War as Short Form Content

In the digital age, how does war reporting change?

When news of the war in the Gulf broke, I saw it on Instagram. A video popped up on my feed; it was filmed vertically, with dramatic music and a voiceover explaining what had happened. And just about thirty seconds later, it was over.

My first instinct (which I find both uncomfortable and a little embarrassing) was to keep scrolling like I always do on the app. But I stopped for a moment because it felt so strange that after watching a video about a war, my reaction was to treat it like any other post. 

Only a few minutes earlier, my feed had been full of Reading Week posts. But then suddenly, those posts had been replaced by updates about a major conflict, though nothing about the format changed. Instagram presented both in the same way: short videos with background music, with the option to swipe away in one tap. The scale of the event flattened; the global significance appeared in the same stream and same form as everyday posts.

Why have we become so comfortable consuming global events as if they’re highlight reels? Whether we admit it or not, this is how many of us first hear about major world events. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts have become one of the main ways people encounter news, myself included. In some ways, it makes a lot of sense. These platforms are fast, engaging, and effortless to consume, with algorithms that reward whatever keeps people watching — and more importantly, scrolling. They also don’t come with a hefty price tag that a news subscription entails. 

Because this environment makes it so easy to consume news, everything starts to blend into the rest of the feed: flashy, easily digestible, compressed stories. The problem isn’t that people get their news from social media. The issue is that short-form platforms push this compression much further than it should go, and we hardly notice. As clips get shorter, the space for nuance shrinks with them, and complexity becomes the first casualty. Geopolitical events that have developed over decades are condensed into quick explanations designed to hold attention for just long enough, before the next video appears.

At an international university, conversations about what's going on in the world happen regularly. Students bring different perspectives and personal experiences into chats about politics and conflict, which makes those conversations richer and more nuanced. But I’ve started to notice how often they begin (and sometimes end) with a clip someone saw online.

It seems that a single video becomes the starting point for an opinion, which is okay, until the 30-second explanation becomes one’s entire understanding of an issue. It's easy not to realise how comfortable we've become with this way of consuming information. Watching one or two clips often feels like enough to participate in a conversation, and we scroll past the information rather than sit with it. The algorithm, of course, isn’t built to reward depth or accuracy. It rewards engagement. The stories that spread the fastest are usually the ones that are dramatic, emotional, and easy to understand.

And while war is certainly dramatic and emotional, it is also layered with decades of tension, decisions, alliances, and historical context. When those realities are squeezed into a short clip designed to stop someone in the midst of their doom scroll, most of that complexity disappears.

This doesn’t mean short-form media is useless. In many cases, it acts as a gateway. An interesting clip can spark curiosity or draw attention to stories that traditional media might overlook. But a gateway only works if people actually walk through it, and too often we don’t.

Instead, the clip becomes the endpoint. We watch the summary, feel briefly informed, maybe even enough to mention it to a friend later, and then move on to the next post or big thing. The result is an illusion of understanding without the effort of actually building it.

That illusion matters. Student discourse is shaped in this very environment. When information that we’re so prone to consume and share is designed around speed and virality, engagement and critical thinking become harder to sustain. With this, complex events risk being reduced to just another piece of content. But war is not content, and conflict is not a trend cycle.

Short-form news itself isn’t inherently good or bad. The more important question is why we’ve come to accept it defining the limits of our attention. Because the events unfolding on our screens deserve far more than 30 seconds of our attention

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons