“TikTok deleted my account. I had 1.4 million followers there, and I had been building this platform for four years,” Odeh, 28, said in a video posted to her other social media accounts on Wednesday, just days after TikTok’s new owners took control.
“I expected it to be restricted, not banned forever,” she said.
Odeh has achieved a large following for her daily blogs documenting life amid Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. She showed herself constantly in motion, one of the nearly two million residents of the Strip forcibly displaced by the military offensive, and gave viewers a first-hand account of Israel. Attacks on hospitalsthat it Neighborhood settlementand her Assassinations of journalists.
Each of them began with the distinctive phrase: “It’s Bisan from Gaza, and I’m still alive.”
A documentary film with this title, produced in cooperation with The island A media network, it has won numerous awards, including the 2024 Emmy Award for news and documentary filmmaking.
Odeh’s videos, most of which are in English, gave Western audiences a humanizing glimpse into the lives of Palestinian people who have fallen victim to war. She was one of many Palestinians who shared their stories on platforms like TikTok, which US lawmakers have blamed for a massive shift in youth public opinion against Israel since the genocide began in October 2023.
In 2024, then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has notoriously justified the bipartisan push to ban the platform by decrying the “overwhelming” volume of “references to Palestinians” on it.
Others, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now Secretary of State, Express Similar sentiments are that TikTok has been a crucial front in the information war over young minds.
In the video in which she announced her ban, Odeh drew attention to statements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Who said? In September, social media was the most important “battlefield” on which Israel needed to engage.
Netanyahu said the “most important purchase” made at the time was the sale of TikTok from Chinese company ByteDance to US investors, which was carried out under an executive order from US President Donald Trump.
Among those investors was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who now owns a 15% stake in TikTok and primary responsibility for data security and algorithm oversight. In addition to being a major donor to Republican causes, Ellison describes He lists himself as having a “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” as the largest private donor to Israeli military causes, and is a close personal friend of Netanyahu.
last Key stakeholders They include US-based private equity firm Silver Lake, which has… Close relationships Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the Emirati investment firm MGX, which contributed an unprecedented $2 billion in a deal to help Trump’s lucrative cryptocurrency startup, World Liberty Financial.
He also highlighted the return comments Made by Adam Presser, TikTok’s new CEO, describing changes he would help make to the platform while serving as head of its US operations that limited the use of the word “Zionist” in a negative context.
“We made a change to designate the use of the term ‘Zionist’ as an alternative to a protected characteristic such as hate speech,” Presser said. “So, if someone uses the word ‘Zionist’, of course, you can use it in the sense that you are a proud Zionist. But if you use it in the context of disparaging someone, calling someone a Zionist as a dirty name, then that would be classified as hate speech that should be toned down.”
Owda’s apparent censorship comes at a time when several other users have reported that their content is critical of the Trump administration throttled In the days following the takeover by the new owners.
Users found themselves unable to upload content critical of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and unable to send direct messages containing the word “Epstein,” a reference to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, whose relationship with Trump has recently come under scrutiny.
TikTok’s owners denied censoring the content, blaming the problem on a power outage at Oracle’s data center.
Following these reports, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom launched an investigation into whether the platform was censoring anti-Trump content.
according to CNBCthe daily average number of users who deleted TikTok Shoot increased by 150% since the new owners took over.
Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of users have done just that flocked to a new platform called UpScrolled, which was launched in July 2025 by Palestinian-Australian app developer Issam Hijazi, who said he created it to counter the overwhelming presence of pro-Israel content on existing platforms.
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