Witnessing the 2014 Gaza War in Tumblr

Introduction

Media have long served as conduits through which those removed from conflict can gain some understanding of the experience of war. From the telegraph’s first use to transmit dispatches about British actions in the Crimea to the live tweets of correspondents reporting from Iraq, media have allowed for a type of witnessing of conflict. Traditionally, it has been witnessing that can make us feel close to those suffering through the violence we see in media (Hariman and Lucaites, 2003) as well as others we imagine are in the audience witnessing the event with us (Zelizer, 2002). However, social media have allowed this imagined community of witnesses to do more than simply watch on their own, albeit collectively; in social media, they can also connect to one another around this shared experience.

During the summer of 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge with the goal of weakening the militant group Hamas. The action was spurred by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in the West Bank (BBC News, 2014a; Dearden, 2014). As Israeli authorities investigated the teens’ abduction and deaths, they launched a military action in Hamas-controlled Gaza in order to curb the firing of rockets into southern Israel (Sharon, 2014). People watched on television and via the internet first the bombardment, then the invasion, of Gaza. This research explores the ways a group of Muslim bloggers witnessed the 2014 Gaza War in Tumblr. It considers how the space’s affordances allowed the bloggers to not only witness the conflict or advocate for Gazans but also how the space made visible debates over whose experiences—both as sufferers and as witnesses—were most legitimate and important.

Media witnessing of suffering

Media witnessing has been defined as ‘the witnessing performed in, by, and through the media’ (italics in copy) (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009: 296). Such witnessing has become a regular occurrence because of the ubiquity of modern media and communication technologies (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009). Together, an audience watching a crisis unfold in media can collectively share the burden of witnessing the violence and trauma. To do so is to claim some proximity to the truth of the situation (Chouliaraki, 2009; Ellis, 2000; Peters, 2001; Ong, 2014). Seeing traumatic events represented in media can help audiences feel a connection to others as well as a connection to themselves (Zelizer, 2002). That connection to others is, in part, due to the feeling that individuals are witnessing conflict or suffering along with victims (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2014; Rentschler, 2004; Zelizer, 2002). To witness an act of suffering is to become morally bound to that event (Kyriakidou, 2015), with Peters (2001: 708) suggesting that, ‘To witness an event is to be responsible in some way to it.’

Mass media, particularly television, are ‘distinguished by their ability to confront a member of the audience with an apparently intimate, face-to-face, association’ (Horton and Wohl, 1956: 228) with the individuals who appear on the screen. This can create a feeling of ‘intimacy at a distance’ (Frosh, 2006; Horton and Wohl, 1956) in which an audience not only demands a connection with those they see on the screen, they also demand that they be ‘real’ (Horton and Wohl, 1956). This mediated intimacy allows the audience to witness the suffering of distant strangers without physical risk to their own lives (Frosh, 2006). Such witnessing can serve as a kind of participation in suffering (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2014; Rentschler, 2004), but it is a participation that is ‘masked by [the] perceived distance from events’ (Rentschler, 2004: 298). Peters (2009: 30) suggests that, historically, to claim to witness the suffering of others was ‘to put one’s body on the line’ and to be forced into action of some kind. However, the mediation of traumatic events throws into relief our ‘temporal remoteness’ (Frosh, 2009: 53) from the experiences of others, which can make it difficult to know what action we can, or should, take. Ellis (2009: 76) suggests that witnessing an event through media ‘is always a position of analysis, of trying to understand a representation rather than experiencing a person or events in front of you… action is not possible.’ This can aid in the creation of what Dayan (2009: 20) has labeled a ‘globally constructed battlefield’ filled with performances he calls ‘monstrations’:

To victims, monstration of suffering expresses regard. To the perpetrators, the same images are a slap in the face. In a word, monstration is an ideal vantage point, both for the discussion of media transformations and for the formulation of a media ethics or morality, both for finding out what a given medium allows to be shown and what the same medium allows by showing. (Dayan, 2009: 26)

Affordances and witnessing

In writing of the development of social media, van Dijck (2013: 4) notes that ‘the need for connectedness is what drove many users to these [social media] sites.’ The affordances of many of these spaces made it possible to curate lists of friends or connections with whom you could then interact in a way that made your identity in the space real and which bound you up in the digital lives of other people (Papacharissi, 2011). Even interactions in social media that may seem ordinary or superficial can carry great weight (Jenkins et al., 2013), serving as ‘a performance of social connection before a broader audience’ (boyd, 2011: 45). The feeling of belonging to a community can often develop around the ability to participate, to share, to interact in a space (Burgess and Green, 2009; Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins et al., 2013). In order to be part of the life of the space, you must contribute something to it. The affordances of particular sites allow you to do so.

Affordances, Graves (2007: 332) tells us, ‘are features of a technology that make a certain action possible.’ He goes on to suggest that the real power of technological affordances lies in their potential to foster an experience. Graves (2007), drawing on Geertz (1973), also points out that the meaning associated with potential affordances is culturally shaped and, therefore, which affordances are important or meaningful is in a kind of continual flux. We produce the meanings we ascribe to technologies and the meanings we associate with their various affordances, with boyd (2011: 39) reminding us that ‘Network publics’ affordances do not dictate participants behavior, but they do configure the environment in a way that shapes participants’ engagement.’

In Tumblr, sharing—information about yourself, your passions, causes you care about—is a vital part of the creation, and maintenance, of connection (Andrews, 2013). The technological affordances of Tumblr are designed to aid in your contribution to the life of the medium. Users can easily share photographs or videos, they can post audio in the form of songs or recordings from their own libraries but Tumblr also allows for the sharing of audio from other sites. Tumblr bloggers have the ability to create text posts, to quote or excerpt the work of others as well as transcribe chats they may have had with someone (or they may have made up). All of these technological affordances help make possible Parks’s (2011) ‘social affordances’ of membership, personal expression, and connection. The technological can facilitate the social in spaces like Tumblr and the intersection of the two is what allows individuals to not only write about their lives but to also connect to others who share their experiences. Or, in the case of the 2014 Gaza conflict, share their understanding of an issue.

Steel (2015: 1269) notes that networked communication technologies, such as Tumblr, allow ‘eyewitnesses, citizens and activists to tell their own stories, and to organize, document and communicate events happening on the ground to audiences both near and far.’ Such media witnessing can work to challenge hegemonic framings of events, particularly when the power dynamic is asymmetrical in nature.

…it is the weakness of the powerless that may present opportunities to score points in the battle over public opinion. Whereas on the battleground the victim is usually unaccounted for, on the field of media witnessing the victim is the one who gives the most powerful account. (Ashuri and Pinchevski, 2010: 112)

Method

Tumblr is a social microblogging site founded in 2007 as a ‘space for the world’s creators.’ As of this writing, Tumblr hosts 436.1 million blogs, with bloggers writing in 18 different languages (Tumblr, 2018). This article grew out of a larger, year-long project examining the ways Muslim bloggers, writing in English, use Tumblr as a kind of third space to navigate identity and community. ¹ The 2014 Gaza war fell in the middle of data collection for this larger project and provided an opportunity to explore how individuals might use a social media space to witness a conflict from afar.

In order to find Muslim bloggers using Tumblr, I conducted a search of the site using the terms ‘Muslim,’ ‘Muslimah,’ ‘Islam,’ or ‘ummah.’ I then examined the blogs these searches turned up, looking at photos, descriptions, and posts, in order to ascertain whether a blogger was Muslim. Because Muslim identity has become racialized and politicized (Garner and Selod, 2015; Karlsson Minganti, 2016; Meer, 2012; Selod and Embrick, 2013), it was important that bloggers identified themselves in some way as Muslim. (For example, a blogger might use an avatar showing her wearing a headscarf or a blog might autoplay prayers in Arabic.) An initial list of more than 500 blogs was created from these searches. I then created a Tumblr blog for the project through which I recruited research participants using Tumblr’s private message function or email when individuals provided email addresses.

Ultimately, 188 bloggers from around the world agreed to allow me to read their blogs, though the majority of bloggers were located in either the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom. (Eighty-two percent of bloggers lived in non-Muslim majority countries.) Additionally, 89% of participants were female, 77% said they were members of the majority Sunni sect of Islam, 59% had attended university or graduate school, and the average age of participants was 21. (Participant ages ranged from 18 to 44.) Although many of the participants blog in a semi-anonymous manner—not using photos of themselves on the site or not divulging their names, for instance—some were concerned their words or posts might be tracked back to them in their offline lives, so all the bloggers have been given pseudonyms to protect their privacy and URLs to specific blog posts have not been provided, although I have included the date a post was published to a user’s Tumblr blog.

Seeing Gazan suffering

Launched in 8 July 2014, Israel’s Operation Protective Edge resulted in the deaths of more than 2,200 Palestinians (BBC News, 2015) and the wounding of another 11,000 (Dearden, 2014). Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians were killed in the conflict as well (BBC News, 2015). The suffering of Gazans was a major focus of many of the Tumblr posts:

We are living in changing times. Any believer - Jew, Christian and Muslim - that knows God knows this. And we are all watching a modern day Holocaust and genocide take place and unlike 60 years ago, this time we are all witness. (Luz, 2014)

Among those Gazans sharing their experiences was 16-year-old Farah Baker. Baker introduced herself to the world in a tweet saying, ‘Hello, I’m Farah Baker. I live in #Gaza and Hamas is not using me as a human shield’ (fallenwalls, 2014b). (Hamas was accused of using Gazan civilians as human shields in order to avoid Israeli actions.) This tweet, and others, was punctuated by images of Israeli bombs filling the Gazan night sky. On Twitter and Instagram, Baker talked about the terror she felt every time she heard planes above her home and bombs exploding. She shared photos, narrated evenings, all in an attempt to help people understand what it was like to be a Gazan living through the conflict. Tumblr bloggers collected her tweets and Instagram posts via screenshotting and bundled them together in blog posts, often providing background in the text of the post on the conflict or providing links to relief agencies that were working to help Gazans during the war. These posts were then reblogged hundreds of times by bloggers, many of whom hoped the posts would drum up support for Palestinians. One Tumblr blogger intent on doing so compared Baker’s experience to that of Anne Frank:

Personally, I felt like I was reading something off the diary of Anne Frank. And who knows? Our children might be reading this and asking us why we didn’t stop her from dying just like we did to our grandparents. The tweets are heartbreaking and the videos are breathtaking. She needs your support. Let her know you stand by her. Follow her on twitter and Instagram and maybe somehow you can change history. (Falla, 2014)

Innocence lost

Among the most shared Tumblr posts during Operation Protective Edge were images showing the suffering of Gazan children. In one post, a young man is seen holding a dead infant, the text explaining that the baby was originally the only member of a family to survive the bombing of his home, but that he died later at the hospital. The young man in the image, it is explained, volunteered to bury the baby as there was no family left to do so. Another image focused on a baby shows an infant in an incubator, the text lain over the image explaining that she survived after her mother, pregnant with her at the time, died as a result of Israeli bombing. This baby, the post reports, eventually died when Israeli authorities cut off electricity to Gaza. Beneath the image a blogger wrote, ‘Born in a genocide and died in a genocide. Rest in peace albi. There are no words for this. Justice will prevail’ (arwenish, 2014).

Peters (2001: 731) points out that since Second World War ‘… new kinds of witnessing have been forged in the furnaces of suffering.’ This witnessing is tied to the idea that the truth of an event is written on the bodies of those who have suffered through it. Many of the posts Muslim Tumblr bloggers shared during Operation Protective Edge showed suffering writ large on the body of Gaza’s children. Several photos showed Gazan children recovering from injuries in the hospital while holding a sign that read ‘I lost my family, I am alone now.’ Another image showed a doctor standing over a table in a long hallway. On the table lay the bodies of four children, the text of the post says ‘A doctor cries while standing next to a table with the bodies of four dead children in overflowing morgue of the Shifa hospital in Gaza City’ (abayanadi, 2014).

The bloggers were able to use these stories and images because mobile communication technologies allowed people in Gaza living through the war to document their experiences and then disseminate them. Andén-Papadopoulos (2014: 758) argues that camera phones in particular ‘…have provided citizens with a new form of capital in producing testimony that has the potential to challenge and provide a counter-gaze to that of entrenched powers.’ Historically, mainstream news stories have framed Israelis as the primary victims of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Handley, 2011; Ozohu-Suleiman, 2014; Richardson and Barkho, 2009), this is a framing the Tumblr bloggers sought to challenge through their witnessing of Gazan suffering. Bloggers consciously brought stories about Gaza’s children into conversation with mainstream media narratives and official framings of the conflict, challenging the idea that Gazans were aggressors or somehow deserving of the suffering they were experiencing. This was made explicit in the reporting on the deaths of four Gazan siblings.

The children were playing soccer when Israeli forces began shelling a beach. The shelling left all four dead. The story was reported as it happened via Twitter by MSNBC correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin, who had just been playing with the children (Mackey, 2014). Mohyeldin framed the deaths of the children as a needless tragedy as Israeli authorities claimed they shelled the beach in response to Hamas. Mohyeldin’s reporting was celebrated in Tumblr, with many thinking his witnessing of these deaths would perhaps begin to sway public opinion in the direction of Gaza. Instead, they watched as Mohyeldin was pulled from his post in Gaza and replaced with NBC’s Richard Engel (Coscarelli, 2014). This prompted the creation of the hashtag #FreeAyman in various social media spaces, including Tumblr, with users claiming Mohyeldin was being punished for daring to tell the truth:

Acclaimed reporter, Ayman Mohyeldien (sic), has been ordered by NBC News management to cease reporting in Gaza and leave the territory for his co-correspondent Richard Engel. You’re asking why this matters? Ayman Mohyeldien reported from Gaza what no other foreign media correspondent would show. He reported on the humanitarian crisis within Gaza; the unsanitary conditions, the countless dying and dead children, the failing infrastructure within Gaza, and the things that we didn’t see in Gaza until he was able to show us… to show America. (fallenwalls, 2014a)

Also circulating heavily in Tumblr during the summer of 2014 were posts featuring birds in some way. Birds have often been used to symbolize freedom, with doves, in particular, symbolizing the freedom that comes with peace and reconciliation. Some of the most powerful images shared by bloggers married the innocence of the young with the freedom, and the fragility, of birds. One photo shared hundreds of times showed a Palestinian boy standing in rubble, cradling an injured white dove. Another popular image was a painting of four birds whose feathers were colored to mirror the Palestinian flag. In the background of the image is the silhouette of what the viewer assumes to be Gaza, flames and smoke rising to the sky. In the foreground are the four birds, one seeming to represent a mother crying out over the bodies of the three smaller birds, her children, as they lie in pools of blood. Perhaps, the most widely circulated image marrying birds with children featured the transformation of a cloud of smoke from an Israeli bomb into figures rising from Gaza seemingly to heaven, a dove sent to greet them. One post featuring this image was reblogged more than 58-hundred times, with few bloggers adding any additional commentary, most simply allowing the images to speak for themselves.

Many of the images including birds were attempts to turn the destruction of Gaza into something beautiful or, at the very least, something less difficult to look at while still communicating the magnitude of the loss and suffering there. Boltanski (1999) suggests that the transformation of depictions of suffering into artwork forces the viewer to linger over it before casting judgement on what they see. Aesthetically pleasing representations of violence and suffering can cause the viewer to immerse themselves in the image without rushing to place labels such as victim or oppressor on what they see, which allows them to see the evil in the act and not in the individuals associated with the act (Boltanski, 1999). By sharing seemingly beautiful images of Gazan suffering, the bloggers worked to divorce the suffering from the larger socio-political context and force the audience of their posts to see what they considered the depravity of the devastation.

A number of these posts gained particular resonance through their transformation into social media memes. Memes, Baym (2010) notes, are a crucial part of the development and maintenance of community in new media spaces. Their dissemination becomes ritualized as the memes are shared in social media networks across the internet. Ritual, Carey (2008) pointed out, is an important function of communication. The ritual of sharing of content in Tumblr is almost as important as the content itself to creating connections and community. It is not enough to simply witness an event in the space, to become connected to the body of other witnesses in Tumblr one must make the choice to share information, this linking you to witnesses past, present, and future, helping to create a ‘shared world’ (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009) you experience with others through your witnessing. The ability in Tumblr to reblog the posts of others—whether they were images of birds or first-person accounts of bombardments—allowed the bloggers to quickly share information about the conflict, while also connecting them to a body of witnesses in the space they could actually reach out to, talk to, and commiserate with.

Through their witnessing of the conflict in Gaza, the Muslim bloggers shaped a community which worked to challenge the idea that all of Gaza was to blame for the violence and should suffer for the actions of Hamas. The bloggers worked to frame the suffering in Gaza as not only a flare-up of the long-running Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but also as a social injustice.

Gaza as social justice

Not long after Israel launched Operation Protect Edge, anti-war protests erupted in cities all over the world. In fact, weeks into the 2014 Gaza War several neighborhoods in Paris banned protests, out of concern they would grow violent (BBC News, 2014b; France24, 2014). In Tumblr, these and other protests were used to frame the issue of Palestine as a global one. At many of the protests, including one which took place in London, protestors laid on the ground to symbolize the Palestinian lives lost during the Gaza campaign. During the summer of 2014, the Muslim bloggers in this research seemed to be trying to tap into a feeling of global compassion as they blogged about Gaza. ‘You don’t have to be Palestinian to feel the pain of the people in Palestine,’ wrote one blogger. ‘You just need to be a human, because it’s all about humanity’ (e4enda, 2014). Gaza, the bloggers argued, was not a problem specific to Palestinians, to Arabs, or even to Muslims; instead, as bloggers like Sosia suggested, Gaza was an issue all mankind should care about:

This is about humanity, this about us being human who have a heart that cares, mind that thinks and soul that cries for every single innocent children being killed without mercy, for every woman being raped, for every elderly being killed helplessly, for the boys being tortured to death, for the parents who lost their little angels, for the sons and daughters who witnessed how their parents die. (Sosia, 2014)

In early August 2014, in the middle of the Gaza conflict, Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. As the bloggers saw protests erupt in Missouri and other parts of the United States, they worked to tie the fight for racial justice in the United States to the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza:

So much love and power to Black mothers in America and Palestinian mothers in the West Bank and Gaza. You all are so brave, so resilient and so beautiful. Raising children and creating homes of love in perpetual warzones. Utterly indebted, this world owes you so much more. (Maarya, 2014)

Media representation of spectacle and suffering can work to construct feelings of global connection. Shani Orgad (2012) suggests this happens in two ways: First, by constructing the audience as a united entity different from those living through a disaster; in the second, the audience is brought together with those suffering in order to highlight the common humanity of us all. We do not physically share the suffering of those affected by the catastrophe, but we do share the experience of witnessing the suffering with others in the audience. Through their monstration of witnessing, the Tumblr bloggers worked to try to frame the issue of Palestine as a global one. By highlighting the common humanity of Gazans, and by showing where similarities of experience might exist with other groups, they worked to chip away at the distance separating witness and victim. As the bloggers in this research worked to foreground the experiences of Palestinians during the 2014 Gaza conflict, they also fought battles over whose experiences as witnesses were most legitimate as well as whose suffering during the conflict was most important.

Contesting experiences

During the Gaza conflict, Hamas fired more than 45-hundred rockets into southern Israel, leading to the deaths of seven civilians (BBC News, 2014a). As images of Gazan suffering circulated in Tumblr, so, too, circulated the Israeli experience of the war. This was made manifest in images of soldiers at rest or as they prepared to move into Gaza as well as in what came to be known as the ‘bomb shelter selfie’ meme.

Gazans were dying every day during the Israeli operation and while war was underway in Gaza, a war of sorts was also being waged in social media. Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr quickly filled with images of the Israeli experience of the conflict. Images circulated in various social media showing Israelis waiting out Hamas’s rocket attacks in bomb shelters. These ‘bomb shelter selfies’ were designed to show that Israelis would persevere in the face of the attacks, often featuring groups of individuals smiling or making silly faces for the camera. ‘Israelis create Facebook page called “Bomb Shelter Selfies,”’ noted one blogger. ‘Wow, look at the fear in their faces. It must be so hard for them’ (hijaabe, 2014). For the bloggers who were working to raise awareness of the suffering in Gaza, the meme highlighted just how different the experiences of Gazans and Israelis was during the war. Other photos showed Israelis not in bomb shelters but on high hills, having what seemed to be rocket-watching parties. To the bloggers in this research, these types of images seemed to be more about celebration than suffering or fear.

In addition to the bomb shelter selfies, media which expressed concern or support for Israeli soldiers were harshly criticized by the bloggers. One post, featuring an Israeli soldier eating watermelon near stacks of what looked to be rocket shells caused blogger buuz33 (2014) to write ‘The only thing of interest in the photo is the size of those artillery casings used in the tank & troop assault on Gaza. That’s what they tore people in half with; that’s what indicts Israel for war crimes.’ However, it would be a post featuring Wonder Woman Gal Gadot that would bring down the most ire. The post is a screenshot of an image from Gadot’s Instagram feed. In it, she and her young daughter are praying for the safety of Israeli soldiers, the image captioned by Gadot ‘I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens. Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas…’ (Selby, 2014). It was Gadot’s support for the Israeli Defense Force that most angered the bloggers in this research, one writing simply ‘WTF?’ and another that ‘the tags literally say “weareright” and “loveidf” fascism is so creepy’ (Sami, 2014). One blogger suggested that ‘Wonder Woman (a superhero devoted to spreading peace) herself would be disgusted’ (Sakura, 2014).

Social media can drive connection, they can help individuals challenge hegemonic cultural narratives while, at the same time, allowing individuals to excise out perspectives they do not agree with or which they do not think are legitimate. In the case of seeing suffering during the conflict, the bloggers were quick to shut down discussions of the Israeli experience of the conflict because they saw Israelis as the aggressors and, therefore, the actors with power in the situation. There was also the feeling among the bloggers that the Israeli experience could be found in mainstream news media accounts of the conflict, whereas the experience of Gazan civilians seemed, to them, to be missing. These bloggers felt it was their job, at least in Tumblr, to make the suffering of Palestinians visible.

In addition to the debate over whether Israeli experiences were necessary in order to understand the 2014 Gaza war, was a debate over who had the authority to act as a legitimate witness to Gazan suffering. A number of the bloggers in this research are white, female, American converts to Islam. Two, in particular, were especially active during the 2014 Gaza war. From almost the beginning of the conflict, the two used much of their Tumblr real estate to educate others about the situation in Gaza and in the Palestinian Territories as a whole. Both received this anonymous message:

Please, refrain from continuing to make posts on the Israel/Palestine conflict. It has nothing to do with you, nor are you well informed on it. Those of us directly involved in it and suffering from it are not comforted, nor amused, by your lack of knowledge and arrogance about it. Particularly, as an American Convert. (Hadeel, 2014a)

Tumblr as a space of witnessing not only allowed the bloggers to see what was happening in Gaza and to use the material coming out of there to attempt to re-frame the conflict, it also provided a space where witnesses could connect to one another and where debates over who may witness and who may not could take place. Tumblr helped make visible the diverse experiences and perspectives of the witnesses to the Gaza conflict, reminding us that no single group is homogenous, even when that group is united around a common cause. It reminds us that witnessing happens, and is interpreted, at both the individual and the community level. We may all be part of a body of witnesses, but how we understand and interpret what we see depends upon the histories and experiences that have shaped us as individuals.

Tumblr: A connected, but bounded, site of witnessing

The bloggers in this research used the affordances of Tumblr to witness the suffering of Palestinians living through the 2014 Gazan conflict. The space did not, cannot, bridge the physical gap that separates media witnesses from those living through violence; it cannot place the bodies of such witnesses ‘on the line’ as Peters (2009) has suggested witnessing has traditionally done. What the space can do is, perhaps, begin to bridge what Peters (2009) has called the ‘veracity gap’ which exists in mediated experiences of witnessing. How can you know if something happened on the ground if you are not there? One way is by accessing the first-hand accounts of people living through the event. The bloggers in this research did not only hear news accounts of the ‘blood flowing’ in Gaza, they saw the source of that flowing blood. They saw, with their own eyes, worshippers attending Friday prayers in a bombed-out mosque; they saw a doctor crying over the bodies of dead Gazan children; they saw the bombardment of Gaza through the eyes of a 16-year-old girl. They were then able to use that material, as Steel (2015) suggests social media allow individuals to do, to tell their own story of what was happening in Gaza—a story that highlighted what they saw as the asymmetrical nature of the conflict (Ashuri and Pinchevski, 2010) and which centered the experiences of Gazans above all others.

Tumblr is one social media space which allows users to construct monstrative battlefields where understandings of events, people, and places can be challenged, if not changed, because they have access to the experiences of people living through violence. The multimedia rich environment provides users the opportunity to make visible the experience of people who are suffering while also providing, for others, the history and context for that suffering. Witnessing is not without politics (Orgad, 2009; Rentschler, 2004) and politics certainly shaped the positions from which these bloggers witnessed and analyzed the 2014 Gaza conflict, leading some experiences to be seen as less valid than others. At the same time, the space also allowed the bloggers to debate these things, to hash out their differences, and find common ground. Of course, this happened around an issue the bloggers in this research generally felt the same about; whether such airing of grievances can lead to similar détentes in social media spaces when users have different opinions may be unlikely given what research on political polarization online has shown us (Conover et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2014).

This research took place in 2014, before the ability to livestream video in such social media spaces as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter was available. While this work provides insight into how social media might facilitate distant witnessing, future research into social media witnessing should engage with how the ability to ‘go live’ affects that experience. If we all collectively watch a livestream on Facebook, are we once again reduced to a mass audience of witnesses? What does it mean for a video of a violent event, such as a bombing, to have been live when it is shared hours after the fact? Then, of course, is the issue of what individuals do with their experience of witnessing in social media. The bloggers in this research advocated for Gazans, they shared ways others could give to relief agencies as well as contact information for policymakers, urging their followers and friends in the space to put pressure on the people in power in their home countries to stop the violence in Gaza. Ellis (2009: 76) has suggested that ‘action is not possible’ for media witnesses. This research would suggest that a kind of action is possible for witnesses in social media, but whether it is the kind of action which can ‘change history’ for those suffering remains to be seen.