Deplatforming terrorist Leila Khaled from Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube

In September 2020, The Lawfare Project achieved an unprecedented victory in causing tech giants Zoom, Facebook, and Google (YouTube) to block from their services a webinar featuring Leila Khaled, a notorious two-time plane hijacker and leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO).

On September 14th, The Lawfare Project sent a letter to Zoom warning that knowingly permitting its platform to be used for this particular webinar could violate U.S. federal anti-terrorism law, which prohibits and criminalizes the provision of "material support or resources" (in this case, communication services) to a member of an FTO. After several conversations between The Lawfare Project's in-house attorneys and Zoom's legal department, and mere days before the webinar was to take place, The Lawfare Project was notified that the event would be banned from Zoom.

Anticipating an attempt to use a different platform, The Lawfare Project immediately reached out to the top legal officials at Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other providers of conferencing services. As expected, the webinar organizers first sought to livestream on Facebook—which swiftly heeded The Lawfare Project's advice and blocked the event—before moving to YouTube. Liaising with Google's general counsel just as the broadcast began, The Lawfare Project was able to interrupt and terminate it, and did so a second (and final) time when the webinar's organizers attempted to resume using a another YouTube account.