Disrupting the Narrative

https://www.neme.org/projects/disrupting-the-narrative

Concept

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in.¹

Social media platforms, once considered as tools of spreading and applying democratic values, are now battleground spaces upon which algorithmic interests routinely undermine commonly accepted civil norms. While early scholarship praised the capacity of platforms to activate movements like the Arab Spring,² emerging research reveals a darker trajectory where the use of networked technologies is used to sabotage elections, instigate violence, fragment, and destroy shared epistemic foundations.³

Social media has restructured communication, and enabled universal connectivity, democratisation of information, and political activism, but their instantaneous, ungoverned incursion into international politics has demonstrated system vulnerabilities within democratic government, laws, and societal ethics. Twitter/X, Truth Social, and Facebook have emerged as theatres for political supremacy confrontations in which algorithmic amplification, deception, and polarised rhetoric disintegrate democratic integrity and reality-based inquiry. This project aims to critically examine the political, legal, and ethical traps of social media, taking into account their use towards electoral meddling, war, failed content moderation, and erosion of public trust. Case studies of the 2016, 2020, and 2024 American elections and the ongoing wars in Ukraine, and Gaza starkly present these hurdles.

Social media platforms’ dependence upon micro-targeting advertising produces perverse incentives to segregate users into adversarial groups of identity, but also generates an additional carbon footprint. Internal research on Facebook, disclosed in 2021, uncovered that 64% of political anger-based groups showed greater user retention (The Wall Street Journal, 2021). Facebook’s “outrage economy” discussed by Daniel Harvey using William J. Brady’s research⁴ is an economy for the sale and trade of discourse that has converted civic engagement into performative rage.

This project critically examines how social media platforms, as unregulated transnational actors, have consistently undermined democratic governance, avoided legal accountability, and degenerated ethical norms in political discourse. To contextualise the project examples from the 2016–2024 U.S. elections, the Gaza war (2023–present), and global disinformation campaigns, are used. This analysis demonstrates how platforms like X (Twitter), Truth Social, and Facebook use algorithmic architectures to amplify polarisation, destabilise institutions, and avoid legal accountability.

Utilising political theory, computational sociology, and international law, Disrupting the Narrative aims to showcase artists who interrogate the current crisis and advocate for reformulating platform governance in interdisciplinary terms with democratic resilience taking precedence over corporate profits.

Context

By 2020, disinformation spread via social media had become a very serious threat as rumours about voter fraud, amplified by Donald Trump and his supporters on Twitter and Truth Social, spread distrust among electoral systems. Researchers found that election disinformation on Twitter had six times more engagement than factual content.⁵ The January 6 2021 Capitol riot is symptomatic of real-world consequences as rioters coordinated mainly through social media platforms. Millions of posts are published on a daily basis. On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, disinformation is detected through algorithms that are faulty in detecting misinformation when nuanced language, cultural context, and implicit meaning are used, whilst most algorithms become even more flawed in the case of images, videos, and livestreams.⁶

The Israel-Gaza war further exposed social media’s role in shaping conflict narratives. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused platforms like Instagram and Twitter/X of systemic bias, citing instances of suppressing content and disproportionate removal of posts documenting Israeli military actions.⁷ Meanwhile, pro-Israeli accounts often overwhelm algorithmic recommendations, reflecting platform policies that critics argue privilege state-aligned narratives.⁸ “Human Rights Watch identified six key patterns of censorship [Against Palestinians], each recurring in at least 100 instances: content removals, suspension or deletion of accounts, inability to engage with content, inability to follow or tag accounts, restrictions on the use of features such as Instagram/Facebook Live, and “shadow banning,” a term denoting a significant decrease in the visibility of an individual’s posts, stories, or account without notification. In over 300 cases, users were unable to appeal content or account removal because the appeal mechanism malfunctioned, leaving them with no effective access to a remedy.”⁹

Social media’s role towards the Gaza war has revealed how platforms magnify asymmetrical power relations. Pro-Palestinian activists monitored systemic bias in Meta content moderation: posts containing “Palestine” or “genocide” were five times more likely to be labelled as “terrorist content” than comparable Hebrew-language posts.¹⁰ Meanwhile, AI-generated photos of Israeli victims, many traced to government-linked troll farms, flooded X’s trending topics, garnering 1.2 billion impressions in 2024.

Platforms’ reaction to the Gaza war shows there are irreconcilable contradictions between free speech and prevention of harm. The Intercept published that “media users around the world have reported the inexplicable disappearance of posts, comments, hashtags, and entire accounts — even though they did not seem to violate any rules” and that an estimated 2.3 million posts documenting civilian killings were removed.^{11 12}

These dynamics fit into theoretical structures of “algorithmic discrimination,”¹³ and “algorithmic oppression”¹⁴ where automated systems mute the already silenced voices while promoting state propaganda. The material consequences are telling as in March 2024, a viral X post falsely alleging UNRWA workers were terrorists led to a $400 million aid cut that worsened famine conditions in Gaza.¹⁵

The 2024 US presidential election witnessed unprecedented utilisation of generative AI tools to manipulate voter perceptions. Deepfake videos of Joe Biden “freezing” up during speeches went viral on X and Truth Social, accruing 28 million views before being debunked by the Stanford Internet Observatory, a multidisciplinary program for the study of abuse in information technologies, with a focus on social media, established in 2019.

Algorithms in the X platform, redesigned under Elon Musk’s leadership after his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, now prioritise posts from paying users rather than verified users, and enable far-right accounts to dominate discussion by promoting conspiracy theories. The result, according to the Pew Research Centre,¹⁶ is a fractured information environment. Partisan influencers promoted the videos, exploiting X’s “Community Notes” system—a crowd-sourced fact-checking feature—that failed to flag 63% of AI-generated misinformation according to The Washington Post. Elon Musk’s takeover was a watershed moment for platform ethics. Musk reinstated 62,000 accounts that had been previously banned for hate speech, including white supremacist and QAnon influencer accounts.¹⁷ Statistics indicate that antisemitic and Islamophobic content rose by 187% after Musk took over, with advertisers abandoning ship as X’s valuation dropped by 71% according to the Bloomberg website.

The “raw speech” experiment reveals the fallacy of libertarian digital utopianism. Unconstrained, platforms become megaphones for radicalisation, like the 2024 “Great Replacement” Tennessee rally, where every aspect of the event was coordinated through X hashtags.¹⁸

Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act, protected platforms from liability for user posting, and has enabled harmful posts on social media platforms. Though intended to promote innovation, it has permitted platforms like Meta and Twitter/X to avoid responsibility for algorithmic amplification of hate speech—a factor which some academics connect to violence in Myanmar against Rohingya.¹⁹ Likewise, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter/X and subsequent relaxing of moderation guidelines have raised questions about the platform’s role as host and amplifier of alt-right extremist ideologies. This phenomenon was discussed in depth by Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism,” whereby platforms commodify user attention by favouring sensationalist content.²⁰

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), enacted in 2023, is a major regulatory shift, mandating transparency in content moderation and risk assessments. However, enforcement remains inconsistent, and platforms often lack the resources to monitor non-English content effectively. This shortage of moderators for non-English posts was exploited during the Gaza conflict to spread Islamophobic rhetoric.²¹

Like in the “Two Minutes Hate” daily ritual depicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, social media is purposely or inadvertently radicalising its users and our societies which prompted Regina Lawrence to ask if we have “become more polarised as more sources of partisan media emerged, or was it the other way around?”²²

Artists

Alexia Achilleos, Hasan Elahi, Ben Grosser, Joana Moll

Venue

NeMe Arts Centre, Corner of Ellados and Enoseos streets, 3041 Limassol, Cyprus

Programme

• Opening: Friday, 9 January 2026, 19:00-21:00.
• Seminar: Saturday, 10 January 2026, 19:00.
• Exhibition Duration: 9 January – 6 February 2026.
  • Exhibition Opening days/times: Tuesday-Friday, 17:30-20:30.

Funding

This project has been partially funded by the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Cyprus Deputy Ministry cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.