Nikki Carreon started Creators for Palestine with a single image of Snoopy on her Close Friends story on Instagram. The 25-year-old YouTuber wanted to raise money for humanitarian relief in Gaza. Three weeks later, Carreon sat in the Try Guys video studio, watching as Keith Habersberger from the Try Guys tried various Palestinian foods as viewers sent in cash. The money raised for organizations on the ground — Medical Aide for Palestine, HEAL Palestine, and UNRWA — steadily grew to $1.6 million.
SEE ALSO:Why fandom wars aren't helping pro-Palestine organizingHabersberger, an early YouTube star, is one of many online creators who increasingly see themselves as necessary amplifiers and fundraisers for social movements. In this case, the feeling was supercharged by the lack of response from the United States government to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and so Creators for Palestine was born. Creators for Palestine’s livestream was an undeniable fundraising success and a potential roadmap for future creator collectives.
But, regardless of their altruistic intent, efforts like these come with all the potential treachery of being famous online, as creators must navigate unyielding community guidelines and the whims of their audiences.
Following the events of Oct. 7, major social media platforms have failed to support the surge of online activism: Meta has faced accusations of shadowbanningpro-Palestinian content; Instagram apologized for translating Palestine in Arabic to "Palestinian terrorist" in English; Human Rights Watchlater found Meta's censorship of Palestine content "systemic;" and in October, a popular account dedicated to sharing on-the-ground footage of Gaza, @Eye.on.Palestine, was locked on Instagram and removed by X — it's since been restored on both platforms.
For most onlookers, the suppression of Palestine content is undeniable. For creators whose livelihoods depend on their reach and engagement, pivoting their content to the humanitarian crisis has been a risky venture. In the creator economy, issues like war are impossible to monetize.
That's not to mention the harassment from viewers and trolls toward those publicly supporting Palestine. But creators like Carreon believe that speaking up is worth the risks.
Creators for Palestine shows how unwavering support for Palestine inspired creators to adapt to platform limitations and provide a support system for harassment. Those involved see the livestream fundraiser as only the beginning. "It's not something we plan to go away now that we have the network of creators," said Hassan Khadair, a 25-year-old content creator in Birmingham, Alabama, who is part of the "admin chat" of Creators for Palestine.
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What spurred Carreon (who uses all pronouns) to action was a graphic image from Rafah that spread across X / Twitter. “It was so horrible that I immediately scrolled away. It was so shocking to me. That made me feel like I want to do more,” she told Mashable. She set out with a $2,000 fundraising goal, generated interest from three friends, and imagined raising money via an informative graphic the small group would repost across their social media platforms.
The first sign that Carreon’s Instagram group chat would become something bigger was when well-known creators joined, expanding their reach and goals.
Fellow YouTuber Saji Sharma added the first large creator, Kurtis Conner, a YouTube comedian with 5 million subscribers, to the Instagram chat. Conner then connected Creators for Palestine with Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer with over 2.6 million followers with experience fundraising on Twitch. Creators for Palestine ultimately morphed into a Discord with over 120 creators.
As more creators joined the group, their fundraising goals also expanded, first to $20,000 and then to $100,000. But Piker had previously raised a lofty $1 million in just two weeks and encouraged the group to raise the goal to the same. Carreon told Mashable she felt relieved that people who knew how internet-based fundraisers worked were helping her cause.
After Conner joined, Carreon knew the group would start being taken seriously. Creators for Palestine's first infographic announcing their $1 million goal (with a note that at the $750,000 mark they'd host a livestream to close the gap) featured 32 creators, including Conner, Piker, and other popular YouTubers like Jarvis Johnson, a reactor with 2.09 million followers, and Mina Le, a video essayist with 1.35 million followers.
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By the following graphic, they were up to 59. Their final post before the livestream featured so many creators that they made a video instead.
With the more prominent creators came connections and a tone of legitimacy.
“At first, I was very anti-doing a livestream just because I didn't know how to. But once the streamers joined, I let them take the wheel,” said Carreon.
Among the streamers integral to planning the livestream programming were Twitch streamers Frogan and CapriSunnPapi (Capri), both going by their streaming names for privacy reasons.
"I [was] the only Palestinian planning the live[stream], so I was trying to figure out how [to] make this both fun, so we're able to raise money and have a good time, and, at the same time, informative," Capri told Mashable.
That meant a variety of personalities, activities, and consciousness-raising. The livestream opened with another Try Guys member, Zach Kornfeld, setting the tone, including a statement that, as a Jewish man, he wanted to reassure viewers that it is not antisemitic to criticize the Israeli government and support Palestine. In addition to Habersberger trying Palestinian food, creators painted watermelon, and Capri and Piker interviewed Steve Sosebee, the founder of Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (PCRF), who now runs HEAL Palestine.
"We wanted to make sure to highlight the culture of the Palestinian people to continue to humanize them since, on social media, that has been lost. And to highlight the positives of Palestinian people versus the death and destruction and sadness that has been on the timeline," Frogan told Mashable.
"I was able to take my mom's and my grandma's stuff from Palestine and decorate the Try Guys studio with it,” said Capri.
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With only three weeks until the headlining livestream, individual creators faced obstacles in getting the word out, often from the platforms themselves.
Creators for Palestine's members decided to take a "blackout social media approach," where each creator uploaded the same graphics and videos to flood feeds to reach as many people as possible, Khadair told Mashable. However, TikTokkers' videos immediately started to be taken down due to the platform's policy against "non-original content."
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"Only three of our videos would stay up, and some of us got demonetized for uploading our initial Creators for Palestine video when our strategy was to be a unified front," said Khadair.
In the Discord, creators compared the metrics of their Creators for Palestine posts on TikTok and their regular content, noticing that the ratio of likes to views was notably different, raising questions about censorship.
Amanda Golka, a 26-year-old YouTuber and Twitch streamer, tried to combat the lack of reach of her videos related to Palestine. "I found the best way to get engagement on the posts would be to sandwich it in a different unrelated video, tricking the algorithm," Golka told Mashable. She opened the TikTok video where she announced joining Creators for Palestine by teasing creator gossip, saying, "You're never going to believe what this creator did." Then, she made her decision to join the collective.
The strategy is growing in popularity among creators and is one of several ways TikTokkers and users drive engagement towards information about and fundraisers for Palestine. For example, in May, Estefania "Teffi" Pessoa, a TikTok personality with over 1.8 million followers, staged a feud with Kendra DePinto, a TikTokker focused on providing accessible recipes. Through a series of videos, the pair urged their viewers to check "the receipts" of the drama in their bios, where there's a GoFundMe to help evacuate a family in Gaza.
Similarly, in what's known as Operation Watermelon, users strategically comment on popular TikToks to train the algorithm-generated suggested search that appears at the top of the comments section to veiled references to Palestine, intending to spur viewers down a rabbit hole of information.
These tactics build upon other ways TikTok creators have tried to circumvent platform guidelines, like "algospeak," a workaround for content moderation in which users change the pronunciation and spelling of targeted words, such as referring to sex as "seggs."
Meanwhile, despite the platform's censorship, Instagram's design allowed for a more fluid dissemination of information as it enabled collaborative posting. The same video that was repeatedly removed from TikTok was collaboratively posted on Instagram by Conner, Khadair, Golka, Carreon, Chad Chad, Stanzi, and the Creators for Palestine page, resulting in 3.4 million views.
Beyond these strategies, creators trying to advocate for Palestine aren't only fighting against the algorithm. They are also beholden to their audiences.
"There's always this talk about creators having a more tenuous hold on their audiences and their jobs because it’s built on people liking you in some capacity," explained Golka. "A lot of creators wanted to speak out but were worried about saying the wrong thing and saying something alone. Creators for Palestine helped give people the confidence to say what they really felt."
Being a lone dissenter can be scary and intimidating in a lonely industry that relies on a creator's likeability. Still, Creators for Palestine allowed creators another option with the security of big names standing behind them.
Creators for Palestine helped give people the confidence to say what they really felt.
But despite safety in numbers, some creators still paid a cost for their staunch position. For his commitment to Creators for Palestine, Khadair lost 15,000 followers on Instagram alone. "It's a dramatic number, but the comments on the third [Creators for Palestine] graphic I posted are a lot nicer than the first," said Khadair. But, despite losing Instagram followers, his other metrics stayed consistent. "If you truly believe in it, you should fight for it. The ramifications of follower counts are very unimportant in the grand scheme of things." Neither Golka nor Carreon had a notable change in followers.
The Creators for Palestine Discord provided a place for those involved to feel less alone dealing with the harassment in response to their stance and an opportunity to share positive responses. "A lot of creators are very worried about standing alone on topics. I wish they weren't, but this is such an isolating job," said Golka.
The financial impact of Creators for Palestine makes the case for creators to bolster social movements, and those interviewed all envision more involvement in the future. "You'll have dissenting voices like Brittany Broski say that creators shouldn't be talking about politics. That's insane. Politics aren't just what a bunch of congressmen are yelling about. They are about human lives — especially [Palestine] is a humanitarian issue," said one of the creators involved.
Frogan echoed the sentiment: "If there are injustices happening, and you're aware of it and you're educated about it, you should be posting about it."
Still, others see the role of creators as even more integral, with coverage of the Palestinian struggle falling short across many U.S. publications. At CNN, the publication's staff called its pro-Israel bias "journalistic malpractice,"and The New York Timescame under fire for censoring the use of words like "genocide," "occupied territory," "ethnic cleansing," "massacre," and "slaughter." On an international level, Israeli control of the borders of the Gaza Strip has preventedforeign journalists from entering the region for on-the-ground reporting. At the same time, the conflict is the most dangerous for Palestinian journalists on the ground, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Some creators see themselves as alternative sources of information about the conflict, reposting on-the-ground footage or educating their followers on Palestinian history. As a Palestinian creator, Capri tries to fill in the gaps, yet he sees the fact that his viewers are learning about Palestine from him as a larger systemic failure.
"There is no major publication that was pro-Palestinian... They were basically repeating the lines of the State Department, and then just softly being like, 'But Israel may have some issues.' They were never really critical of Israel. Creators had to fill that role," said Capri.
For them, their role as creators is to recognize their potential power. Carreon is still in awe of what she created. "This whole thing opened my eyes. We're YouTubers and Twitch streamers, and we're almost at $2 million [raised]. Imagine if we were actual important celebrities?"
TopicsActivismInstagramTikTokTwitchCreators
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