“What our ruling class has decided will be normal”: On how a digitized visual economy constructs,enables,and contests the Gaza genocide

Images of Israel's genocide in Gaza spread widely through the communication networks that pervade our mediatized social world. Since 2023, reports of Hamas’ October 7 offensive have made way for images of a doctors’ press conference amid a destroyed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, of Palestinians burning alive in bombarded tent encampments, of emaciated children. More than any previous genocide, “Gaza” has become a globally shared experience watched in real time. To many, it feels like, to use the words spoken by U.S. Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell before his fatal livestreamed self-immolation, “what our ruling class has decided will be normal” (Ray, 2025). This normality is marked by an onslaught of imagery, as self-recorded footage, misinformation, propaganda, and AI-generated slop compete for attention. Despite the evident political urgency of these images, it is less clear how their circulation within the contemporary media landscape contributes to granting this unfolding atrocity its (geo)political significance. We here pursue that question. Drawing on David Campbell's seminal analysis of the visual economy of the Darfur genocide, we appraise changes in three spheres of visual practice: the production of images (the organization of technologies and people); the circulation of images (transmission and publication); and their consumption (their social interpretations and uses). Our aim is not to exhaustively analyze media coverage of the Gaza genocide, nor to morally and politically evaluate it. Rather, it is to examine how a reshaped visual economy coproduces a political reality in which genocide can be popularly recognized yet continue with Western backing.

Genocide and the visual economy

Over the past century, mediatized imagery has come to dominate political dynamics and shape social realities. A “visual economy”—structured by the same relationships of power, materiality, people and technologies that structure the broader social world (Poole, 1997: 8–11)—conditions the making, circulating and consuming of the images that shape our collective perceptions of political issues. Images co-construct (geo)political problems; how issues are visualized shapes how we understand them, and what responses become possible. For instance, as Campbell notes about the Darfur genocide, different kinds of photographs support different interpretations and generate different responses and responsibilities. Depicting the violence as a humanitarian crisis (e.g. by foregrounding refugees) elicits and legitimizes other forms of political response than when visualized as genocide (e.g. by foregrounding imagery of the crimes). Hence, images shape what we accept as normal and what we deem appropriate responses to political situations. As Herman and Chomsky (1988) famously showed, consent for political responses relies on mediation; on media infrastructures deciding what issues to discuss, how to discuss them, and whose voice matters.

Clearly, then, images help shape social and political realities. Understanding this process is crucial to understanding perceptions of and responses to the Gaza genocide. Yet today's media landscape looks different from the one Campbell described. These days, mediatization happens through a cocktail of legacy media, social media, self-made imagery, and competing propaganda machines wielding those tools. Despite early hopes of social media democratizing public discourse, media platforms remain privately owned, with selective algorithms aimed at maximizing profit and engagement (Dean, 2024). Because the collective construction of social and political realities also happens through media (Couldry and Hepp, 2017), this reshaping of communications severely impacts how issues are understood and politicized. As a barrage of images competes for attention, divergent social realities around Israel's genocide emerge. For some, atrocities committed by Hamas still dominate; for others, images of mass death prompt popular protest against (complicity in) Israel's genocide.

Visual construction of genocide

Gaza represents the first “livestreamed” genocide. The political economy of media that, in Herman and Chomsky's analysis, helped manufacture consent for imperialist warfare, and which Campbell described as a “concentration of the means of production in the global visual economy” (2007: 370), is a historical relic: today anyone can snap pictures with their smartphones and spread these images online. Hence, producing images of genocide markedly differs from Campbell's media landscape, in which professional photojournalists had to provide coverage of conflict zones. Often, photographers could not access sites of conflict: refugee camps instead provided “the most visible traces of conflict,” serving “as proxies for the conflict itself” (Campbell, 2007: 368, 370). These images then depicted the situation as a humanitarian crisis, the result of supposedly complex histories of ethnic strife. The conflict's physical inaccessibility made genocidal violence harder to visualize.

With Gaza, no such restraints apply: the dependence on photojournalists to provide global publics with images is gone. In Darfur, Campbell noted that images tended to focus on victims rather than perpetrators, regardless of the interpretive frame; this has also changed. Victims now depict themselves and aggressors through networked media: citizen journalists in Gaza have implacably represented the genocide by circumventing the “bureaucratic hurdles of legacy media [and] by decreasing the psychic distance between the subjects of the news, the reporters of the news, and the consumers of the news” (El-Kurd, 2025: 166). Palestinians’ self-made images have produced an exceptionally visible “conflict” zone, showing not just the aftereffects of genocidal violence (e.g. refugee camps), but this violence unfolding. Moreover, the perpetrators also document their atrocities, sharing photos of themselves destroying homes, abusing detainees, and shooting civilians (Cordall, 2025).

Networked communications have also changed how images circulate. Describing Darfur, Campbell noted, “it is often editorial decisions at the place of publication – rather than the choices of individual photographers – which help determine what and how we see” (2007: 371). Today, legacy media no longer curate the spread of images this exclusively. Although editorial choices still carry great influence—evident in criticism by BBC journalists of their editors’ demands for pro-Israel content (121 BBC Journalists, 2025)—people get their news from various sources. On social media, Palestinians’ self-reporting of their suffering circulates widely, fitting such platforms’ affective character and propensity for outrage (Dean, 2024). With every new image of schools bombed, rockets impacting hospitals, and encampments ablaze—all legitimate targets according to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)—the narrative of Gaza as a humanitarian crisis becomes harder to maintain on these platforms. Billions across the world witness genocidal violence in “real time.” Despite the IDF targeting journalists reporting from Gaza (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2025), it is nearly impossible to suppress the images and information captured and disseminated through mobile devices. Partly due to their ubiquity online, these images also feature on legacy media channels, having become a normalized part of even eight o’clock news broadcasts.

The widespread capability to record and disseminate images must not, however, be mistaken for a democratized political economy of the media landscape. The way images circulate continues to depend on differentiating factors like geography (other images circulate in the West than in the Israeli media environment; Stein, 2024), age (generational differences in perceptions on Gaza seem related to social media use), and platform (each with different standards, vernaculars, and uses). But crucially, the ability to amplify messages and give them political weight is not equally distributed. The concentrated ownership of many social media platforms by U.S.-based tech giants undeniably shapes discourse on Gaza in the West. While the editorial power to manufacture consent, in Herman and Chomsky's sense, has diminished, public discourse remains disproportionately shaped by a political and economic elite with the power to amplify its own narratives and suppress the circulation of others: Meta systematically censured Palestinian accounts, and U.S. lawmakers aimed to ban TikTok, accusing the China-based platform of an anti-Israel bias (Human Rights Watch, 2023; Washington, 2025). This power to shape reality is closely guarded (e.g. Keane, 2020), and part of what Bushnell indicted: largely against popular opinion, Western ruling classes continue to support Israel both militarily and politically, and increasingly borrow from authoritarian playbooks to keep doing so.

Changes in production and circulation extend into the sphere of consumption, where images acquire social uses. Interpretive frames are constructed and circulated through the media landscape in hard-to-trace ways. Moreover, the overwhelming volume of imagery makes visual economies difficult to navigate for users who now choose—often unknowingly, algorithmically—what to see. In this context manufacturing consent—imposing a dominant framing to justify political (in)action—has become more difficult, as revealed by U.S. senators’ complaints to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu about the difficulty of providing Israel political cover when images of mass starvation circulate online (Scahill, 2025). (Reports of Israel's starvation campaign appear to finally provoke some international political pressure.) The ceaseless images of atrocities that social media users encounter online solidify the interpretation of Gaza as a genocide. These images also find other uses: the Hind Rajab Foundation uses IDF soldiers’ self-incriminating footage to track them down when they travel abroad, to have them arrested and tried in international courts (Cordall, 2025). Likewise, South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice relied heavily on images from Twitter/X and other platforms as evidence (Joyini, 2025).

Conclusion: What our ruling class decides will be normal?

Is this genocide “what our ruling class has decided will be normal”? Gaza throws into sharp relief the schizophrenic nature of our digitized visual economies. A constant stream of atrocious images has contributed to the growing dominance of the interpretation of Gaza as genocide. Nonetheless, more images did not stop—or prevent—an ongoing massacre. We must sadly answer Campbell's lingering question—will “more or better pictures help in the struggle for attention and action in places like Darfur?” (2007: 361)—with an emphatic no.

Manufacturing consent for Israel's genocide has become harder as visual production, circulation, and consumption have become entangled. Yet the abundance of images—combined with misinformation—also creates a spectacle in which people selectively opt-in to particular social realities. Against this backdrop, the tenuous character of political structures becomes painfully apparent. The performative fiction of a consensual “rules-based” international order has proven to be differentially applicable. The exception and impunity granted to Israel by a Western ruling class supposed to enforce international law confronts the increasingly prominent interpretation of Israel's conduct as genocidal and Israel as a settler-colonial state. Such political interpretations also depend on the social and cultural reality that political elites inhabit and decide is normal. Increasingly authoritarian attempts to suppress dissent or designate protesters as terrorists will not stop the emerging political reality, in which images of a Western-backed genocide show the tenuousness and hypocrisy of a Western-led, liberal world order.