On the 7th of December 2024, Damascus was up all night having a special kind of party.
At 3 a.m., my siblings were chatting on WhatsApp, caught between fear and excitement. They shared updates, piecing together what was happening in their Damascus neighbourhood. A family caught in the middle; disconnected from the networks that bound each side. They, being far from the street, and I, being in another country far from home, had no clear sense of what was unfolding, only fragments of information.
Shooting was everywhere, they told me, and my sister’s children couldn’t sleep. At first, it sounded like fighting, but soon the shots turned skyward. After all, 3 a.m. was a moment of celebration. Yet, for the children, this liberation was terrifying.
Like many others, we may never truly know what happened in the streets that night. Instead, we will tell the stories we heard, confined within the four walls of our homes.
The next day, I called my younger sister to ask about the news. She said, “Syrians have an error in their programming, and they’re acting accordingly.” I found the phrasing amusing; like a flawed code causing a tool to malfunction, misinterpret tasks, and disrupt outcomes. This “error” seemed to define us. It was as if something was perpetually loading… until, suddenly, everything updated at once.
My elder sister, on the other hand, faced an existential crisis. Since the revolution began, she had no reliable source to verify any of the claims she heard; all narratives were echoed without substantiation. Beyond the reality of our own village, which was attacked in 2015 in a tragic event that killed 50 civilians and led to the kidnapping of others, she did not have information about the newcomers or anything that could assure her that everything would be fine. When the situation shifted, this lack of reliable information remained the same: she found herself without any firm ground to stand on. Meanwhile, my mother suspended her emotions, fearing her mind might not withstand the rapid changes. She belonged to a generation that had sacrificed a future for the sake of artificial safety, and now a younger generation was demanding change. Guilt lingered; the weight of having once surrendered was now clashing with the reality of transformation. Memories and confusion hovered in the silence.
In his room, my only brother sat glued to a small screen, charging it with a battery, devouring every piece of information. In the morning, he would form one opinion, only to adopt another by evening. A main concern for them all was: would the electricity situation improve with this transitional government or not?
Being far from my family, my concerns revolved around the uncertainties of the new situation. I was no stranger to uncertainty; it had been the theme of our lives for fourteen years. But for the diaspora, tied to this geographic point called home, uncertainty mingled with hopelessness, instilling the sense that, as individuals, we mattered little and could do even less to change the realities on the ground. At least, that’s how I felt.
But then came the surge of activity on social media platforms, with an explosion of content shared after the 8th of December. From that very first day, I felt overwhelmed, yet I was also tempted to see what was going on. The semi-active small network I followed on Instagram suddenly became extremely active. All the Syrian members of this network started posting or reposting every half hour.
Celebration videos from all around Syria appeared alongside reports of looting and shootings. A significant amount of sectarian sentiment surfaced, accompanied by numerous authoritarian acts silencing some groups while praising others for different reasons. It was not a dialogue in the traditional sense; rather, individuals responded to one another’s posts. The comment sections quickly devolved into a battleground of accusations… “Now you are talking? We have not heard from you for the past fourteen years”, or “don’t give your opinion from your warm apartment in Berlin”. Amidst this, broader issues began to surface. A member of the new administration in Syria made a statement regarding the role of women in society. This statement ignited a war on social media between so many camps, one protesting against him and one reminding us that we are not Switzerland; one agreeing with him and one claiming that his statement was misinterpreted. Everyone had something to say. Since then, additional issues have continued to emerge, with many users engaging in ongoing disputes in comment sections or posting opinion videos on topics that appear to be gaining traction in the online sphere.
It felt like smoke billowing from a fire…thick, disorienting, impossible to trace to a single source. Besides these events, some individuals rushed to share statements about their feelings and their stance over the past fourteen years, while others shared their fears. Many were attempting to help survivors of detention or the families of the missing by re-sharing content about newly opened prisons or lists of detainees’ names.
Misinformation and disinformation spread just as fast as fact-checks… sometimes faster, and even news outlets misattributed content. The hunger to speak out was insatiable, yet what emerged was chaotic, raw, and sometimes cruel.
I felt like I was witnessing a hungry crowd…desperate to say something, yet so starved that what came out of their collective mouths was random, disorganised, and, at times, deeply hurtful.
It felt like more than just the euphoria of celebration; it seemed like a wave of online hysteria.
This digital madness echoes researchers like Sandra González-Bailón’s (2017) descriptions of how social media algorithms shape information flow, creating echo chambers and amplifying polarisation. Of course, social media has provided an opportunity for ordinary individuals without institutional power to share their experiences of injustice and make their voices heard. It has enabled human rights organisations to document violations and support claims for accountability. Social media has also amplified stories from marginalised communities that would otherwise remain inaccessible to the outside world.
However, these opportunities come with significant risks, as is currently evident in the context of Syria. Platforms meant to inform can instead distort, as seen in the 2021 Rohingya lawsuit against Meta, where Facebook’s negligence allegedly fueled violence through unchecked hate speech (Milmo, 2021). Syria is no exception; before the fall of Assad, pro-regime accounts incited violence, while disinformation deepened divides. The situation worsened after the fall of the regime. Social media doesn’t just document history; it warps it, leaving us in a haze, struggling to breathe.
Social media, by fostering unreflective expression and reactionary discourse, might be seen as a digital arena where the banality of evil spreads quickly.[1]
Silence…
Imagine you are at the station, waiting for the train, and all of a sudden you have the ability to listen to the unspoken thoughts of people around you. For a few moments, you might appreciate the new talent, but then your brain might wish for something else. This is how this felt.
People who were silenced for 54 years are now tasting new flavours of meanings and thoughts. I found this sudden shift in online dynamics worth a moment of reflection. It was hard for me to say something about silence when people want to experience themselves for the first time in years. It is perhaps also ironic that I want to occupy a space to tell people to give up their space.
Yet, when I call for silence, it is not to suppress speech, but to invite thinking. To take responsibility for our words and actions. For too long, Syrians have been deprived of true dialogue; we barely know each other. In many ways, social media is that space of conversation today. But that doesn’t mean we must now use digital space for destruction. Perhaps the situation is more complex than we wish to admit. Perhaps understanding it is like assembling a puzzle whose pieces do not always fit as expected.
In the web of my brain, a session from a conference I attended in September 2024 surfaced.[2] The session was about theorising silent thoughtfulness. I remember that I was bothered by the empty space created when we remain silent and who could potentially take advantage of and fill that space. The Speaker clarified that silence is not about leaving an empty space; rather, it is an act that allows us to recognise what truly matters (Hansen 2024).
Sometimes we have to ask ourselves: What are we doing when we contribute to this noise? What space are we occupying? What messages are we amplifying? And what voices are we drowning out in the process?
The pain of being rejected by your own homeland, not only once but twice, is not easily put into words. I held onto the dream of a Syria transformed through transitional justice, justice without revenge. It was a beautiful, fragile hope.
But the mass killing this March shattered that illusion. It struck like a slap in the face. The violence now unfolding against yet another community in Syria felt like a blow to the chest. I found myself filled with anger, demanding others to shut up; not out loud, but in my thoughts, in my imagination.
If we paused for a minute of silence for every innocent soul taken in Syria from the 1980s until this very moment, we would need more than 120,000 minutes. That kind of silence would teach us something: how to stop contributing to unnecessary violence, how to demand justice not only with words, but with presence and responsibility. I ask you (dear reader) to take your time to think carefully about the words you use and the narratives you shape.
I want to celebrate freedom and step into a new Syria. I want to express myself with wild abandon. And yet, I choose to stay silent…
Still, perhaps every plan I make must remain postponed until the families of the missing and the survivors of forced disappearance receive the answers they seek, until their demands for justice are met on their own terms. They deserve our silence when they tell their stories. Maybe only after a genuine transitional justice process is set in motion which not only addresses the old crimes and injustices but also the current ones. Maybe only after electricity and water finally reach those still waiting. Perhaps only when people can finally feel that all the struggle was worth it…when we can walk the streets without looking over our shoulders, write without our pens trembling, and speak without our voices carrying the weight of fear.
We have a responsibility to be silent when silence is needed; to create space for those whose voices must be heard. We also bear the responsibility of rejecting the dominance of content that provokes hostility, hatred, or violence, the kind that fuels conflicts with no purpose.
[1] In this realm, perhaps it is thoughtlessness, to echo Hannah Arendt (1963), which allows evil to flourish.
[2] Ejvind Hansen, a philosopher, presented a talk titled “Theorizing Silent Thoughtfulness as Normative Demand” at the Democracy & Digital Citizenship conference 2024.
References
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.
González-Bailón, S. (2017). Decoding the Social World. Data Science and the Unintended Consequences of Communication, Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Hansen, E. (2022). The fourth estate operating by means of silencing. Journalism, 25(1), 141-157. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849221132601
Heidegger, M. (1971). The Way to Language. In P. Hertz (Ed.), On the Way to Language (pp. 111-138). New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology. Edited by William Lovitt, Harper & Row New York, 1977
Milmo, Dan (2021). Rohingya sue Facebook for £150bn over Myanmar genocide, The Guardian, Available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-sue-facebook-myanmar-genocide-us-uk-legal-action-social-media-violence
The author thanks colleagues and dear friends Meg John, who proposed and created Coffee Analogy by cutting and pasting magazine papers, and Kseniia Goniaeva, who edited the visuals and designed the layouts for this piece.
