are you tired?
on compassion and information fatigue
Author’s note: Hello! I foolishly thought I’d be able to release this newsletter regularly while clocking over 16000 travel miles over the past month (don’t try this at home) and while my toddler was in the process of dropping his morning nap. Joke’s on me! Glad to be back with you and hoping to get back to a regular newsletter pace soon.
Conflict and violence have become a feature of the modern media experience. Reporters and editors know: “if it bleeds, it leads.” The past two years, in particular, have been quite bloody. We were horrified by, then gradually became inured to, photos and videos of Russia’s war in Ukraine, while conflicts raged in Yemen, in Ethiopia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, civil war continued in Myanmar, and violent coups exploded in the Sahel. (This is not an exhaustive list.)
Adding the Israel-Hamas war to the mix, violent imagery is almost inescapable when you log onto a social media network or open the news. Everyone seems to be either sharing these images with captions like “don’t. look. away.” or finding ways to deliberately do so. They’re installing the One Sec app, which adds friction to the experience of opening social media and gives users an off ramp before diving into another doomscroll (honestly, I’m considering downloading it too).
Over the past few weeks, I’ve observed two types of war fatigue manifesting in the American information ecosystem: a fractured compassion fatigue and a widespread information fatigue. I’ve thought a lot about these issues and how to mitigate them: last year, my colleagues and I examined war fatigue in the context of Ukraine, and we found several factors that limit its spread. They include geographic proximity, shared cultural or religious proximity, and accessible, authoritative information about the conflict at hand, ideally from a mix of sources (governmental, mainstream media, social media).
While the Israel-Hamas war theoretically exhibits elements of these mitigation factors, the complexities of the conflict itself are leading to a compassion gap on both “sides” of the war. While there is a well of compassion for one’s own “side,” a dearth of it exists for the other. For example, while American Jews feel a shared cultural and religious proximity with Israelis, and even have friends and family in Israel who are now in danger, we know that not all Americans will feel that same proximity and compassion: anti-Semitism is surging in the United States.
Some Americans have hesitated in condemning Hamas’s attacks, displaying a complete lack of compassion for the victims of what was the deadliest day for Israel in the 75-year conflict. American Muslims—such as Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, and even those grieving lost relatives like former Palestinian-American Congressman Justin Amash—are facing a barrage of abuse and violence for their ethnic and religious background. Many Americans are equating all Palestinians with Hamas and with terrorism, allowing their own anti-Muslim hatred to excuse the deaths of innocent civilians who have nowhere to run. A six year old boy was stabbed to death in Illinois last week in an anti-Muslim hate crime. In short, a lack of religious and cultural tolerance is creating a subsequent lack of compassion for the victims in this war on either side.
Geographic proximity, too, is a factor not in favor of generating compassion in this war. Intellectually, most Americans feel quite distant from the Middle East. This means it is easier to express flippant opinions, divorced from reality and dangerously disrespectful of human life, shared on an Instagram story or in a tweet in order to feel that one is “doing something.”
And what of information in this conflict? In the digital age, perhaps we can trust that the stream of horrifying footage on social media will lead us to truth and to compassion for our fellow humans. Surely those images will shake us into action, as the image of Fikret Alik behind the wires of a modern-day prison camp in Bosnia did in 1992.
Not so. We’re all feeling information fatigue, exacerbated by the mis- and disinformation that has been rampant on social media over the past few weeks. In addition to “influencers” and pseudo experts who are sharing misleading or emotionally framed information to gain followers, the two combatants, Israel and Hamas, are both expert propagandists, as David Patrikarakos explained in his 2017 book War in 140 Characters. Furthermore, celebrities and ordinary internet users have shared misleading images and stories in a rush to support one side or the other, to not remain silent, to “do something.”
This explosion of misinformation has led to the payoff of the “liar’s dividend,” a term coined by Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney, who argue that when no one trusts anything they hear, read, or see, it is the liars of the world who benefit most. In the context of this conflict, the information environment has created a situation in which a huge amount of interpersonal and interstate distrust has flourished, and only information from one’s own side can be trusted. Tempers are high. Compassion is low.
All of these factors are further exacerbated by the fact that the conflict has persisted for 75 years, draping ordinary information consumers in a malaise of intractability. I have felt helpless hearing so many essentially excuse away the violent murder of civilians in order to end the conflict, though this feeling isn’t new to me. It’s one that has become familiar over nearly ten years of occupation, war, and civilian casualties in Ukraine, where some in the West would have Russia’s crimes be absolved and forgotten in order to pay a lower price at the gas pump.
President Biden and the White House are attempting to push back against fatigue, making the case for aiding allies like Israel and Ukraine, and reminding Americans of our common values and backgrounds:
“We can’t stand by and stand silent when this happens. We must without equivocation denounce antisemitism. We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia. And to all you hurting, those of you who are hurting, I want you to know I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.”
It’s a start. There is no easy solution; we have to do the hard work of appealing to common humanity and the protection of civilians, and I’m glad to see Biden doing it. It should, as US Representative Jamie Raskin explains in his masterful statement on the conflict, be the core tenet of any entity at war:
“Contempt for civilian life is the hallmark of terrorist regimes and actors, not liberal democracies. Unlike the terrorists, we reject all notions of mass guilt, collective punishment and deliberate sacrifice of civilian life for military or ideological purposes. The knowledge that a terrorist enemy displays spectacular disrespect for the lives of civilians—by such means as using them as “human shields” for embedded soldiers—imposes an obligation of extra care not to kill civilians who are being used in this way.”
So as we scroll, as we post, as we rage, I have one request that I’ve made before and will undoubtedly make again: let’s all remember the human beings behind the videos, images, posts, and screens. They deserve security and happiness as much as any one of us keyboard warriors do.