-Danny Begg
Tik Toks, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram reels are all examples of short-form video content that is ubiquitous across social media. The term “doomscrolling” was added to the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2023– it refers to an excessive amount of scrolling through online content and it seems to be uniquely related to these short-form videos. Meta and other social media sites use algorithms to tailor the suggested videos to the individual user which compounds time spent on these videos to a point that resembles addiction.
One day during my own endless scrolling I came across a video that stood out. It was an edit comparing the kindness of Queen Camilla to Princess Diana, and it was just the kind of innocuous, pointless media that I came to expect from Instagram Reels. Suddenly, after 22 seconds of images of the two royals there was a hard switch to a woman who identified herself as Palestinian. She said, “Don’t scroll past just because you saw me. Five seconds of your time is all I need. Like, comment, share—any little amount helps.” I felt like I was being spoken to, as if a direct plea to be seen was being made to me. It was jarring to have my doomscrolling interrupted by a real person. I was moved, I liked the post hoping that if I boosted engagement on the post it might find its way to someone who had the spare cash to donate.
Later, I encountered another video with the same structure, what I have started to call a “bait and switch” template. It was posted by a different account, but followed the same pattern: a “popular” or eye-catching image, followed by a sharp cut to a heartfelt appeal. It started with a video of an artist painting a landscape and switched to a young girl walking around through the rubble of destroyed buildings saying “everyone can donate. So can you donate to me? ‘Cause I’m tired in this place. Thank you.” She was no more than 11 years old and seeing her on my reels raised so many questions.
I built a small archive of all the videos I came across and as my engagement grew, my social media started feeding me more of this content. I noticed that it was usually women and children reaching out—speaking directly to global audiences, asking for relief or simply a boost in engagement. I kept wondering: Why do they rely on innocuous content to draw viewers in? Would their pleas get the same attention if they weren’t wrapped in something easy, light, or algorithmically “safe”? The reliance on this bait-and-switch technique isn’t accidental, I have come to understand. It’s a necessary response to algorithmic suppression, both by platforms like Meta and, in these cases, by the state of Israel (Cristiano 2022). Israel’s algorithmic suppression stems from their total control of Plaestinian digital networks that Tawi-Souri and Aouragh (2014) called “cyber-colonialism. As a result of the Oslo accords, “all international traffic, initially for landlines and later for cellular and internet lines, had to be routed through Israeli providers (pg.112).” This control allows for all content posted by Palestinians to be routed through Israeli content moderation.
Figure 1. Instagram screen shot of the bait-and-switch template
Many advocate for free and open access to the Internet as a human right. While not officially recognized by the United Nations, this right is increasingly seen as essential in contemporary society, where a lack of digital connectivity can result in real disparities in information, education, opportunity, and safety. Today, the over-surveillance and moderation of Palestinian content may impact how the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is perceived and addressed. In recognition of the importance of things like social media visibility, the organization 7amleh, fights against online suppression by using international law to lobby for the digital rights of Palestinians. After the May 2021 protests in Palestine, 7amleh pushed Meta to hire an external company, named BSR, to review possible discrimination in the application of their content moderation algorithm. The BSR’s memo investigated Meta’s activities and identified “various instances of unintentional bias where Meta policy and practice, combined with broader external dynamics, does lead to different human rights impacts on Palestinian and Arabic speaking users” (BSR, 2025). The evidence that Palestinian content is over-moderated is clear, but when the memo refers to “external dynamics” what do they actually mean?
Fabio Cristiano (2022) writes about a different level of algorithmic surveillance facilitated by the government of Israel in which “algorithms scan social media contents—texts (statuses, notes, and comments), videos, and images—in search for data constituting an ‘incitement to violence’” (pg. 134). These algorithms result in Palestinian content becoming hyper-visible to Israeli authorities and, as a result, highly surveilled from an Israeli perspective. Yet this hyper-visibility to the Israeli state consequently made Palestinian content invisible to broader audiences – in an act of algorithmic violence against the Palestinian cause. This has an effect on what videos reach global audiences, but perhaps most importantly it carries real material impact on the livelihoods of Palestinians. It is estimated that algorithmic surveillance “led to the arrest of more than five hundred Palestinians since 2017” (Cristiano, 2021,134). There is a looming threat of imprisonment hanging over the heads of anyone who is posting on social media from Palestine. Cristiano (2022) asserts this threat leads to “self-censorship,” a hyper-awareness about what one is saying online and also leads to multimodal innovation by Palestinians to navigate these “algorithmic checkpoints” (pg.133,135) and the policing of language.
William Cotter (2017:54) identifies “engagement […] on language within systems of violence [… as] an emerging area of research” for linguistic anthropologists. Cotter researches language from Israeli military pamphlets and argues that “language traverses the margins of the state and can serve as a source of political and social power in the maintenance of sovereignty” (Cotter 2017: 55). As I discovered in the context of my research into the bait-and-switch template, Gazans rely on digital mechanisms to amplify their language toward the global audience. The bait-and-switch technique is not only a way to amplify a message, it becomes an integral part of the information that is being communicated. My own experience with this template forces the viewer to engage with uncomfortable questions regarding how they spend their online time and what their priorities are. Gazans use the bait-and-switch template to illustrate their pleas to have their sovereignty and humanity recognized against algorithmic suppression and linguistic policing.
Israel defends this surveillance by suggesting that it is being done to limit the amount of content that “incites violence” online. Its implementation uses a vague filtering system of various Arabic words “such as ‘martyr,’ ‘Al-Aqsa,’ ‘jihad,’ ‘knife,’ and more.” (Cristiano, 2022: 134). This policing of language has grave implications for anyone who is attempting to use social media to share their side of the story. Social media is a particularly important tool in the spread of information in the case of Palestine because Israel has banned international news organizations from the Gaza strip since the start of the current war. Al Jazeera reports that: “more than 200 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israeli forces since October 2023” (Salhani & Humaid 2025: 24). In this context, citizen journalism on social media becomes especially important by sharing images of extreme violence that index the history of colonial oppression in Palestine and thus combating biased media narratives. Tay Jeong (2024) identifies that “cross-border communication in the internet age has augmented the importance of foreign public opinion…as more and more people are cognitively exposed to horrible events happening beyond their national borders and empathize with the sufferings of distant others” (Jeong 2024, 1).
Their audience
It seems plausible that Palestinians use this bait-and-switch technique so their videos have a higher chance of being seen by people who may get them aid. That being said, whether or not these narratives reached others internationally were questions I wished to explore outside of my own personal experiences.
Toward that end, I conducted ethnographic interviews with students in New York City to interrogate the effectiveness of the Palestinian message. I tailored the questions to probe the relevance of the content to the university experience of students, in times of heightened censorship and surveillance due to a widely publicized international conflict. I showed students videos that integrated the bait-and-switch technique and asked them why they thought Palestinians chose that video template as a means to communicate their message. For many, the videos triggered feelings of guilt about their own media consumption habits. One person said “the worst thing you can do is interrupt those short-term cycles, people don’t want to be made uncomfortable in their doomscroll…”
This type of bait-and-switch content forces the viewer to question how they spend their time and realize that they are wasting their time “doomscrolling” as opposed to doing something actionable that helps people no matter if they’re Palestinian or their next-door neighbors. The guilt response comes from the urge to skip past someone in a desperate situation who isn’t asking for a great time commitment. “That guilt still impacts you even if you’re alone with your own thoughts.” The guilt response forces the viewer to question who they see as worth their attention: if an individual was happily consuming some non-offensive pointless content like images of Queen Camilla or an artist painting a landscape, why are they so irritated by another human being asking for help?
The activists I interviewed also identified an important point. They spoke about the noticeable lack of men using this template, and theorized it is because Arab men receive less sympathy from international audiences, (something that Mohammed El-Kurd [YEAR] has also written about). “The fact that it’s children…if we cut to an image of a man there [is] not that sympathy response…we see an Arab man in this country and we’re programmed to think “terrorist.” It’s telling that most of these spokespeople are young girls. The female child…the only Palestinian we in the west treat as adjacent to innocent.” Out of the 16 videos I collected, 13 were of women or children. Given Israel’s framing of the war on Gaza as a matter of rooting out Hamas, the rhetoric of terroism and the invisible enemy pervades news cycles and likely influences international audiences. Children have become especially powerful transmitters of these pleas for aid given the incredible number of children who have been wounded or killed since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel (over 50,000 according to UNICEF). Their cries for aid are just one of the repercussions of the dehumanization of the Palestinians and the rhetoric of the invisible, omnipresent enemy.
One student responded to my question by agreeing that “people aren’t paying attention … All of Rafah has been destroyed, every university has been destroyed, people can’t get in or leave Gaza. It’s very sad that the public has lost interest because students aren’t getting beat up by the NYPD. The only way for Palestinians to get attention from a large number of people is to bait people in with things they care about–consumption.” The desperation of the situation is gut-wrenching and the bait-and-switch Instagram reels are one way that Palestinians try to get attention from the world. The only accessible medium for communicating their desperation to global audiences is social media, an innovative approach to cross-border communication by hiding important messages after innocuous videos.
References
Cotter, W.M. (2017), Gaza at the Margins? Legibility and Indeterminacy in the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27: 54-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12147
Cristiano, F. (2022). The Blurring Politics of Cyber Conflict: A Critical Study of the Digital in Palestine and Beyond. Lund University. (2025).
Jeong, T. (2024). Hamas or Palestine? The Discursive Battle over the 2023 Israel-Hamas War and the Global Distribution of Partisan Search Interest. ResearchGate. DOI:10.31235/osf.io/mp48e
Mishra, Vibbu. “US Vetoes Security Council Resolution Demanding Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza | UN News.” United Nations, United Nations, news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164056. Accessed 30 July 2025.
Salhani, J., & Humaid, M. (24, April 7). Targeted, killed, burned alive: Journalists in Gaza attacked by Israel. Al Jazeera. Retrieved April 24, 2025, from https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/4/7/targeted-killed-burned-alive-journalists-in-gaza-attacked-by-israel#flips-#:0
Tawil-Souri, H., & Aouragh, M. (2014). Intifada 3.0? Cyber Colonialism and Palestinian Resistance. The Arab Studies Journal, 22(1), 102–133.
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Danny Begg graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2025.
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