Digital Activism in the Gaza War: Mirroring Israelis on Social Media

Social media platforms, with their different ecosystems, offer their users various sociotechnological environments and new communication experiences. Social media platforms, with their diverse ecosystems, offer users a variety of socio-technological environments and new communication experiences. These platforms allow users to engage in political activism and challenge hegemonic narratives. After October 7, 2023, as the Israeli attacks on Gaza turned into genocide, social media became an important arena of struggle. In this study, I aimed to examine how young Palestinian users subvert the perception of Israel's victimization on social media, focusing on the digital publications of Hamzah Sadaah and Bilal Nassar, who actively use the dialogic aspect of social media platforms for political activism. Using a digital ethnography approach, I watched the videos of the two activists hosting Israeli participants with the technique of non-participant observation and interpreted the data obtained through descriptive analysis to reveal the outlines of the Israeli participants' discourses. As a result, the activists made Israeli soldiers, youth and adults visible by hosting them on their platforms, making their war crimes and hate speech visible. They also used social media as a mirror, revealing a side of Israeli society that is ignored by mainstream Western media