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Short abstract:

Taking the war in Gaza as a case study, our paper explores the reception of visual content by TikTok and Instagram users. We question users' experience of viewing war and their ability to make sense of contemporary warfare through their activity on these platforms.

Long abstract:

Taking the ongoing war in Gaza as a case study, our paper explores the reception of videos and photographs by TikTok and Instagram users by questioning their experience of viewing war on these applications. Our study combines interviews, collaborative analyses of photographs, videos, and reels, and a theorization of social media platforms as “technocultural actor” (Langlois, 2013). We apply an interdisciplinary approach to social media phenomena, at the intersection between image theory and social media studies.

We explore the ways publics engage or disengage with war content and negotiate with its platform governance. In our case, we examine how these applications amplify existing polarized opinions and affects for users already emotionally and intellectually involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict, ultimately producing a specific “affective economy” (Ahmed, 2014) of war, shaped by platform design and its feedback driven algorithm (Abidin & Zhao,2022; Lin et al.,2023).

We question users’ ability to envision, conceptualize, and imagine contemporary warfare in an endless stream of heterogeneous content, and understand the impact of their practice on “digital infowar” (Hoskins & Shchlelin, 2023). We study whether and how the “commerce of gazes” (Mondzain, 2010) existing between content and users could contribute to common understandings of war and stimulate their political agency and desire for change. Furthermore, we approach their activity online as a contribution to the “war feed” (Hoskins & Shchlelin, 2023), insomuch as it shapes narratives and public opinions on the conflict (Merrin, 2018; Moran & Boxman-Shabtai, 2023) ultimately influencing its conduct.