"educate yourself"
nobody knows what it means but it's provocative
By any measure, this has been a difficult few weeks to be plugged into the news cycle. Watching the immediate conflict between Israel and Gaza develop day-by-day has been horrendous. The Hamas attack was vile, and the Israeli government’s swift, disproportionate and inhumane rebuttal has been absolutely terrifying. This is not a platform on which I will engage in debate about human rights or the specifics of what qualifies as ethnic cleansing or an open-air prison — if you are keen for that discussion, please find it elsewhere.
Primarily, I’ve been thinking about the people of Gaza who have lost their families, friends and homes and suffer continuously as geopolitical chess pieces, as symbols of a government they didn’t vote for and an ideology they don’t believe in. Before reading any further, please consider donating medical aid to Palestinians, which will hopefully reach them once Israel agrees to open a humanitarian corridor. I cannot stress enough the seriousness of the situation; please donate if you feel able.
Something that has brought a glimmer of hope to an otherwise awful digital experience of this conflict is how Tiktok has been utilised to educate, and how effective this education appears to has been. Grassroots videos from those with expertise in the area, local Palestinians and the diaspora have helped contextualise the contention and provided eye-witness updates of what’s happening on the ground. Twitter, once a go-to source for up-to-date information — notably during the Arab Spring of the early 2010s — has proven itself to be unreliable in 2023. Fake news proliferated over the past two weeks, with people sharing old videos claiming they were recent, and pro-Zionist accounts sharing photos of injured children, allegedly Israelis, who turned out to be young Palestinians. In contrast, when weeding out the truth in what is often described as a complex topic, Tiktok has proved incredibly valuable in making the conflict easier to understand and in humanising those who are suffering. One of my friends told me that watching the internet rally and organise across social media lately reminded her of how fandoms operate — the Swiftie, Army or Barb mobilisation has become a model for online political activism, born from the K-Pop fans’ success in disrupting a 2020 Trump rally. It’s been really heartwarming to see these information-sharing and mobilising social models used for good once again.
When I’ve posted about Israel and Gaza over the past two weeks, I’ve had a many replies from people across the spectrum of opinion — many positive, but many negative too. It’s to be expected, especially in those initial days when people were most angry and afraid. The main critique that has been levelled at me is “educate yourself” — a phrase which I now realise has taken on a secondary meaning since the surge of awareness around BLM in 2020 and the social media reckoning that followed. As I mentioned, the discourse has fortunately evolved past pastel infographics about racism and war crimes, however it seems that there is a vocabulary hangover.
We’re now at an interesting crossroads where we don’t know if we want online creators to speak about current affairs, or share their stance on ethical or political issues. “Educate yourself” has been levelled at me to ask me to shut up, and it’s also been used to ask me to say more. “Proud of you for educating yourself!” said one person, as though I’d been nothing but a walking billboard since the day I started posting. “Educate yourself” means so much more than I realised, especially now it’s easier than ever to listen and learn.
What does it mean to educate yourself around difficult current affairs issues in 2023? Is it all for the polished, thought-out micro-response that’s somewhat expected if you update your profile regularly? Or is the tide turning on that too? And ultimately, is this the same expectation we’d secretly placed on our friends and family in the past, hoping their baseline knowledge would lead them out of a place of apathy and hopefully to the same conclusion we had already reached ourselves?
I’m not an expert in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I’m also not ignorant to the situation or the wider context of what’s happening. I have a degree in Asian and African history where we studied the precolonial and colonial Middle East, and I was brought up as a Quaker, a Christian denomination known for their pacifist principles and involvement in international conflict resolution. On a more fundamental level, I also read the news — which is for some reason perceived as unusual for online creators. I feel comfortable enough in my knowledge to have spoken about Israel and Palestine many times in the past, and to continue to speak about it today.
I’ve had my fair share of backlash for sharing my thoughts on topics some believe are out of my lane. Over time I’ve grown more secure in what I know, what I don’t know and when I should comment. That confidence comes from my education, the people I’ve met and the experiences they’ve shared with me. My access to degree-level resources gave me a head start (thank you SOAS,) and years on, I’m really glad to see a levelling of the playing field; a new point of access through social media, helping people who might not have had this available to them previously to find their voice. It’s easier than ever to learn — which of course brings the risk that someone will parrot the first piece of non-verified, emotionally-driven content they discover — but also creates the potential for people to absorb a lot of high-quality information faster than was possible before, helping them craft a thoughtful take on current events.
All this to say — I hope this phrase doesn’t fully morph into social media argot. It is genuinely important to read up on ethical issues you don’t understand, and to hold your tongue when you don’t yet know enough to share confidently, or risk sharing with too much emotional influence. Asking people to learn more about a topic is more than understandable, but I hope we make a conscious decision to avoid “educate yourself” becoming an accusation, a veiled silencer. I don’t mind hearing it, but I worry about the less confident person who winds up not saying anything again after receiving this multiple times in their DMs and comments sections. The most important thing in these situations is that people feel comfortable leaning in to learn, and I would love if we could foster a digital environment that made this possible.