Disclaimer: You are allowed to have your own opinion and disagree with me. That’s the whole point. Be an intellectual and think for yourself. This piece uses the Israel Occupation of Palestine as a central example throughout. My goal is not to disregard the human lives lost as that is the antithesis of my argument. I do not condone terrorist attacks. I do not support the killing of civilians I specify the institutions in which violence stems from for a reason.
Feel empathy and mourn for those affected by the situation because our ability to empathize with others is the key to social change. However, the grander context of this ethnic cleansing is a direct insight into how social media has changed the way we respond to information. I urge you all to use ACADEMIC JOURNALS or at the very least credible sources to educate yourself on the topic as I do not give a history lesson here but rather a culture and moral thought piece to reevaluate what you believe and why. As always, please leave your feedback in the comments as this is an open dialogue. Link to in-depth disclaimer
We have access to so much information. Like an overwhelming amount of information is at the tips of our fingers and we truly don’t know what to make of it. Before we carried around a database of everything that’s ever happened in our back pockets, people could only get information by going to the library, reading a newspaper, or word of mouth. There was no real “independent research” done by non-academics. Personal beliefs were shaped by who you knew and interacted with or any formal education you might have had if you were privileged enough to get it. Not only that but because of the internet and the information revolution, we have a more comprehensive and globalized view of the world. We can see what other groups of people are struggling with across the country and across the world. It changes our perspectives on what it means to live in our world.
While access to resources to educate yourself might be more available, it is harder to decipher what is real and what is not. Because of how much information is available, we don’t always know what to do with what we’ve learned. After consuming news, memes, TikToks, Wikipedia pages, etc., our brains are in information overload. We are in a constant state of consumption where there is a disconnect between our lives inside and outside of a screen.
So, we’re in a conundrum: we are in a constant state of information overload and when we interact with media: whether it be books, movies, TV shows, news, etc., we have no idea where to place the information we learned. Is it real? Is it a joke? Is it commentary? Is it news?
But sometimes we don’t want to have to place information in boxes and we want to consume unconsciously and not think of the deeper meaning of the media we are viewing.
Phrases like "It's not that deep" or "You're overthinking it" discourage critical thought and media analysis. Some find it too challenging, time-consuming, or uncomfortable to critically examine the world we inhabit and the reasons behind its current state.
And the lack of critical thinking is apparent throughout social media. Not only does our society have short-term memory loss, but we do not have a working moral backbone. Those two things coupled with our individualistic culture where everything must revolve around ourselves, make social issues unbearable to sit through when conflict ensues, and people take to social media to talk about it.
Human rights are human rights. Point, blank, period. That must be a fact we hold closely and hold without discrimination. One of my majors is Political Science, so not only do I interact with some of the most insufferable people on campus, but I learn concepts that feel so simple, yet they are debated heavily. Nonetheless, at the core of any political theory, freedom is vital.
The freedom to self-determine, the freedom to act as you please, the freedom to be treated as an equal member of society, the freedom to live. There are very few things humans value more than freedom. We go to wars over it. We take lives over it. We write it in Constitutions to solidify a social contract between the people and the government that protects our freedoms.
So, when international conflict occurs and Americans inevitably give their two cents in, why are we so quick to state that freedom is not worthy of a revolution? It is so hard for humans to hold two truths at once: People shouldn’t die because of war and freedom is necessary for all human lives.
Those are seemingly contradictory yet intertwined concepts because lives will inevitably be lost in the pursuit of freedom. No country has ever gained or retained sovereignty peacefully.
It is propaganda that tells the American people that we live in this idealistic peaceful society in which social issues can be solved through nonviolence. It is propaganda that teaches us that the Civil Rights Movement was a form of peaceful protest against the government that worked to change the minds of the people in power when the truth is that the Civil Rights Movement was violent.
Black people fighting for their rights was violent in the eyes of the majority. We must place ourselves in the position of the historical situation to understand the full context in which people were fighting. Any form of resistance is considered violent by the oppressors. We might call it “peaceful” now, but it was not peaceful to those during that time.
When the colonists in early America fought the British, was that not violent? We deem it necessary because freedom and the right to self-govern are unalienable rights, but when non-white people do it we criticize the means by which they fight for freedom with. It is hypocrisy.
And the truth is violence is only acceptable when the people in power wield it. Violence is the answer to make those who want freedom comply with their subjugation. Most people are okay with violence if it does not affect them. We’re okay with the violence the status quo perpetuates but not the violence oppressed groups might use to liberate themselves. And in the Western world, most white people can shelter themselves from the terror and horrors that affect not just the people in their countries, but also the violence that ensues globally.
War is unfathomable to the Western world, so much so, that most white Westerners never feel empathy, but rather sympathy or pity, over war unless someone who looks like them starts getting affected. When Russia invaded Ukraine to start its war almost two years ago, the Western world watched in shock, horrified as to how atrocities could happen against a democratic, sovereign, and white land.
To the people of the global west, war is a Middle East or African problem, not Europe. War is not supposed to happen in the global West; thus, we do not know what to make of it. When we only consume war through media like movies, news, or occasionally social media, there is an inherent disconnect between what war really means and how it changes lives.
And this disconnect of empathy for people who do not share our identities and values is where we see moral compasses falter. Our constant state of consumption allows our desensitization of war until we are directly affected. When we consume news of war or terror against black or brown people, we end up categorizing that event in our heads as just another thing because it happens so frequently.
There are layers to the propaganda being pushed by Western media to justify the crimes Israel has and will commit against the people of Gaza. Over 70 years of war, but there is only uproar when white Europeans are the ones brutalized. When the human rights of whites are stripped and disregarded, that is when the Western world will care. They will not care when brown and black lives have been painted by the horrors of war because, to them, human rights are conditional. We are able to view this violence as war or terrorism. We see this on social media because this is a foreign new concept that shakes us to our core.
I’ve seen countless reposts of my peers “siding with Israel” after claiming they were pro-ACAB. I’ve seen reposts saying that violence is never the answer, but they are siding with Israel’s government’s attack on the people of Gaza. Just a few months ago, “The Hunger Games” was trending on TikTok: A book that is based on the ideas of revolution and refusal to comply with an oppressive government that depicts freedom as a cause worth dying for. People of my age demographic must’ve consumed that media in a vacuum because when it comes time to stand against an oppressive government, they side with the side their favorite characters would have died to free themselves against.
And this is a lack of critical thinking in practice. If we used the media and our so-called beliefs, we would see that the media we consume is no different than what happens in real life. If we consciously consume, we wouldn’t be surprised when uprisings happen or when people fight for their right to exist. If our morals were as sound as we pretended, there would be no question about siding with the Palestinian people and recognizing the Israeli Government as an oppressive, apartheid state that is participating in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.
Our desire to consume media unconsciously without consuming it with critical thought manifests into wide-scale performative activism that is based on misinformation and contextual truths. We repost the first thing we see people repost because we use social media to tell us what and how to think and place information in context.
The fact that we cannot stand by what we claim to believe is proof that our beliefs are merely aesthetic. We consume social movements as a trend rather than as a movement that can create social change.
ACAB is cute and fun when you are not resisting an open-air prison or being forced out of your homeland. When a militaristic state that has so much power is using it on civilians, suddenly, the issue becomes complex because the state is allied with the Western world.
Let me state this unequivocally: the occupation of Palestine is not a complex issue if you know where your morals lie. Freedom should not have to be fought for. Colonization and ethnic cleansing should be resisted. Civilians should not die. Those are simple truths that I think are quite easy to grasp.
These issues only become complicated when we pretend that war will not happen when people are being oppressed. The issues only become complicated when we cannot conceptualize the idea that people will sacrifice everything for freedom. These issues are only complicated when we know for a fact that one side is in the wrong, yet we hold onto the propaganda we’ve internalized and view this issue as a singular event instead of something that has persisted for decades.
For some, it is too much work to sit with your thoughts and think about what you truly believe and how it may conflict with what you do in practice. You’ll have the first critical thought about a situation and immediately deflect and shut down further inquiries because it is too uncomfortable to figure out what your true values and beliefs are.
You don’t want to navigate the complexity of thinking because it is uncomfortable, and you have the privilege not to. So you look for what other people are saying and dictate your daily morality based on what the popular thought is.
Some people will parade around as a “human rights activist”, and only condemn violence when the violence happens to someone who mirrors them. This is conditional activism.
It is much easier to repost an infographic with flowery words that support the “side” most people you know support. It is much easier for you to paint this as a situation where “both sides are wrong” and nothing more. We have this emphasis on peace and love and harmony and all that fluffy happiness, but the real world is not that way, unfortunately. Your feed might romanticize the struggle of oppression and systematic issues or dumb these issues down until it is practically misinformation, but if you really want to be an advocate for human rights and use social media as a platform for activism, you must stand for all human rights, not just the ones that look good on your feed.
You must support the resistance to states that are actively participating in ethnic cleansing. This does not support Hamas or terrorism, but there must be an equal rage toward the Israeli government. If you call what Hamas did to Israelis terrorism, you must reciprocate that energy for the terrorism the Israeli government has done to the Palestinian people for decades. You must recognize the power imbalance that has enabled the killing of over 1,000 civilian Palestinians in a week, the bombing of medical teams, and the restriction of access to resources. That is also terrorism. Terrorism should not be a racialized word that is only used when black or brown people are the perpetrators.
Lastly, I say this as someone who used to think social media activism was a necessity for all activists: social media activism is the most roundabout way to feel like a good person when you don’t practice what you preach.
Please, reflect on where your morals lie. Seek out information and draw lines to what you’ve seen through media and apply that to how you view real-life events. Examine how you respond to propaganda and how easily you can be swayed to support something you wouldn’t tolerate if it happened in a book or a movie. Continue to learn yourself and align your beliefs properly. We have the resources to educate and learn about topics independent of what those around us tell us. Your view on a situation should be holistic, and not completely determined by what people decide to repost on their Instagram story this week.
If you’ve ever asked yourself what side of history you would have been on if you were born in a different generation, this is your practical test for that question. It is easy to stand up for something that affects you, but it is hard to be actively engaged and vocal about a cause that does not concern you. How we react to situations we hold no stake in is how we discover what we define as a cause worth fighting for.