History Will Be Livestreamed

By Nir Hagigi

In October 2023, as Israeli bombs began to fall on Gaza, something unprecedented unfolded. For the first time in history, the victims of mass atrocity —and only the victims— broadcast their own destruction in real time. Unlike previous conflicts where foreign journalists or outside observers mediated what the world saw, in Gaza the task of witnessing fell almost entirely to Palestinians themselves, because Israel barred international media from entering. Through TikTok livestreams, Instagram stories, and Telegram updates, they documented life under genocide with no outside press on the ground. The crisis in Gaza has been called a “livestreamed genocide” in Amnesty International’s annual report, a label that has been used since the start of the war by pro-Palestinian activists in the West.

While wars and atrocities have always been depicted in the media, the immediacy, intimacy, and sheer volume of testimony coming out of Gaza mark a turning point in the politics of witnessing. To understand what makes Gaza different, it helps to place this moment in historical perspective.

The idea that media changes the way people experience war is not new. In the 19th century, the telegraph allowed near-instant communication from battlefields for the first time, which revolutionized journalism during conflicts like the Crimean War. Yet, even then, reports were filtered through war correspondents and often biased to fit political agendas.

By the 20th century, war became a visual spectacle. During the Second World War, governments carefully curated newsreels to present a sanitized version of conflict, emphasizing heroism and downplaying the brutality of mass death.

The Vietnam War was different: television brought disturbing images of civilian casualties and body bags into North American living rooms. Dubbed the “living-room war,” Vietnam convinced many that media coverage could sway public opinion and fuel anti-war movements.

Bearing Witness Before Social Media

The 1990s brought new horrors in Bosnia and Rwanda. Graphic images of concentration camps in Bosnia, or of machete killings in Rwanda, shocked international audiences. But coverage was mediated by journalists who entered war zones at great personal risk. Victims’ own testimonies were often translated or reinterpreted by outsiders. By the time footage appeared on television or in newspapers, atrocities were already well underway.

With the rise of digital platforms in the 2000s, the Arab Spring of 2011 was often hailed as a “Twitter revolution.” Protesters used social media to organize and broadcast demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond. But while social media helped topple dictatorships, it was less central to documenting systematic killing.

Gaza, by contrast, has shown the power of platforms—not only to mobilize, but also to testify, in real time, to mass atrocities.

Gaza as the First Livestreamed Genocide

What makes media coverage of Gaza distinct is that Palestinians themselves (not just foreign journalists or NGOs) are narrating their own catastrophe, minute by minute. Ordinary people with smartphones have become war correspondents, historians, and archivists. When Israeli-imposed communications blackouts occur, global audiences await anxiously for Internet service to return so that survivors can tell the world, “I am still alive.”

This immediacy changes the dynamics of witnessing. Unlike Vietnam-era footage, which aired days later on evening news programs, livestreams from Gaza collapse time: the distance between atrocity and audience is quite literally seconds. Viewers are not just hearing about events, but watching them unfold in real time, sometimes interacting through comments and messages of solidarity.

At the same time, this new form of testimony faces unprecedented obstacles. Social media platforms like Meta have removed countless Palestinian accounts, citing “community guidelines.” Algorithms suppress videos deemed “graphic” or “political.” In some cases, entire digital archives of testimony have disappeared without warning. The very platforms that allow Palestinians to testify also threaten to erase their voices due to algorithmic gatekeeping and corporate politics.

One might assume that real-time witnessing of atrocity would force governments to act. Historically, the “CNN effect” described how graphic television coverage could push politicians toward humanitarian intervention, as with Somalia in the early 1990s, but Gaza demonstrates the limits of visibility.

Despite overwhelming evidence of civilian suffering, Western governments continue to arm Israel and block meaningful action to stop the genocide. The paradox of Gaza is that the world is watching, yet political action lags behind. Livestreams generate solidarity marches, campus encampments, and boycott campaigns, but not shifts in foreign policy that victims desperately need.

This raises a haunting, timeless question: is bearing witness enough? Or has a flood of images produced chronic compassion fatigue, where horror becomes normalized? Historians can help situate this by reminding us that media exposure has never guaranteed justice.

The record shows that witnessing alone has rarely been sufficient. Photographs of lynchings circulated widely in the early twentieth century United States without ending racial terror; images of famine in Biafra mobilized donations but not structural change; televised suffering in Somalia or Darfur spurred bursts of global attention that faded as quickly as they rose.

This reminds us that visibility must be paired with sustained political pressure, organizing, and accountability. Without such action, even the most searing images risk becoming background noise in the historical archive of violence.

Archiving Testimony

For future historians, Gaza poses another challenge: how will this livestreamed genocide be remembered? Traditionally, historians rely on state archives, official reports, or the work of journalists. Yet Gaza’s most important sources may be TikToks, Twitter updates, WhatsApp voice notes, and Instagram reels.

This creates both opportunities and dangers. On one hand, we now have direct access to the words, images, and emotions of ordinary people under siege, something rarely preserved in earlier genocides. On the other hand, these digital traces are fragile. Companies can delete them, governments can pressure platforms to censor them, and servers can fail. Without intentional preservation and archiving (which, at the moment, is not widespread), much of this testimony could vanish.

This problem is not entirely new. Historians of slavery, colonialism, and Indigenous genocide have long grappled with silences in the archives. Gaza shows us that even in an age of information overload, marginalized voices still remain at risk of erasure. 

Preserving digital records is itself a form of resistance.

Conclusion: History Will Be Livestreamed

Gaza is not the first atrocity to be documented—the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, for instance, was also captured and circulated through digital media— but it is the first in which the victims alone have livestreamed their suffering to the world. This transforms not only how we understand media and war, but also how future generations will study our present. For centuries it was said that history is written by the victors, and that remains true in terms of official narratives. Yet when atrocities are livestreamed by those enduring them, the victors no longer control what is recorded. The question is not whether evidence exists, but whether historians, journalists, and institutions will have the integrity to preserve and interpret it.

Yet testimony alone does not guarantee justice. Historians, journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens must grapple with the uncomfortable truth that seeing and knowing does not always translate into action.

If history is being livestreamed, then the question is: who will watch, and what will they do with what they have seen?

Nir Hagigi is a student of Global and International Studies, specializing in Global Development and minoring in Environmental and Climate Humanities at Carleton University.

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This post is part of an activehistory.ca series on media and history in Canada. Media have been both remarkably important and intensely theorized but also historically understudied. We hope this series highlights the diversity of ways the study of media history informs and contributes to our knowledge of the past and our understanding of the role of media in the present. The editors encourage other submissions on topics related to media history, broadly conceived. If you are interested in contributing or even just finding out more about this series, please feel free to write to Andrew Nurse at anurse@mta.ca or Hannah Cooley at hannah.cooley@mail.utoronto.ca.