BY Nana Abuelsoud
My question to us, as larger feminist and social justice movements, is: what is the point of policing each other’s social media commentary when it only serves to divide us and make a guy or two wealthier?
“Yusuf…7 years old…has curly hair…he’s white and beautiful” — this was the mother’s way of giving cues in hopes of finding her missing son in Gaza on October 15, 2024. This video went viral, evoking emotional reactions from users who recounted what they watched on screens. Some feared for their own children fitting the description, even though they were safe miles away. Others wept for the mother’s loss.
On the other hand, some feminist social media commentary lashed out at the attention Yusuf — or the video searching for him— was getting, pointing to the repercussions of painting a “perfect victim” defined by beauty. According to the commentators, this fed a perceived and lived hierarchy of beauty, one that worked well against millions of other victims. Because they weren’t as beautiful, or white enough, or at all.
When a devastated mother searches for her lost son in the middle of a genocide, the worst thing we can do as witnesses, is to blame others who are overtaken by sadness. Whether some are moved more because of the beauty cues or not, this is not the issue. The main issue is that Yusuf was killed by Israel, along with hundreds of others that day. Extra social media attention didn’t bring him back, nor save those who looked like him in the months that followed. Another issue is how child loss and bloodshed become content for us to consume and comment on — before resuming our daily lives as if nothing happened.
I wonder: what exactly changes in our reality when we police others’ reactions to such horrific events? We end up disrupting the moment of grief and pointing somewhere else, away from Yusuf and his mother. Interrogating our internalized racial hierarchy is inevitable in our pursuit of liberation from colonialism, capitalism, and racial supremacy. Yet in moments when grief is received with scrutiny and whataboutism, it works in favor of the same oppressive forces, pitching us against each other, and misplacing our anger.
Indulging whataboutism is a well-known fascist tactic. It dissolves attention and calls to action without offering alternatives. Feminist and social justice movements, by copying this one in particular, aren’t accounting for this as a damaging tactical move. So much energy is wasted in singularizing blame when we know violence is systematic. Energy that could be used to place our anger and grief in their political context — and into collective action — is lost. Why are you talking about this struggle and not that? Shouldn’t we be provoking ourselves and others to connect the different struggles and organize around their interconnectedness? Otherwise, it becomes easier to compartmentalize ourselves and our politics.
The strengthened grip of fascism has shifted our attention away from the systemic causes behind Yusuf’s death. This is not just the ongoing genocide in Palestine carried out by Israel, rooted in a settler-colonial history in the region, but also the capitalist loop of endless consumption of people’s suffering. In today’s attention economy, diversifying suffering across locations becomes a way of patting ourselves on the back, under the watch of “social media police.”
It is true there is a hierarchy we have internalized over decades of living under a racial capitalist system, which constantly shifts the markers of disposability. We already know that white victims in the Global North receive much more airtime than Black Africans. The minutes shift depending on markers of identity, and above all, on the kind of audience consuming the news. Longer airtime is racist. Yet, is it the only thing that matters when thousands of people are being murdered every day anyway?
More airtime — whether through social media or mainstream news — will not save us. The main obstacle today is not ignorance: people know too much, if anything. The problem is indulgence in despair, or the illusion that posting more can undo settler colonialism and capitalism. Let’s not conflate deliberate political education with social media activism. Social media activism alone will not liberate us; at most, it inflates egos and strengthens algorithms of oppression. Reactionary organizing lacks strategy by design. These social media meltdowns are engineered to extract our reactions and emotions and convince us we are “better” than others—the very logic on which oppression is built.
Solidarity takes different forms at different times. From the 1950s to the 1970s, transnational solidarity thrived across the Global South—often powerfully and defiantly. Today, solidarity praxis still exists, but it faces annihilating borders, restricted access to land and resources, and the grip of capitalist alienation. Resistance has become individualized and costly. What’s changed? The racial capitalist and imperial systems have evolved, but our tactics haven’t kept pace. We’re up against advanced military technologies, crushing foreign debt, crackdowns on unions, mass displacement and surveillance, and the unraveling of social fabrics—all symptoms of deepening capitalist alienation. These conditions demand agility and attuned strategies, yet our movements often fall short, constrained by institutionalization and the shifting logic of late capitalism (or whatever you want to call it).
To this moment, we still believe that pressuring governments through petitions will be effective. This strategy worked when nation state and corporate power were less entangled. But this is a different moment, one that demands a new kind of transnational organizing — one that takes down capitalism and imperialism, and centers liberatory agendas for all.