Splitting Genocide

I planned my wedding during a genocide. My partner and I got engaged on April 27, 2024, 203 days into Israel's latest attempt to destroy the Palestinian people across the sea. It was the happiest day of my life.

I loved planning our wedding. It's something I always dreamed of and I dove headlong into the endless advice and inspiration online. I scrolled from “5 things I wish I knew before my wedding” videos to updates on which hospital had been attacked now: al-Awda, al-Shifa, Nasser, Al-Aqsa, the Indonesian.

We picked out a venue, a florist, a caterer. Food became progressively scarcer in Gaza as Israel tightened their blockade of aid trucks at the borders.

Famine set in. We got married.

My algorithm had become a disturbing mix of wedding content and genocide coverage. Social media has made it easy to watch this atrocity unfold in real time—and also very easy to look away. If you don't want to know what's going on, you don't have to. Haven't you noticed how if you stop, even for a day, interacting with content about Gaza, it will stop showing you? Haven't you come across that blurred-out content and decided whether or not to hit the “show me anyway” button? I've hit that button, gotten mired in those feelings of outrage and horror and despair and fear and disgust and rage and utter overwhelm. I scroll to the next video in pursuit of something like regulation. It's a video about wedding hair and makeup. I watch.

The algorithm picks up on how we choose to engage or not engage, reflecting something back about us. As I scroll through my own feed, I fail to reconcile how this happiest chapter of my personal life could possibly coexist with such global suffering. I reckon with this split mirrored back to me by my phone screen.

What I'm describing is, I think, particularly prevalent for white

women (like myself). Not everyone's algorithm reflects the same defensive structure. For people of color and other groups who have no choice but to engage because what is happening is