Print A visitor to Arabic-speaking corners of Facebook or Instagram in recent days might have encountered a strange anachronism: thousand-year-old Arabic script salvaged from the past in order to trick modern algorithms. Over the last week, as Israeli jets have rained missiles and bombs on the Gaza Strip and Hamas fighters based there have launched rockets at Israeli cities, social media users have taken up the classical letterforms in an effort to circumvent what they describe as a wave of censorship and over-moderation affecting Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices across the internet. Marking it as archaic is the lack of dots and marks — called diacritics — that were originally added to make the Quran easier for Muslims from North Africa, Spain and India to read, said Mohamed Gaber, a Cairo-born student pursuing a master’s degree in Arabic typography. The diacritical marks help readers distinguish between words that would otherwise look identical.