A Bite-Sized “Battle for Mosul”
Clustered previews for the public Snapchat stories of March 10 offered multifarious choices, including “The Academies: Sprang Break Ready,” “Thirsty Thursday: Time to Make Pour Decisions,” and “Battle for Mosul: Forces Close in on Isis.” I rarely watch these public stories, but the last one startled me, so I tapped.
I watched the whole thing, trying to apply my critical view of Snapchat’s news efforts with fairness. There were moments when I thought “Hey, that’s a real reporter from a real news outlet really providing coverage. Snapchat is trying.” But for the most part, I cringed.
Snapchat, I see what you’re trying to do: educate a massive audience with bite-size pieces of information and humanize victims of ongoing direct violence in a place widely represented as “other.” There’s something to be said for that project, but there’s a lot to be said against it.
The ethical implications of turning a major battle which intends to free an Iraqi city from illegal occupation by terrorists give us a lot of grappling material. I’ll start with a hot topic: the dumbing-down of the news cycle. It’s no revelation to observe that most people get their news from social media, but the degrees of harm caused by this reality vary. If a person becomes aware of an event or changing reality because they glimpsed a headline, that’s still awareness. If they click the headline and actually read a news article, that’s even better. For a simple news event requiring nothing more than the transferral of fact — who won an election, whether or not a bill passed, which sports team triumphed — Snapchat might be appropriate, but Mosul is not one of these cases.
Snapchat’s fleeting structure gives the impression that the events covered are as brief as their appearance on the screen. While users can discern that Snapchat stories are reductive representations, the platform suggests that events presented are just that: singular events. The efforts to retake Mosul from ISIS domination are not a one-day occurrence, and while the Snapchat coverage acknowledges this in a “Mosul Battles” slide delineating occupation by ISIS and struggles against it since June 2014, the background offered is not enough.
The coverage reduces “Mosul Battles” to not one, but a whopping four individual events and, beyond this reduction, buries the slide tenth in the “Battle for Mosul” series. Many users won’t make it that far.
Once users have been deluded into feeling informed by minimal background information, there are the random testimonies and shots of children.
Here’s the thing about the project of “humanizing” victims of wars, plagues, and famines in far-off, exoticized lands: it gives the audience too easy an out. It says “wow, look at you, you recognized that these other people are also people. That’s incredible. Now pat yourself on the back and go watch something lighter, because you deserve it, empathy warrior.” “Humanizing” tells us that we can’t possibly understand the complex systems and forces at play within a nebulous and strange “other” group, so it’s better that we just consume a few relatable anecdotes.
Take, for example, the following testimony from an Iraqi woman. We connect with her loss of material possessions; we feel for the death of her children; we see the evil of ISIS. But we learn nothing about her life, her family’s socioeconomic position and resulting vulnerability, or what she thinks of the efforts to retake Mosul. She is reduced to something simple and consumable, something to which we can all say “aw.”
To bring this to an even further point of reduction, consider the following shot of children standing outside a tent. A voiceover tells us: “It’s the children who seem the most traumatized. A plane goes overhead, and many look up in terror.”
Who are these children? Do they still have parents? Did they consent to being filmed? They are being propped up as victims who “seem” traumatized, and, while surely they are, their pain is being displayed as little more than suppositional momentary evidence of havoc wreaked. We offer children up as “the innocents” for the people who just can not get behind humanizing the adults. For those who cannot manage to identify with the overly-simplified narratives of Iraqi grown-ups, Snapchat has made the project even easier.
Of course, coverage efforts and their effects change depending on their intended audience, so for whom did Snapchat embark on this project? Because Snapchat is an internationally-accessible online platform, we cannot assume that the intended audience is entirely from the United States, but usage data provides us some pointed insight. According to a Feb. 2 registration statement filed by Snap, Inc. with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, of Snapchat’s 158 millions Daily Active Users (DAUs), 68 million are from North America, 52 million from Europe, and the remaining 39 million are from a category dubbed “Rest of World.” Of the 68 million DAUs in North America, Snap, Inc. reports, “over 60 million” are from the U.S. and Canada alone. This tells us that it’s fair to say the “Battle for Mosul” snap story was created with an English-speaking Western audience in mind, a large portion of which is located in the U.S. and Canada. Snapchat isn’t just giving Westerners an empathy-congratulating break; it’s reminding us of the evils of ISIS, and in the U.S. at least, nationalist rhetoric translates to anti-ISIS sentiment to patriotism. But it’s not scary, aggressive patriotism; Snapchat makes it easy to swallow.
Audience informs the role of the platform, and Snapchat has been trying to grow its audience and penetrate the news scene. But is a network fueled by selfies and silly filters right for hard news coverage? The situation in Mosul is not simple, and it should not be made to seem that way for our short attention spans and guilty consciences.
