Abstract

This study examines war testimony in the platform era, with particular attention to the interrelated dynamics of 
witnessing, authenticity, and misinformation within digitally mediated environments. It argues that social media 
platforms have fundamentally reshaped the conditions under which armed conflicts are observed, narrated, and 
interpreted by compressing time and space while privileging immediacy, circulation speed, and virality over 
provenance and verification. In this context, witnessing is no longer confined to physical proximity to conflict 
zones but is instead distributed across networked infrastructures that enable remote, mediated, and participatory 
forms of observation. However, this transformation destabilizes traditional epistemic categories, as authenticity 
becomes increasingly contested and detached from verifiable truth, while misinformation proliferates through 
fabrication, miscaptioning, contextual fragmentation, and synthetic media such as deepfakes. The paper further 
explores how platform affordances, algorithmic amplification, and audience dynamics contribute to epistemic 
uncertainty, shaping how war narratives are produced, consumed, and evaluated. It highlights the role of trust 
signals, metadata, and provenance tracking as emerging mechanisms for assessing credibility, while also noting 
their limitations in addressing large-scale information disorder. Drawing on case studies from contemporary 
conflicts, including Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza, the study demonstrates how platform-mediated witnessing 
influences public perception, political urgency, and humanitarian response. Ultimately, it contends that war 
testimony in the digital age operates within a contested informational ecosystem where authenticity, verification, 
and ethical responsibility remain unresolved but essential concerns. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need 
for interdisciplinary frameworks that integrate media studies, information science, and ethics to foster more 
trustworthy systems of digital witnessing.