In the past 24 hours, social media has been ablaze with horrendous footage from the latest attack on Gaza. So why aren’t we seeing it in the actual news?
This is an opinion piece.
There’s an old Russian joke that I first learned about when Trump became president – “We thought we hit rock bottom, then we heard someone knocking from below.” This feels apt for two reasons; firstly, if 2016 felt like rock bottom, 2020 and everything that followed is the knocking from below. And secondly, because I don’t know about you, but I keep thinking to myself that the war on Gaza cannot get worse. Surely… surely, this must end soon.
But it turns out there is something worse than taking away a people’s freedom for generations, then invading them when they have nowhere to go. When Israel bombed hospital after hospital, when we heard the stories of women having c-sections without anaesthetic, when we saw dead baby after dead baby being pulled out of rubble, or wrapped in a white funeral shroud, could we imagine it would get worse?
When we realised that the death toll was going to be in the tens of thousands, when we realised the war was going to stretch on and on with no intervention. When it became clear that the international disapproval of the UN was not enough, when the hollow disapproval of the US was not enough, when the specific ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague was not enough.
Because now the footage that came out of Rafah yesterday is what I would imagine Hell looks like – flames, broken, burnt bodies and more dead babies. I have read descriptions of beheaded babies and parents collecting the burning body parts of their children. But do you know where I haven’t seen that footage, or read those descriptions?
The news.
Why is it that our Instagram feeds are more graphic than the news? I am almost 40 – I am not a generation that gets my news from social media; I still don’t really understand TikTok, I mostly gave up on Twitter when Elon took over. But I have always been a religious follower of the news and almost every day, the unimaginable horrors that I am seeing on Instagram – INSTAGRAM!!! – are not reflected in the actual proper news.
And I understand that there is a cost of living crisis. I understand that there is a big budget and bad policies and horrendous weather events and that there are hundreds of people losing their jobs in this country; this small, bruised country that has gone through some really shit times over the past few years. I understand that actually, it’s a privilege to not have your own country’s bad luck lead the headlines, and that there’s enough horrible news of our own to fill those early minutes of the news. I understand cultural relativity. But I have been bracing myself to see that footage on the big screen, or coming up in the main headlines, sandwiched in between the budget and the sports, and… nothing.
And as Capsule columnist Brodie Kane wrote earlier today, so much of this is crazy making. “I feel like I’m going crazy,” she wrote on her Instagram. “I am so deeply deeply angry, so deeply deeply sad, that my sobs hurt at the weight of humanity falling… No matter how many times I rage when something so cruel and so twisted happens to the people of Palestine, I am endlessly broken that, in fact, there is always something worse than can happen to them.”
To watch this genocide happen without intervention is devastating. And to watch this massacre happen on our social media feeds but to see it fail to make the impact it deserves on our news sources makes us feel like we’re losing our minds. It also makes it particularly clear why the US is making such a huge attempt to ban TikTok, when they have QUITE A LARGE NUMBER OF OTHER PRIORITIES (e.g. Trump 2025).
Because they know they are losing control of the narrative that this is a just war to be involved in. The events of October 7 were an atrocity and the ongoing wait for families of the hostages must be utterly torturous. They must also feel like they are losing their minds, to watch their own government storm, bomb and destroy the land that is holding their loved ones. But any justification for Israel’s response is long gone.
The footage from yesterday… what kind of world is that? And how is this latest attack not front and centre of every newspaper, of every set of headlines, in the world? Why am I finding out the most about it from Instagram, the same place that tells me that Jamie Kay has a sale and where I learn about a new moisturiser? Why is this story itself not being written by, forgive me, a proper journalist, rather than a woman in her round-the-house sweatshirt who last wrote an in-depth story about retinol?????
Why isn’t this front and centre of our news?
No wonder we feel like we’re losing our fucking minds.
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