Throughout Section 1, we examined how narratives surrounding images have formed across both historical and modern conflicts. From this analysis, four key themes emerged that illustrate how these processes have changed over time. In the modern era, each of these themes has been significantly shaped by the rise of digital platforms as the primary channels for circulating images and narratives. This section will explore how the design of of digital media circulation changed how users engage with and react to narratives surrounding images of conflict and violence in relation to these themes.
The speed at which images and narratives circulate is a central difference between digital and traditional media. As outlined in Section 1, traditional platforms saw only incremental acceleration—from daily print to nightly broadcasts and eventually 24-hour news. Digital media has surpassed this entirely, enabling images and narratives to spread almost instantly across global networks. This shift is driven not just by technological progress but by platform designed intentionally to be optimised for rapid visual sharing.
Initially, this acceleration appears beneficial, allowing information to reach the public before traditional media can curate it. In principle, this broader and more immediate visibility should reveal aspects of conflict that might otherwise have remained unseen. Yet these advantages are often undermined by reactionary or sensationalised narratives that emerge spontaneously among users, producing a proliferation of conflicting interpretations; particularly in the early stages of conflict (Forsyth, 2024). The same design features that enable rapid awareness also hasten the spread of false narratives and misinformation, leaving little time for reflection or verification and fragmenting user responses. Ultimately, the speed of digital circulation is a central force reshaping how users engage with and react to narratives, especially in the shifting control over how those narratives are formed.
Social platforms, designed around the uploading and sharing of user-generated content, have become the primary channels for image circulation, shifting narrative control into the hands of users. While this democratisation of narrative production can be seen as positive, it also enables malign actors to shape public discourse with greater ease (West, 2017). Unlike traditional media; where audiences typically received a limited set of government- or press-controlled narratives; digital platforms expose users to a far wider spectrum of interpretations, accurate or otherwise, fundamentally altering how public perception forms during conflict.
Although ambiguity is common in the early stages of any conflict, the design of digital platforms intensifies this uncertainty. These systems prioritise rapid, continuous, and easily consumable content, often surfacing images before any professional verification is possible. As a result, the versions of images that gain the most traction tend to be those paired with sensationalised or emotionally charged narratives, regardless of accuracy. Misleading narratives can be uploaded by anyone, but engagement-driven algorithms further amplify them, promoting misinformation at moments when clarity is most needed. In this sense, media circulation is still controlled; yet not to deliver a predetermined message, but to elevate whichever narrative is most likely to provoke user engagement. With narratives being far harder to control by the press or government, and increasingly being controlled through algorithmic feeds, there is also a greater focus on individualism in regards to user response to narratives around conflict image.
Although an increasing divide was observed throughout the historic conflicts examined in Section 1, these divide still formed conflicting opinions based in similar foundational ideologies. However, modern conflicts have seen an unprecedented level of individualistic reactions to their surrounding narratives (Antonakaki and Ioannidis, 2025).
As highlighted already, algorithmic feeds on social platforms promote the narratives users are most likely to engage with, regardless of their accuracy. This individualisation of narrative engagement is further intensified by the design of these platforms, where every piece of shared content is directly tied to an identifiable user. Each share, comment, or reaction becomes a publicly attributed stance, creating an inherent personalisation of conflict narratives (Olaniran & Williams, 2020). Because users' positions are easily visible to others, divisions become more pronounced, reinforcing polarisation and illustrating how the structural design of digital platforms contributes to increasingly fragmented and individualised public reactions.
This effect is further intensified by the micro-community–oriented design of social platforms, which encourages users to cluster around highly specific interests or viewpoints. Because each user account generates extensive data points, platforms can easily recommend communities and individuals who share near-identical perspectives on a given narrative. As with conflict narratives, these recommendations are often algorithmically driven, prioritising those users and groups a person is most likely to engage with. This dynamic fosters the formation of echo chambers, where users repeatedly encounter only viewpoints that reinforce their own. While this may appear to create a sense of community, it ultimately strengthens individual identification with a chosen narrative by providing effortless access to others who share; even very niche; interpretations. Having established how digital social platforms enable niche individualistic narratives, the idea of individualism continues but with regards to performative participation.
Over the past fifteen years, the design of social platforms has evolved significantly. Once built around a single core feature or gimmick, they are now deeply integrated into daily life, serving as spaces where users connect with others, consume news and entertainment, shop, and create or circulate content (Moelloer & D’Ambrosio, 2021). With so many aspects of life now occurring within these platforms, it is unsurprising that protest has also moved into this space. Rather than demonstrating publicly, many contemporary campaigns take place online, where users share memeified images of conflict as a form of political expression (Erriskon, 2016; Subzwari, 2024). While this approach can effectively circulate particular narratives, it can also perpetuate superficial engagement, as users often participate to align with prevailing online sentiments rather than through deep personal conviction.
Digital platforms also make it far easier to react to, challenge, or counter competing narratives than traditional media ever allowed. In traditional circulation, disputing someone’s interpretation of a conflict typically required face-to-face discussion, demanding time, effort, and a degree of interpersonal accountability. Online, reactions occur through comment sections, replies, and short-form interactions that allow for rapid, depersonalised responses. These features often encourage brief, reiterative messages designed to provoke engagement rather than support meaningful deliberation, reducing discussion to tit-for-tat exchanges (Anderson et al., 2016). As a result, digital media circulation has diminished the depth and quality of public discourse when compared to traditional platforms, favouring the quick, repetitive interactions for which these systems are optimised.
Additionally, this speed can effect wider governmental or national reactions, as the immediacy at which users can observe images and narratives of conflict causes an expectation that governments react with similar speed. This can force governments into needing to react to narratives because they feel their population are expecting a reaction, despite whether that reaction has been appropriately considered (Duncombe, 2020). The speed of circulation that digital social platforms have been designed for has