Mediatised Conflicts and Digital Witnessing: A Study of Palestinian Narratives on TikTok in the Gaza Occupation in 2023

In today's digital age, the synergy between social media and mainstream media has transformed the landscape of political communication, highlighting the need for a comprehensive understanding of both media's influences on public engagement and democratic participation. Scholars have extensively studied the use of social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube as tools for amplifying voices, shaping public discourse, and holding governments accountable. The rise of TikTok as the most popular social media platform among Generation Z has transformed political communication, indicating the need for further research in this area. Drawing from theories of mediatised conflicts and digital witnessing, this article contributes to discussions on how TikTok has emerged as a platform for the documentation and dissemination of the realities of conflicts by civilians. It does so by conducting a discourse analysis of 230 TikTok videos documenting events in Gaza from October to December 2023. This article shows the particularities of how the Palestinian community has articulated their struggles online as a diasporic community, and how they have used TikTok as a site of resistance. Additionally, it shows the large array of surveillance strategies that the Israeli government has in place to control the narrative of the events, and the tactics that Palestinians have developed to avoid algorithmic filtering, censorship, and surveillance.