Kashmala Khan ’29
Managing Editor
I can watch a building collapse in Gaza before my morning class. I can encounter footage of Russian drones over Ukraine while waiting for coffee. Somewhere between a friend’s Instagram story and a TikTok trend, I can witness a war, form an opinion about it and move on. There is something profoundly unsettling about that last part.
We have become a generation of witnesses without necessarily becoming a generation of informed observers. War has never been more visually accessible, yet I wonder whether this unprecedented proximity has produced a corresponding depth of political understanding. We possess an almost instantaneous awareness of destruction, but it is crucial to understand that awareness is not knowledge. And witnessing, I would argue, is not an ethically neutral act either.
The Tripod sat with Political Science Professor Sidra Hamidi to dissect this particular topic. In conversation, I was struck by how historically peculiar our relationship with war has become.
Hamidi recalled the Vietnam War, when televised images helped reshape American public opinion and the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, when footage of American soldiers’ bodies being dragged through Somali streets intensified domestic opposition to military involvement.
The phenomenon of mediated warfare, then, is hardly new. What is new is its architecture.
Television operated largely through centralized editorial authority. However, social media fragments that authority among journalists, governments, civilians, political organizations, influencers and algorithms. The distinction is not merely technological; it is epistemological. It changes how knowledge about war is produced, circulated, authenticated and contested.
Hamidi described social media as more of a conversation than the relatively one-directional transmission of televised news. But I wonder whether we have confused the proliferation of voices with the democratization of knowledge. After all, who gets heard in this conversation? Consider Gaza. Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attacks and Israel’s subsequent military campaign, social media became a battleground not only over competing political claims but over the historical starting point of the conflict itself. As Hamidi observed, much of the debate concerned where one should “start the clock.”
That question is deceptively political. Begin on Oct. 7 and one historical narrative emerges. Begin with the 1967 occupation, the 1948 Nakba, or earlier colonial arrangements and the interpretive framework changes. None of these starting points makes subsequent events irrelevant. Rather, the selection of a beginning establishes what audiences are invited to regard as cause, consequence or justification.
This is framing theory operating in real time. The struggle is not simply over what happened, but over which historical sequence makes what happened intelligible. And a 30-second video rarely accommodates the burden of historical explanation. Yet, misinformation presents an even more disturbing epistemic problem.
During the June 2025 Israel-Iran conflict, BBC Verify documented fabricated military footage, including three false videos collectively viewed more than 100 million times. The implications extend beyond the immediate circulation of falsehoods.
Hamidi identified a danger that I find considerably more frightening than deception itself: people may eventually “not believe anything at all.”
This is the paradox of contemporary information warfare. When authentic evidence and synthetic media circulate through identical interfaces, skepticism can metastasize into generalized distrust. Scholars call one manifestation of this the liar’s dividend: the possibility of fabrication becomes grounds for dismissing genuine evidence.
What concerns me is how easily intellectual skepticism becomes political abdication. We congratulate ourselves for questioning everything, when sometimes we are simply refusing the responsibility of arriving at a judgment.
But there is another, equally consequential form of distortion: selective visibility.
Sudan’s civil war has generated mass displacement, hunger and widespread civilian suffering. Yet its presence in Western digital discourse has often appeared disproportionately limited relative to the scale of its humanitarian catastrophe.
Hamidi suggested that diaspora mobilization, organizational infrastructure and sustained political advocacy help explain why some conflicts retain public attention while others recede. She also cautioned against assuming that visibility is exclusively engineered by powerful institutions.
I agree with that distinction. Algorithms do not operate in a political vacuum, nor do audiences exercise entirely autonomous choices. What emerges is an attention economy in which geopolitical interests, collective identities, platform incentives and institutional influence interact. In other words, the visibility of suffering is itself a political outcome.
Hamidi offered a revealing historical example: Kony 2012. The viral campaign transformed Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony into a globally recognizable name. Yet when she recently mentioned him in class, her students did not recognize him.
I find this more revealing than the campaign’s original virality. What does it mean for an atrocity to become momentarily ubiquitous and subsequently disappear from collective memory? We mistake the intensity of attention for its durability.
And perhaps this is where Trinity students, myself included, should feel particularly implicated. Our classrooms encourage historical contextualization, methodological skepticism and critical engagement with power. Our phones, meanwhile, deliver compressed fragments of geopolitical reality within an infrastructure optimized for attention. We are expected to reconcile these incompatible modes of knowing almost instinctively.
I am not arguing that digital witnessing is meaningless. Civilian footage can challenge state narratives, document abuses and mobilize international solidarity. Nor do I believe political engagement must begin with expertise.
But I reject the assumption that exposure automatically constitutes understanding, or that reposting necessarily fulfills the responsibilities created by witnessing.
To witness war should mean more than possessing visual evidence that suffering occurred. It should require an effort to understand the structures producing that suffering, the interests shaping its representation and the political consequences of our own interpretations.
We have unprecedented access to the world’s violence, but access is not accountability. And the ability to look away does not absolve us of what we have seen. The question is no longer whether war can reach us. It is what we owe the world once it does.