Description
Civilian actors in Ukraine and beyond are using digital platforms to witness Russia's war, i.e. to document, archive or investigate the war through platform-specific data and media practices. These digital witnessing practices, which can also be seen as digitalized resistance, are part of a historically and geographically diverse phenomenon of mediatised war witnessing. I propose that some digital witnessing practices on social media platforms (e.g. by prominent journalists, investigative collectives or war influencers) represent a form of witnessing aimed at exposing war experiences and crimes. In this talk, I focus on those digital witnessing practices that are less concerned with accountability through exposure, rational discourse and empathic solidarity, but rather create alternative witnessing forms. Drawing on a case of inconspicuous and non-institutionalised witnessing on Telegram (Bareikytė & Makhortykh, 2024) and other cases, I speculate on the potential of such obscure, inventive and creative forms of digital witnessing.
