This War Shows Just How Broken Social Media Has Become

Illustration by: Irene Suosalo for The Atlantic

The Atlantic
Social media has, once again, become the window through which the world is witnessing unspeakable violence and cruelty in an active war zone. Thousands of people, including children and the elderly, have been killed or injured in Israel and the Gaza Strip since Hamas launched its surprise attack on Saturday—you have probably seen the carnage yourself on X, TikTok, or Instagram.

These scenes are no less appalling for their familiarity. But they are familiar. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote last year, the history of war is a history of media. The Gulf War demonstrated the power of CNN and the 24/7 cable-news format, foreshadowing the way infotainment would permeate politics and culture for the next 20 years. A series of contentious election cycles from 2008 to 2020, as well as the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, and the rise of the Islamic State, showed how social-media platforms democratized punditry and journalism, for better and worse. Commentators were quick to dub Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the “first TikTok war,” as the internet filled with videos from Ukrainians documenting the horrors of war in profoundly personal, often surreal ways. MORE