War Testimony in the Platform Era: Witnessing, Authenticity, and Misinformation

Mutoni Uwase N.

Faculty of Business and Management Kampala International University Uganda

                                                                   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.

Keywords: War testimony; Digital witnessing; Authenticity; Misinformation; and Social media platforms.

CITE AS: Mutoni Uwase N. (2026). War Testimony in the Platform Era: Witnessing, Authenticity, and Misinformation. NEWPORT INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LAW, COMMUNICATION AND LANGUAGES, 6(2):117-121
https://doi.org/10.59298/NIJLCL/2026/6.2.117121