VERY morning, millions of us open our phones before getting out of bed. We swipe through reels, clips and headlines. Increasingly those feeds begin at a front line: a missile strike caught on a phone camera, a live-stream from families fleeing, a helmet-cam from aid workers during a rescue.ÌýThe same platforms also amplify online campaigns, especially among younger users, that researchers say have helped coordinate demonstrations from Eastern Europe to South and Southeast Asia. Social media gives a generation unprecedented power to challenge authority. It also makes uprisings, retaliation and unrest easier to ignite and harder to contain. Most of us are not journalists, diplomats or soldiers. We are citizens scrolling through our apps, and, without realising, we may already have taken out a subscription we never intended: a subscription to war.
We look because we care. Seeing lives at risk can spark outrage, generosity and sometimes political change. But today’s platforms turn witnessing into something else. Their algorithms are built to maximise time and emotional engagement; violent or highly charged content reliably rises to the top. Each tap or share trains the system to give us more of the same. We don’t pay a fee, but we pay in another currency — our data, attention, outrage and empathy — and receive an endless feed of war and suffering.
This cycle shapes more than our information diets; it sustains a market. Platforms sell ads against every impression, however grim. News outlets compete for clicks, privileging the most graphic clips. ‘War influencers’ on every side build large followings and monetise them through donations or sponsorships. In 2023, BBC Verify exposed a Russia-based network of thousands of fake TikTok accounts pushing false stories about Ukraine, a reminder that conflict footage online often mixes verified material with staged or misleading clips designed to go viral before they can be checked.
The 2024 Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows that more than half of people worldwide now use social media for news, with younger users especially reliant on TikTok and Instagram. On X and Instagram, hashtags linked to major conflicts generate billions of views within days. Conflict content is not just reported but packaged and monetised. None of this means tech firms or journalists want war to continue. But incentives matter. When engagement is the metric, conflict becomes lucrative: the longer a crisis lasts, the more content flows, the more revenue can be earned. By subscribing to war content we indirectly feed the business model that rewards war’s visibility, while those living through it bear the real cost.
That cost extends beyond the battlefield. A 2024 Harvard Health Publishing review found that heavy ‘doomscrolling’ is linked to anxiety, depression and fatigue. Each conflict now arrives in the same swipeable format, complete with lurid headlines, dramatic thumbnails and ominous music, until suffering blurs into spectacle. Exposure is mistaken for action, confusion for knowledge, empathy for entertainment. Comment sections show how easily viewers become spectators, rooting for ‘our’ side or relishing a rival’s setback, treating real lives like moves in a game. At that moment we are participants in an attention economy that turns conflict into content and may even fuel the instability we watch.
Turning away is not the answer. Ignoring atrocities doesn’t make them disappear. What matters is how we watch and share. Before forwarding the next viral clip, we can pause: Is it verified or staged? Is there context? Will sharing help or merely feed the algorithm? We can favour outlets that explain rather than exploit, support credible relief agencies and careful journalists, and stop rewarding accounts that turn tragedy into virality.
Platforms already apply guardrails to misinformation and self-harm content. They could extend those protections to unverified war footage by adding context labels, warnings or limiting the algorithmic boost behind virality. They could prioritise original reporting over gore and clarify how conflict material is monetised. The aim is not to hide victims but to prevent their suffering becoming bait for clicks.
Changing our scrolling habits won’t stop wars overnight, but the attention economy makes conflict profitable in ways we rarely notice. Recognising how our attention powers that economy is the first step to unplugging from it. We can unsubscribe from war as spectacle while staying subscribed to humanity — choosing information that informs, acting when we can, and pressing platforms to value integrity over outrage. In a world where a single tap can deliver an entire war to our palms, neutrality is not only political; it is about our posture. Do we wish to be witnesses who help end war, or spectators who keep it going as business? The choice begins with how we look.
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Kazi Tamaddun is a US-based scientist specialising in energy and environmental systems design.
