Mol McNulty mourns for a man he never met in a land he’s never visited.
For weeks, Ahmad J Ismael was among a handful of Gazan journalists and civilians McNulty checks in on every morning, as they post photos and videos chronicling death and destruction in their besieged home while the Israel-Hamas war drags on.
“You want to make sure this person is OK,” said McNulty, a 22-year-old Stoneham resident.
But Ismael’s Instagram account went silent shortly before the new year. Within days, McNulty learned Ismael was killed in an artillery blast by the Israeli Defense Forces, according to a post by Ismael’s friend Motaz Azaiza, a Gazan photographer with more than 18 million followers on Instagram.
“Motaz, his best friend, had posted a picture of his body,” McNulty recalled, stuttering with emotion. “I was shocked.”
McNulty is one of many people in Massachusetts and around the country who have turned to social media for updates about the war in Gaza, largely from the Palestinian perspective. While in the war’s early days, images of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the seized hostages spread online, social media swiftly became inundated with pictures of the Israeli bombing of Gaza, showing piles of dead bodies, flattened buildings, and children trapped under rubble. Often, the footage comes uncensored.
And, as it did with the Vietnam War, the flood of images from the battlefield has influenced public sympathies, particularly among young people for whom social media is usually their first — and often only — source of information.
“Before [Vietnam], we had never really seen a war on the ground unless you were in that war. . .” said Jay Kwon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who mostly gets his news on X, formerly Twitter. “Now we’re seeing the actual, raw footage, unfiltered by media outlets, which can often have an agenda.”
Fifty-seven percent of registered voters say they disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the war, according to a December New York Times/Siena College poll. Among voters 18 to 29, that number was nearly three-quarters.
“Without it, honestly, we wouldn’t be seeing the widespread protests that we’re seeing right now,” Kwon said.
As the Vietnam War raged from the 1960s into the 1970s, American television ownership shot up to 93 percent, according to the National Archives. At the same time, the US government loosened restrictions on who could cover the war and what they could show. All that allowed footage from the front lines — rather than written accounts alone — to reach wide swaths of viewers at home for the first time.
That shift correlated with a dramatic decrease in support for President Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War, from 56 percent approval in 1965 to 32 percent in 1968, according to Gallup polls.
Facing intense criticism for its bombing of Gaza, the Israeli government in late October released a competing video narrative of the war: footage, including from body cameras worn by Hamas members, of the Oct. 7 attack on settlements.
That footage, too, is extraordinarily graphic, but the Israeli government has tightly restricted its release, largely to reporters at traditional news outlets. The Israeli military screened a nearly 44-minute compilation of footage of the attack to members of the international press and to select organizations, such as Harvard University’s Chabad center in December. The film, however, has not been widely released. Meanwhile, others have posted images of the hostages still held by Hamas, online and in public places.
Broadly speaking, footage and images tend to be more compelling than vocal retellings, a principle social psychologists call “visual primacy,” according to Joseph Walther, a University of California Santa Barbara professor who is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Sight is “often the first stimulus that we get when we enter an environment, so we learn to lean on it,” Walther said.
That was as true in the 20th century as it is today, Walther said, but the person-to-person format of social media can make images shared there seem even more poignant.
People who look to Instagram and TikTok for news may assume they have more in common with posters than with professional journalists at legacy news outlets, Walther said. That fuels what researchers call “parasocial relationships,” one-sided relationships between regular people and public figures, he said.
“Journalists will interview people who express emotion, but they themselves kind of create a distance. There’s no filter like that on social media,” Walther said. “We get people’s expressions that seem honest and authentic to us, and I think that draws people into that relationship.”
In Gaza, where the Committee to Protect Journalists says more media workers have been killed than in any other conflict in 30 years, there is no separation for reporters between the events they cover and experience firsthand. On Jan. 22, Azaiza, the Gazan photographer, announced he was evacuating the strip. “We’re sorry,” he said, before removing his signature blue vest, marked with “PRESS” in bold lettering.
Catherine Kenny-Canal said she keeps in mind the faces of Azaiza and Bisan Owda, another Gazan who posts daily updates under the moniker @wizard_bisan1, when she attends pro-Palestinian protests.
Raised in Topsfield, the 24-year-old Kenny-Canal said that she has no personal connections to Gaza or its people, but that following Gazans on Instagram is “a conscious choice for me to become invested in this person’s survival.”
Her feed is a medley of photos from friends, animal videos, and the carnage of war, all served back to back, she said.
“It’s whiplash,” Kenny-Canal said, but added that’s part of the format’s appeal. “You are refusing to allow yourself to forget.”
“We begin to trust these people,” she said. “They become a part of us.”
Some scholars raise concerns about social media as a news source.
Nir Eisikovits, a UMass professor and founder of its Applied Ethics Center, noted that social feed algorithms are optimized for engagement, not accuracy. The best way to keep users engaged, he said, is with content that reinforces their existing beliefs or outrages them — ideally, both.
“The point of the model, the point of the platform are not to teach you anything. They’re to make money. So if you want to learn, then you need to go elsewhere,” Eisikovits said. “There’s no nontraditional way around this, unfortunately, right now.”
Eiskovits said social media reports can supplement information from traditional media, but cautioned against using them as a primary source.
Kwon said he tries to watch out for an “echo chamber effect” when he scrolls X, and he argued “you can’t change anyone’s mind on Twitter.”
Still, he said X has proven a valuable source of connection to those on the ground in Gaza, which Israel has not allowed most Western journalists to enter.
Before Oct. 7, Kwon said, he knew relatively little about the Palestinian territories. But several months in, he said, following the war is probably the most engaged he has ever been with world affairs.
McNulty also said he “didn’t have enough of a grasp” of the decades-old dispute before October, and he has spent the last few months catching up.
In addition to his social feeds, McNulty looks to a handful of more traditional outlets for broader context, including Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye. But local eyewitnesses remain his primary source of information.
“I would rather listen to someone who lives there, or knows someone who lives there, than people who have studied the subject completely disconnected from the conflict,” McNulty said. “If you don’t see it with your eyes, then how much do you know?”
Daniel Kool can be reached at daniel.kool@globe.com. Follow him @dekool01.