In an interview earlier this week, Sam Rose, the senior deputy director of UNRWA affairs in Gaza, spoke with Politico about his increasing despair in relation to the genocide in Gaza, where despite a full year of widely shared atrocities, the world has not yet felt compelled to collectively act to stop it. In Rose’s words, “Everyone’s attention is on it, but it doesn’t make a difference”. This is the crux of what bewilders many around the world who have watched the genocide in Gaza unfold with horror and disbelief for over a year now. We live in a world where we scroll past genocide on our phones. We view it, we bear witness to it, but this does not necessarily translate into effective political action to stop it. Instead, genocide has become almost normalised in the public discourse.
We are all conditioned to believe that mass atrocities can only happen in the shadows, when such atrocities are kept hidden from the public. In the past, the full scale of genocide has often only become known to people beyond the perpetrators and the victims after the fact. During the Holocaust, for example, while newspaper reports hinting at the scale and brutality of Hitler’s actions first appeared in the British and American media around 1942, these were couched in a language of uncertainty and were often buried on the inside pages. Nothing that had appeared in the media prepared audiences for the sheer horror that was to be revealed in 1945 when the first reports emerged from the liberated concentration camps. Similar patterns of post conflict revelations of atrocities have characterised many other genocides including the Rwandan genocide, the Bosnian genocide and the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka.
Traditional theories of propaganda and the mass media therefore tend to focus on the fact that public opinion is shaped and manipulated by information being filtered out or kept from the public. In state controlled media systems, censorship over what is broadcast often functions quite directly. In systems dominated by privately owned media, the manner in which public opinion is shaped is more subtle. Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model for example analyses the American mass media and posits that news is only broadcast once it passes through several filters including the ownership structure of news organisations, advertisers, a reliance on information provided by the government or experts funded by the same corporate interests and the dominant ideology of the land. This is still very evident in the American network television and newspaper coverage of the Palestinian genocide. A review of major American newspaper coverage of Gaza found that Israeli deaths were mentioned 16 times more than the deaths of Palestinians. Further, words like “slaughter”, “massacre” and “horrific” were reserved almost entirely for Israeli deaths.
The claim that social media, and the decentralised character of the internet in general, overcomes these filters to create a more democratic information system isn’t necessarily accurate (given how social media algorithms are owned and controlled). However, compared to traditional mass media, social media does provide greater opportunity for information and news that would otherwise be suppressed to reach its target audience.
For over a year, Palestinian journalists, at great risk to their lives, have broken through media filters and broadcast what is happening in Gaza using social media. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) estimates that 126 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel during this period. As early as December 2023, South Africa had collected enough evidence from social media posts to approach the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for interim measures to stop Israel from committing genocide, a majority of which were granted.
But despite this live streamed genocide, international support for Israel from its key allies has not waned to a degree significant enough to stop the genocide (though few more European states have recognised Palestinian statehood). And critically, despite huge public demonstrations and anti-genocide sentiment in the West, genocide has not evolved into the main electoral issue in these countries. In the UK, Keir Starmer, who claimed on television that Israel had the legal right to stop water supplies to Gaza, won by a landslide, and in the US, Kamala Harris, who has repeatedly pledged to continue supporting Israel is also reported to be likely to win, albeit narrowly.
Two important factors have combined to make this possible. First, as it is now impossible to completely restrict the flow of information, mass media around the world has increasingly turned to directly indoctrinating their viewers on broader ideological lines, even at the cost of fragmenting their audiences. In India, many major news channels have in the last decade stepped away from portraying an image of journalistic neutrality to energetically broadcast Islamophobia. From interfaith marriage to “demographic threats” to women’s safety, every issue is covered in a manner that demonises Muslims. Once this indoctrination sinks into the audience, it shapes how they receive unfiltered information from all other sources. So for several Indian right wing influencers, the sight of Palestinian slaughter in Gaza is treated as something to celebrate not condemn.
In the West, the far right media, the neo-conservatives and the liberal media all tap into similar forms of racism and Islamophobia in different ways. In this framework, Western lives are often simply assumed to be of vastly greater value than brown lives elsewhere. Since 2001, in the context of the US led “war on terror”, any actions taken by the West to ostensibly keep themselves safe have generally been portrayed as valid and necessary, no matter what human cost is suffered elsewhere in the world. For example, former US President Barack Obama, in his two terms, ordered more than 500 extraterritorial drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. This part of his legacy is barely analysed or seriously condemned in the American mainstream media.
But Islamophobic and racist indoctrination by the media does not, by itself, explain the willingness of electorates to turn their eyes away from genocide. A second factor plays a critical role, especially on social media – the use of entertainment to depoliticise public spaces.
A growing number of young adults in the West now get their news primarily from social media. However, studies have shown that entertainment oriented use still accounts for a large proportion of everyday internet use. This means that often people are receiving their news and entertainment from the same sources at the same time. As the online public sphere is still primarily entertainment dominated, we often see political messages being forced into entertainment formats to compete for attention. For example, political organisations and activists might use memes, viral jokes or celebrity endorsements. This has led to a blurring of the lines between political engagement and entertainment. Hence, while people on social media are more exposed to political news, they tend to engage with it in the manner in which they engage with entertainment. We frequently see behaviour created in the context of entertainment fandoms, such as banding together to unquestioningly defend a celebrity, spilling into the political space, shutting down critical debate on political policy. Further, as the primary expectation from social media is entertainment, political content on social media is often perceived lightly, and does not necessarily increase long term political engagement or organising. And when information about genocide is repeatedly viewed interspersed with entertainment, it also risks becoming normalised by its proximity to everyday news.
A fair amount of entertainment related content on social media today also reinforces values like consumerism, and an individualised, arguably self-centred, view of the world. Political engagement from social media for many therefore also tends to be contained within the same ideological boundaries. Hence, people who are not subject to the racist indoctrination of mass media, and who may condemn genocide or be affected deeply by the horrors they witness, can still believe it is necessary and right to put their own comfort or interests before the moral imperative to stop genocide. This is particularly evident in the unwillingness of a vocal section of the liberal Western electorate to make genocide an electoral issue.
Genocide is a rare crime. The prohibition of genocide under international law is not an ordinary rule. It is an overriding fundamental principle, applicable at all times and without exception. It is one of the few crimes which states are legally required to act to prevent everywhere, and not just within their territory. The fact that a crime this serious can be normalised in the public discourse should terrify us all. A world where consent can be manufactured for genocide is a world that is fundamentally unsafe for the marginalised everywhere.
Social media posts about Palestinians who have been killed in this genocide often focus on their lives, their everyday achievements and their dreams before the genocide, all of which have been cut short. A phrase that has stayed with me from one such eulogy is “he was an entire planet”. It was a perfect description of the inherent value of every one of us, of every human life. A world where hundreds of thousands of such planets are wiped out in front of our indifferent eyes is simply unacceptable. We owe it to the Palestinian people, to the marginalised around the world and to ourselves to challenge this.
Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.
Missing Link is her new column on the social aspects of the events that move India.
This article was first published on The Wire on October 31, 2024.
