview material with platform governance actors.

Conceptually, I argue that the STS notion of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) does not sufficiently account for infrastructural asymmetry - the uneven capacity of actors to materialize imaginaries within operational systems. I introduce infrastructural realization to distinguish imaginaries embedded in code, taxonomies, and automated decision architectures from those that remain discursive. Publics generate counter-imaginaries contesting moderation regimes, but lack the material capacity to instantiate alternative epistemic orders.

From a decolonial perspective, this asymmetry is not incidental. It reflects hierarchies of technological sovereignty in which US platform infrastructure operationalizes particular geopolitical imaginaries as technical fact. The Palestine Exception is thereby not only imposed through liberal discourses of neutrality or overt repression, but encoded in the automated architectures governing global speech. Foregrounding infrastructural realization contributes to STS debates on epistemic authority, showing that the legitimacy of competing claims depends on differential access to the material means of world-making.