The year in ‘sensitive content’
When I open Instagram early in the morning, I might see a monkey nursing her baby, an ad for ribbed leggings, a montage about manifesting a pregnancy, and a video of two men tenderly hugging a boy’s body on a white sheet lift.
In this video, posted by Palestinian photographer Belal Khaled, the men hold the boy by his shoulders and knees. I feel his lightness in their hands. Before he disappears into the shroud, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck smile at me from his yellow sweatshirt, which looks a lot like the one tucked into the lower left corner of my son’s dresser. The boy’s chest reads: best friends forever.
Social media is designed to feel random and unpredictable. That’s what makes it so addictive, like a slot machine for feelings. This was the year when its contradictions were raised to grotesque levels. Monkey baby, soft pants, new life, dead child. I go to Instagram to mindlessly scroll and share photos of my kids. Now I also see the photos of Gaza’s children there.
On Instagram, many of these posts are marked as “sensitive content‘ and hidden behind a gray digital cover. I pause and then tap it, revealing videos that feel too horrible and intimate to describe. Instagram explains that when it identifies an image that “some people may find disturbing,” it becomes “harder to find.” I wonder what that means. Is the child’s death disturbing, or is documenting his death offensive? Maybe it just finds it too shocking, the sight of children’s bodies piled up in the plaza of its Internet shopping mall. Maybe it’s bad for business.
Before this year, I hadn’t been exposed to images of dead children much. I could count them on one hand. They had appeared in a medical journal, in a Holocaust museum, in a news report about a Syrian toddler who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. On Instagram, the context becomes personal. Images of dead and injured children are merged into the highlights of my life, connected by superficial details. I see the underbite on a girl fleeing Gaza City, the red hair on a pair of Israeli boys kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, the bear ears on a baby pulled from the rubble.
It feels like my Instagram needs an ethical guide now, someone who can explain to me what I’m doing when I open the app with my thumb and pull up the sensitivity screens. So I read “About the pain of others”, Susan Sontag’s 2003 essay on images of war and the people like me – “the privileged and the merely safe” – who view them. When Sontag wrote twenty years ago, Instagram did not yet exist. But she pinned my concerns on the app’s emotional whiplash, the way targeted mom ads get caught between layers of rubble and ash. She wrote: ‘Space reserved for being serious is difficult to find in a modern society, where the megastore is the main model of a public space.’
Now the Internet is our mega-megastore, and it is an uncomfortable fact that images of death and suffering have become a kind of currency. I’ve seen some videos of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 – the bodycam footage of attackers stalking people in their homes looks gruesome and surreal, like a first-person shooter game – but much of the footage of the attack is not released publicly. . Israel did that instead staged private screenings of the graphic images to journalists, senators and celebrities in the United States and elsewhere, as part of what an Israeli army spokesman called a “narrative battle.” But even during a lull in the fighting, terrifying new images from Gaza arrive stacked in my feed every day.
One of the tricks of the internet is to make markets feel private and isolated. I had a baby last year, so Instagram presents me as a school for moms. It always gives me little tips: how to tame a tantrum, how to cut up a kiwi for a nine-month-old child, how to dress when you are taken to school. Now it coaches me on how to think about the images from Gaza as a mother.
One post sticks with me: an Instagram poem that passed through my feed in mid-October. It’s a few lines of text typed on a white square, written from the perspective of an American mother. She describes the cognitive dissonance of her eating and then wonders, “what secret of the universe can explain PTA and frozen waffles for my kids, and bombs and graves for theirs.”
I keep thinking about that phrase: “secret of the universe.” It means that in the United States, Gaza or Israel, children are just children. But it also suggests that some children are lucky and others are not, and that this is mysterious and inexplicable. I’ve scrolled past many other mom posts expressing a similar state of numb compliance. Motherhood school tells me that my job as an American mother is not to protest this suffering, or even feel shame about it, but to absorb it. Maintain the normalcy of my own home, but alas.
These posts are written as if we are all governed by the arbitrary and apolitical logic of Instagram itself. But that is not the case. I see these ‘sensitive’ messages from the safety and warmth of my apartment in the United States, a country that, like The New York Times has reported, is helping to finance the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. My own prosperity feeds their misery. The first time I saw it, the Palestinian boy’s Disney sweatshirt just evoked my son’s innocence. The second time I saw in it an emblem of American power. It pointed to my own guilt.
From the perspective of a journalist in Gaza, it is reports like mine – about my safe and happy children – that feel unbearable and inappropriate. It’s sickening how easily we seem to move on. “The internet went out again and believe it or not, I was happy,” Palestinian photographer Motaz Azaiza wrote on his Instagram account after a Power outage in October in Gaza. “Because after what we showed to the world, they just said we were so sorry, and no one did anything.” He’d seen people sharing his photos of suffering Palestinians, then posting photos of themselves “having fun,” and he wanted them to know, “There’s no need to share and we don’t want your pity!”
Sometimes, when I tap on a post from a journalist in Gaza, Instagram suggests next steps. “Are you sure you want to see this video?” it asks. Instead, it tries to point me to “resources” for dealing with “sensitive topics.” It suggests a crisis hotline for disaster survivors and responders, but I am not a survivor or responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The sadness I feel is shame.
Instagram offers me self-care tips: Drink a large glass of water. Eat a nutritious snack or meal. Call a friend and say: “Can you distract me for a moment?” The internet thinks I have a problem: other people’s children are dying. The remedy is to stop paying attention to them and pay even more attention to myself.