A widely followed social media service in the United Arab Emirates is pushing a boycott campaign against Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce platform, after its president endorsed a recent social media comment critical of biased media coverage against Israel.

In a series of dramatically worded Instagram posts on Wednesday, Smashi, a digital information service owned by the Dubai-based media group Augustus Media, took aim at Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, over a brief social media remark voicing agreement with a fellow tech entrepreneur who had denounced a news article for uncritically citing casualty figures provided by Hamas.

“Thx for saying this,” Finkelstein wrote on Tuesday, responding to a viral post from Martin Varsavsky, an outspoken board member of Axel Springer, the German publishing giant whose subsidiary, Politico, had run the Associated Press story Varsavsky dismissed as “one-sided Hamas support.”

Smashi, in its framing of Finkelstein’s comment, said he had backed a “pro-Israel tweet defending Israel’s airstrikes” against Hamas, “adding fuel to the debate over the legitimacy of Israel’s military actions, which equate to a genocide, in Gaza.”

Noting that Shopify has nearly 25,000 customers in the Middle East, “with a substantial concentration” in the United Arab Emirates, Smashi urged its followers to use alternate e-commerce platforms in the region, sharing a list of six competitors to Shopify.

Finkelstein’s online remark has drawn separate calls from anti-Israel activists to boycott Shopify — which has previously been a target of such campaigns. But Smashi’s involvement stands out given its wide reach in the United Arab Emirates, which has continued to maintain its normalization agreement with Israel even amid the ongoing conflict with Hamas in Gaza.

Augustus Media — whose advertising partners include Nike, Citi Bank, Samsung, Nestle and Coca-Cola — owns another digital media brand, Lovin Dubai, that has promoted other anti-Israel content since October 7th. The so-called “local news and lifestyle brand” has described the Israeli hostages held by Hamas as “prisoners,” for instance, and amplified a conspiracy theory about “‘Zionists’ organ harvesting Palestinian bodies.”

Augustus Media did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. 

Smashi has also turned a critical eye toward Google over its recent acquisition of Wiz, an Israeli cybersecurity startup. In a social media post this week, the company emphasized that Google had just paid a “world record $32 billion” for the startup “founded by former Israeli military officers.”

After some followers took issue with the framing as celebratory, the company said in response to critics that its coverage of Google had been misinterpreted.

“We, as a policy, call Israel’s acts in Gaza a genocide,” the streaming service wrote. “This news is also one of the pieces where we highlight that Google has invested in one such startup which is Israeli and by former military officers. While everyone highlighted it as a big deal in tech world, we are one of the only few who highlighted for IOF [[Israel Occupation Forces, a term used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the IDF] soldiers being behind it.”

Still, the company — which claims more than 605,000 followers and reaches more than 28 million viewers, according to Augustus — has otherwise recently reserved its involvement in boycott efforts to Shopify.

It is unclear, however, why Smashi has chosen to target Shopify now, as Finkelstein, who is Jewish, had previously spoken up more vocally in support of Israel amid its war with Hamas.

Finkelstein did not return a request for comment on Wednesday, nor did a spokesperson for Shopify.