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Emmy-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda says her TikTok account has been restored several hours after she posted a video saying the platform had banned her.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, she said she regained access to the account, but people had to type her full username in the search bar to find it. She also said she had received a message from TikTok saying many of her posts were now “ineligible for recommendation”.

The journalist said the platform was important because it was more widely spread among young people and less restrictive than Instagram. Talking about the youth, she said, they were “the future” and “the main pillars of all these systems”. She expressed concern that, “[if they] don’t understand anything, they will be exploited”.

Owda said “Israeli propaganda” had succeeded in spreading the country’s narrative globally for 76 years, but the rise of independent reporting on social media had made people realise the reality of the situation. She said, “Not saying the truth, not resisting, not fighting back for our rights and our lives, it’s not an option anymore.”

Her TikTok account, with 1.4 million followers, was visible to Images on Thursday, but no new posts were visible after September 2025.

In a post shared on her Instagram account on Wednesday, the journalist announced the account’s deletion, saying, “it’s not restricted as every [other] time, it’s banned, forever”. She said she had been “building that platform for four years”.

Owda said she saw the ban coming after statements made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that the government was seeking greater influence over the platform. She added a clip of the PM talking to American influencers in September, where he called social media “the most important weapon… to secure our base in the US”.

Anadolu Agency reported that Netanyahu went on to say that TikTok was “the most important purchase going on right now,” adding that its control could be “consequential” to Israel.

The journalist also attached a video of Adam Presser, the newly appointed CEO of TikTok in the US, where he said the platform had banned the use of the term “Zionist” in a derogatory sense.

In the clip, which Roya News reports is from a meeting of the World Jewish Congress in 2025, Presser said, “We made a change to designate the use of the term ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for a protected attribute, for hate speech… Of course, you can use it in the sense that you’re a proud Zionist. But if you’re in the context of degrading somebody, calling someone a Zionist as a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated.”

The executive said the platform had tripled the number of accounts it was banning over hateful activity over the course of 2024 and that it was receiving intelligence about “violative trends” from “over two dozen Jewish organisations”. He said there was “no finish line” when it came to moderating hate speech.

On Thursday, Owda also announced she had joined the Palestinian-owned social media app UpScrolled, which is gaining increasing popularity as a censorship-free alternative to major platforms like TikTok.

The app has seen a major spike in traffic from countries like the US, UK and Australia, where it became the most downloaded social media app on Apple devices recently. The Council on American-Islamic Relations recently commended UpScrolled for “protecting free speech” amidst TikTok’s “censorship spree”

Cover photo: Bisan Owda/Instagram