Is a Gaza Social Media Archive Possible?

Join us for "Is a Gaza Social Media Archive Possible?" with Daniel Bertrand Monk (GEOG/PCON).

The period spanning 2023–2025 has generated urgent questions about the proper name and legal status of the violence that took place in Gaza, as jurists and political actors debate its character in forums like the International Court of Justice. What has received comparatively less attention is that Gaza 2023–2025 is arguably the most digitally contested event in human history — distributed across X/Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Telegram, and marked by both authentic and engineered viralities, near-constant engagement farming, periodic cross-platform raids, institutional branding, and transnational repurposing of Gaza imagery in other disputes.

If social media has been a primary locus of global contestation about these events, an urgent question follows: how might one produce a scholarly archive of that contestation? This presentation offers a partial answer — and a candid account of challenges that remain unresolved.

The Gaza Visual Social Media Archive Project (G-VSMA) rejects two assumptions that have dominated social media research since the Arab Spring: that social media constitutes a Habermasian public sphere of intersubjective deliberation, and that comprehensive data collection is either possible or desirable. The archive treats social media instead as a site of social production and reproduction, and responds to the post-API research environment by embracing purposive, editorially governed sampling over computational scraping.

Three interlocking sampling strategies — anchor account, event-based, and outlier sampling — produce a theoretically grounded representative record: not a count of what was said, but a structured documentation of how the conflict presented itself to view, from multiple positions, over 24 months. Whether that approach can be sustained at the scale the archive requires — and what model of scholarly labor makes it viable — are questions this presentation takes seriously and does not yet fully answer.

Lunch will be provided while supplies last.