Could 50,000 Emojis Save a Life? The Digital Hypervisibility Paradox. Author: Grace Fadahunsi

On my cracked phone screen, I see a low-quality video of a Palestinian teenager asking for a ‘watermelon chain’. They, of course, don’t have any use for the red-and-green emojis, but the goal is to drive attention towards the GoFundMe in their bio. The comment section is full of well-meaning Tik Tok users – there’s over 50,000 of them, yet the aforementioned GoFundMe has yet to reach its goal. Why is this? Because they’ve been trapped in what I call the digital hypervisibility paradox: algorithms show us everything whilst engineering our powerlessness. Foucault taught us that power produces subjects, and in turn platforms have produced the perfect digital subject: witnessing suffering, performing activism, but incapable of action. This essay argues that our phones don’t just addict us; they systematically convert awareness into paralysis through three interconnected mechanisms: doomscrolling, compassion fatigue, and slacktivism. To escape, we must build democratic alternatives that prioritise collective power over engagement metrics.

Foucault (1982, p.777) argued that power doesn’t just repress, it produces subjects. His work examined ‘the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’. Digital platforms are a modern expression of this: they don’t just monitor us, they actively shape us through continuous data flows and algorithmic categorisation. The panopticon (Foucault 1975, p.195) is now in our pocket; we internalise surveillance, modifying our behaviour because we’re always potentially being watched, always performing for the algorithm. Foucault (1977, p.187) observed that disciplinary power transformed ‘the economy of visibility’, meaning that power became invisible while ‘it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them.’ Digital platforms perfect this logic: the algorithm remains opaque while users perform constant visibility, documenting suffering and performing activism under the compulsion to be seen. I argue this explains why 50,000 people can comment on a GoFundMe post without donating. We’ve internalised the algorithm’s logic: engagement equals action. The heart emoji feels like solidarity because the platform has trained us to believe visibility is power.

The question ‘what kind of subject does digital hypervisibility form?’ finds clear answers in platform design. The ideal digital subject is constantly available, by being always online and never disconnected. They are ever-consuming: scrolling, watching, clicking, they cannot be satiated. They must also be data-producing, since every well-meaning emoji generates extractable data to further the algorithm machine. To govern, Foucault (1982, p.790) wrote, ‘is to structure the possible field of action of others.’ Platforms govern by structuring what actions feel possible: clicking, sharing, scrolling, not organising, mobilising or resisting. This ideal subject experiences suffering through three interconnected mechanisms that convert awareness into paralysis. Firstly, there is doomscrolling. Defined as ‘spending excessive time online reading unpleasant news, leading to negative emotional states’ (Soraci et al., 2025), this mechanism is vicious: negativity bias makes brains prioritise negative information for survival, fear drives consumption seeking to reduce anxiety, but more negative content increases distress, compelling continued scrolling in futile attempts to calm anxiety. The platform sets the conditions (infinite scroll, algorithmic curation of tragedy), and we discipline ourselves into the behaviour. As Foucault (1982, p.790) observed, power operates ‘only over free subjects’ – we could stop scrolling, but the platform has structured our field of possible actions such that continued scrolling feels inevitable. If doomscrolling traps us in a loop of fear and helpless attention, then compassion fatigue deepens that paralysis.

Compassion fatigue (Figley 1995, cited in Dowling 2018) describes ‘an extreme state of tension and preoccupation’ with the suffering of those being helped to the degree that it can create secondary traumatic stress. Active users regularly encounter global trauma producing symptoms once limited to medical professionals. Payne and Cameron (2011, p.36) find that the more victims people see getting hurt or killed online, the more they shut their emotions, for fear of being overwhelmed. Platforms produce witnessing subjects: morally obligated to see but emotionally exhausted from seeing. Each click erodes compassion while feeding the algorithm. I find that hypervisibility without agency defines the contemporary condition: billions of views, shares, and posts generating neither policy change nor effective mobilisation. I contend that this is not accidental. Platforms profit from engagement, not action. A user doomscrolling generates more ad revenue than a user organising offline. Compassion fatigue serves capital, by ensuring that exhausted subjects click but don’t resist. You can’t change policy with emojis. When feeling becomes unbearable, performance replaces empathy. This emotional exhaustion feeds directly into slacktivism.

Finally, there is ‘slacktivism’ (Kristofferson, White and Peloza, 2014). Slacktivism is the concept of supporting causes through social media or online petitions characterised as involving very little effort or commitment. Low-cost digital actions create the appearance of engagement while actually reducing subsequent prosocial behaviour through ‘moral identity-symbolisation’ (p.1164). Token support acts relieve conscience pressure, making people less likely to take substantive action afterward (p. 1150). Platforms produce subjects who believe clicking IS activism. Foucault (1982, p.781) identified two meanings of ‘subject’: ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.’ The digital subject is both: controlled by algorithmic logic yet believing themselves to be freely expressing political identity through likes and shares. Empirical research (Schumann and Klein, 2015) cements clicktivism as a deterrent to meaningful, offline engagement – power triumphs when subjects are held ‘in a mechanism of objectification'(Foucault 1977, p.187). The algorithm doesn’t need to stop us from building movements when it has made us objects of constant visibility, governed by metrics that transform political action into commented emojis.

At the time of writing, the TikTok hashtag ‘#Palestine’ has 7.3 million posts. Ground-level documenters like Hind Khoudary and Bisan Owda gained followings providing direct visual testimony. Unprecedented documentation (Lorenz 2023) should have triggered unprecedented response. Despite billions of views, global protests, and unprecedented solidarity movements, institutional responses and policy remain largely unchanged; leading to hypervisibility without agency and awareness without power. Those 50,000 comments on the TikTok represent the terminal stage of the paralysis pipeline. We’ve been engineered to witness, react emotionally, perform digital solidarity, and scroll on, believing we participated when we merely spectated. Together, these mechanisms complete a circuit of control: we see, we feel, we perform, but we do not act.

We don’t need better algorithms, we need democratic alternatives. Platform cooperatives like Wikipedia and Fairbnb already exist. They embody cooperative ownership, by having users collectively govern platforms rather than serve as data sources, and have an open-source ethos where transparency replaces algorithmic secrecy. Such models align digital infrastructures with collective benefit instead of ad-revenue. The choice is clear: remain trapped in platforms engineering our paralysis, or collectively build alternatives. Palestinian teenagers shouldn’t have to beg for algorithmic visibility, and we shouldn’t lobotimise our emotions by reducing them to commented emojis. We must refuse sites designed to dampen our emotions and commodify suffering. Join platform cooperatives. Delete TikTok. Organise locally.