Since social media pages started gaining global attention, people latched on to these platforms at the expense of the television. One does not wait for the news to be broadcasted by news channels but chases it moment by moment. Pages carrying people’s names have become “influencers” and other pages carry the names of cities and neighborhoods have turned into constantly followed sources. Especially in times of war, when anxiety pushes everyone to stay on their phones to read every update.
Our colleague, Cendrella Azar, captured an image of a displaced southern Lebanese woman, over 60 years old, lying down on the asphalt in the street under the sun and smoking a cigarette. The image was a part of a humanitarian journalistic coverage on the conditions of those displaced and scattered along the roads after the opening of a battle front in the south of Lebanon with Israel. However, it was reposted by a one of these social media accounts, without naming the source, and the description moved from its humane position to something else: “in Beirut, photo taken of a displaced woman lounging on the road and smoking a cigarette during the day in Ramadan”.
That is how the meaning completely flipped, and the focus shifted from the tragedy of displacement and its horrors to a personal moral judgement on the freedom of a woman to smoke as she contemplates her fate…
The style of the caption which brought dozens of interactions and comments, seemed positioned to attacking her, not to sympathize with her or ponder at the harshness of her position. By reformulating it, the tone was reproduced, the reality of the image changed, and its meaning formed to push the public to take a moral, religious, and offensive stance rather than one of human solidarity.
We do not just look at the images, but we do so through a severely eroded value system, and commenting is not a reflex for everyone, but a continuation of a framework of moral erosion.
The theft of the image without naming the source is not merely a professional gap, especially since social media lacks image protection regulations. The page wanted to change the image’s meaning, a deliberate step to open the door for comments and incitement in an era where social media rewards hate speech and provocation with more interaction and reach. The goal was not to spread the image, but to visually rewrite it. Every repost produces a new interpretation and inserts the image into a different cycle of use. It may transform from a documentation about displacement into mockery material, or into a meme circulated in a passing conversation or in a WhatsApp message. The image gradually detaches from its original reality and is reduced to a tool within a rapidly circulating emotional economy.
In the comments, moral judgement appears in the name of God. Ramadan invoked as a ready-made standard for condemnation, and judgement is practiced from a comfortable position, where moral discipline replaces seeing the precarious cruelty within the image. Quickly does the language turn to a vengeful tone in which gloating intertwines with a sense of moral superiority. The question is no longer about the conditions of displacement, but of an assumed sin. Roles are distributed, and meaning is assigned to punishment: she is facing punishment for she did not fast.
Condemnation, defamation, mockery, as well as sexual and moral characterization become tools of punishment and an obsession with expressing it in a way almost pathological. What is happening cannot be reduced to an individual lack of morality, as it reveals an emotion that transcends public reason, carried by ready-made judgements of justice and religion, not to be debated but invoked as certainties. Here values become tools of humiliation, and anger becomes a means of establishing a moral identity through punishing the other.
What appears is not a political disagreement in the public sense, but a moral language that replaces politics itself. When politics as a form of management of differences and the choice to live together, becomes absent, the public sphere is reduced to a court of values. We are facing a guided morality economy where war is viewed from an angle of how the woman behaved, not of how displacement led to her circumstances.
Here is a raw image, but we strip it of its meaning, and we strip the photographer of their intention and the reason that drove them to capture it. The story transforms from a story of displacement to that of a woman carrying an assumed “sin”. The new plot is born within the title and pages that follow the news aiming to feed the narrative, and we pay the price with a like button ensuring we remain a member of their audience.
Despite many defending the woman, what appears in the comments does not reflect established morals as much as it exposes a fragility in ways of expression, and the need to establish the self through punishing the other, humiliating them, stereotyping them, and declaring them infidels. It is a language which carries more pathological tensions than an attempt to understand.
Initially, the image is not produced outside of meaning, but within it. It is the photographers right to frame it as they choose to express a story or as a symbol. Stripping the journalist of their will and ripping the image from its context as well as changing what they intended it with it, is not a merely simple repost but a form of theft and poisoning of its content and narrative, an expropriation of their interpretive will. During a war, photographers and journalists capture faces and circumstances searching for a story that reveals the meaning of cruelty, not to be redirected towards moral condemnation within a sectarian or political context. When the journalist is turned into a participant in somebody else’s story, we find ourselves in an ethical and professional crisis that touches on the journalistic conscience itself. The photographer did not intend what the page titled yet finds herself implicated in a narrative she didn’t choose, a symbolic crime committed in her name without her realizing it. The image has become a document conveying facts in addition to a ready-made cultural code, and the pattern seen in the comments carries these formulas with a dangerous social dimension. The event is no longer invoked to be understood but to be judged. Thus, the image went from an attempt to understand, to passing a moral judgement; from the testimony of a harsh reality to material for collective condemnation.
