Digital bystanders to genocide: Moral expectations, social media, and passive outrage online

Bystanders are observers. They are neither perpetrators nor victims. And yet, bystanders are an important part of history. In contemporary society, the act of standing by increasingly takes place online, rewriting the laws of what it means to ‘see’ atrocity crimes. This study seeks to explore digital bystandership through the lens of genocide. It begins by taking the term ‘digital bystander’ out of colloquial discourse about online behaviour and recontextualizing it in the domain of genocide. Next, social media data regarding the Uyghur genocide in China was collected from Twitter and analysed using digital text analysis; a model of digital bystander behaviour was thus created. The model is a matrix categorizing digital bystander actions and emotions along intersecting spectrums. The results are discussed in light of technomoral change theory, with the ultimate conclusion that bystandership has not undergone significant moral change in the digital age; rather, it has been mediatized.