Digital Solidarity and Online Protest: A Sociological Study of Global Youth Mobilization during the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Abstract

The Israel-Palestine conflict, which has been epidurally reinforced after the occurrences of October 7, 2023, set the stage of a new era of digital solidarity activism among young people worldwide. The paper is a qualitative investigation of the youth between the ages of 18-30 years by analyzing their online protest, solidarity actions, and counter-narrative production on the large social media networks, namely Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and Tik Tok, in direct reaction to the developing conflict. Based on interpretivist epistemological approach and using digital ethnography with qualitative content analysis, researchers study the meaning, motivation, discursive tactics and perceived sociopolitical implications of youth-led digital activism. Instead of getting human participants to take part, the study utilizes around 100 publicly available posts, hashtags, comment threads, solidarity campaigns, and artefacts in visual media that circulated through the three platforms throughout the conflict period to sample the most relevant and a thematic variety of posts. Thematic analysis of the gathered digital data provides four intersecting themes, namely construction of global moral witnessing as a type of political action, creation and distribution of counter-hegemonic discourse that disrupts mainstream media frames, the use of digital aesthetics, such as memes, infographics, and images of solidarity, as a tool of political persuasion, and experience and strategy of circumventing algorithmic censorship and platform governance. It is suggested in the study that global youth digital solidarity is not a performative alternative to political engagement nor an unconditionally transformative process, but a complicated, structurally determined and symbolically meaningful type of political agency that transform the terrain of transnational youth politics in the digital era. The conclusions have significant implications to sociology of digital activism, platform governance research, and the research of transnational youth politics in a time of increasingly rapid geopolitical crisis.

Keywords: Digital solidarity, online protest, Global Youth mobilization, Israel-Palestine conflict, digital ethnography, qualitative content analysis, thematic analysis, social media activism, algorithmic censorship, counter-narrative, connective action, transnational youth politics, platform governance, political witnessing.