Dissolving borders through the Insta sphere: Alternative media’s role in influencing political engagement among the MENA diaspora

By Douaa Dridi | OMC 2025

Photo by Shutter Speed on Unsplash

Digitally mediated diasporic experiences offer yet another lens on the convoluted notion of the diaspora. Already conceptualised as a “flying” construct, to repurpose Edward Said’s theory, diaspora ‘instead of becoming domesticated’ has flared up to continuously restate and reaffirm its ‘own inherent tensions’. Traveling between disciplines, historical periods, geographies, and communities, the term has gradually given way to a diverse scholarship that seems to only grow further as the digital space emerges as a new site for diasporic encounters. Online, understandings of displacement and belonging are infused with new meanings, and experiences of political expression hinge upon a constant adaptation to the political climate in the origin and host country, the medium of articulation, and the policies of big tech companies. Strategically navigating cyberspace, diasporas of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) origin have recently found in Instagram a cosmopolitan site of ‘participation, resistance and solidarity’.

Instagram as a political space 

In its multifaceted consequences – democratic transition, consolidation of dictatorships, civil wars – the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 inaugurated the official technopolitical turn in Arabic-speaking countries, and by extension among the diasporas from the region. The social network became the site for the articulations of political grievances, aspirations and celebrations. Having thus been infused with the conviction that the ‘decentralized structure of digital networks’ is pivotal in driving national, regional and international engagement, and being exposed to the quotidian uses of the social network in maintaining transnational relations with the home country, the MENA diasporas’ patterns of online engagement present an inexhaustible source of scholarly exploration. 

The social network is replete with diverse forms of digital communication, including but not limited to, networking sites, micro-blogging and video-sharing mediums. Alternative media – defined here as media that deviates from mainstream and corporate media – has, increasingly, found in Instagram a dynamic space for multimodal content and an open community for multilingual and multinational reach. Similarly to other platforms, Instagram as a medium generates specific norms of online engagement that conform to its features. Launched in 2010 and now part of Meta, Instagram’s audiovisual focus allows for image-based content – or spams – and videos,  also known in the Insta jargon as reels. The stories’ feature with its ephemeral quality is considered the most challenging set of data to compile and analyse on the platform, since a story is only visible for 24 hours. 

The wake of 7 October 2023, Hamas-led retaliation and the subsequent escalation of violence on Palestine has focused analytical attention on the Insta sphere, especially in relation to the currently ongoing politicisation of the platform. On Instagram, politicians and major broadcasters are capitalising on the short-form video/text binary to gain popularity among a young audience largely known for their “digital first” mentality, a proclivity towards news bites, and the routine practice of scrolling and swiping.  However, for Insta users, it is not high-level figures or big companies that matter.

From Palestine, accounts chronicling events as they unfold have turned the political, academic and general public attention towards this eyewitness content format. “Raw, selfie-style videos” gave way to figures whose voices resonate across borders. From the ground, openings such as ‘it’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m still alive’; ‘Salam everyone. It’s Ezzedine Lulu, a 6th year medical student from Gaza city’ exposed that outside of Gaza, independent journalism is scant. 

Concomitant to this unfiltered coverage of events by what can be dubbed “user-war influencers”, infographics disseminated by accounts with a self-proclaimed educational objective are also reframing geopolitical narratives on the MENA region. Combining aesthetics with data grounded in cited sources, networks of content creators are creatively debunking decades of dis/misinformation and propaganda and shaping global understandings of conflicts within the region. @sudansolidaritycollective, led by a collective of volunteers based in Tkaronto; @letstalkpalestine, bringing together a multilingual platform of creators posting in 7 languages; @humantiproject prioritising ‘grassroots political advocacy’, among other accounts are combining historical and legal analyses of major incidents with activism and humanitarian objectives (call to action, fundraising, petitioning activities) in a visually homogeneous, textually concise, and bibliographically sourced swipeable posts.  

Renegotiating the Insta sphere among the diasporas 

At the intersection of war photography, citizen journalism, and influencer culture, the instant and interactive mediatisation of the home region has created disjunctures between location, imagination and identity. The war on Palestine, the Syrian transition, clashes in Sudan and the rising derivatives of authoritarianism in Tunisia are no longer distant political events, but ones in which the diasporas are immersed in spite of national origin. Connectivity online seems to blur racial, ethnic and national markers so much that a comprehensive understanding of the novel configurations of participation and identification are occasioning the exigency to examine the North African and Middle Eastern diaspora’s patterns of virtual responses within this network of interactions. 

When approaching migrant communities, there exists a consensus on the adoption of an ethnic or national approach that avoids the aggregation of groups with seemingly similar markers of identity – linguistic, regional or historical – into one cluster. This strategy is prominent in the work of researchers focused on the MENA region who contend that communities were/are driven by distinct motivations to migrate, have their origins in singular historical and contemporary developments and are received in the host states differently occasioning the need for separate studies that have the potential – when comparatively approached – to inform more apt and inclusive frameworks for the politics surrounding them. 

Yet, deep-dives into interactions online through digital ethnography have engendered new considerations. On the one hand, diasporas in their heterogeneity are navigating a comparable space of political engagement that is characterised by finding refuge in independent media networks while resisting (self)-censorship – informed either by Meta’s policies of shadow banning or the overall crackdown on, primarily Palestine-related, solidarity movements in Western host countries.

On the other hand, the participatory and democratic nature of the Insta sphere provides an open data source to draw and synthesise insights on the responses to content of political nature on the region. Among the diasporas thus, the region is no longer constructed or mediated as a place of origin, but as a point of reference around which multiple and contradictory diasporic groups interact. Nation-state borders are increasingly dissolving in the digital sphere that a repurposing of postcolonial sociologist Brah’s consideration of the diaspora space as ‘the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of “us” and “them” are contested’ seems to capture the ‘twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation’.

Forms of popular communication have rendered the (hybrid) Diasporic Public Sphere among the MENA youth largely connected and overlapping. Exposed to the social nature of the Insta sphere and the recent leveraging of the platform’s features by independent media creators, users have the potential to find themselves in the “echo chambers” of the MENA politics warranting thus a comparative overview of their distinct yet complementary interactions. Beyond the ethnonational bubble of identification, processes of bridging and bonding are maximising MENA diasporic encounters and political conversation online. ​

Douaa Dridi

Douaa is a doctoral student in International Politics at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral School in the University of Pécs, Hungary. Her research experience lies at the intersection of digital political communication and diaspora politics with a special focus on the patterns of virtual political engagement among MENA youth in Europe.