Platformized Conflict Visibility: A Conceptual Research Note on Digital War Coverage and the Lebanon-Israel Conflict

This working paper argues that contemporary conflict coverage should be studied not only as a question of bias, quantity, or editorial position, but as a hierarchy of visibility produced across institutional media routines, platform infrastructures, geopolitical attention, and emotional legibility. Using Lebanon-Israel conflict episodes since October 2023 as a motivating case, the paper defines platformized conflict visibility as the uneven process through which some wars, victims, geographies, and explanations become searchable, memorable, shareable, and politically intelligible, while others remain temporary, fragmented, or peripheral. The paper proposes six dimensions for analyzing conflict visibility: volume, duration, framing depth, humanization, attribution of responsibility, and platform afterlife. It also outlines methodological implications for future doctoral research without disclosing a complete empirical design. The contribution is conceptual: it offers a vocabulary for studying unequal visibility in digital conflict coverage and for moving beyond narrow debates about whether a conflict is merely covered or ignored.

Note: This is a conceptual working paper. It does not reproduce the full doctoral research proposal, sampling design, or unpublished empirical material