Yesterday I retweeted the picture of Bayyan Abu Khammash, the 18 months baby killed in Gaza the day before. The picture transpired to be wrong, of a different baby, so deleted the twit. But this opens up question of circulating pictures of casualties and sufferings.
My general rule is not to tweet/retweet pictures of wounded/dead. Not only it's not always possible to verify them, they are sensationalist and reduce human suffering to an image, to a message. That seems to me wrong.
But when children die or get hurt, and when you have children yourself, its all but impossible not to react from a visceral place of empathy/despair/outrage. So we retweet and circulate images, that may have the effeect of reducing human pain to abstracted politics
When we need to keep track of the real people. The real image of Bayyan is apparently here. instagram.com/p/BmSgNr-AJyb/…
