"I only have one question..."
Reflections on photographing the 48th International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
At a certain point this summer, I realized that if I used the word “protest” anywhere on my Instagram story — or “ICE,” or “fascism” — my views would plummet.
I think it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of checking your engagement metrics on social media. We’re all addicted because we like the tiny dopamine hit of getting a Like or a Comment, but as the incomparable Robyn sings in her excellent new single, “I know it’s just dopamine / but it feels so real to me.”
But that’s not what I’m talking about.
This year I’ve realized that my way through this — this time in my life, this political moment, this city — will be photography. It’s how I feel like I’m helping. Living in Los Angeles in 2025, I’ve become painfully aware of how fast the news cycle moves. It seems like the entire country pays attention when things happen here… and then immediately moves on to something else. From the fires that consumed major swaths of the city in January to the June “riots” that kickstarted the domino effect that led to the shooting death of a National Guard member last week, it seems like everyone cares and then no one cares.
Even people who live here talk in the past tense. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve overheard people say, “When the ICE raids were going on…” or, “Back during the protests…” That’s all very much still happening, but because the media has moved on, even people who live here are unaware of it.
So, when I noticed my Instagram views crater any time I shared something that included the word “protest,” I tried Reddit. Not because I wanted clicks for their own sake, but because the point of protest — of these photos — is to amplify the message, to make sure it gets seen and heard, so that people are aware that things here are very much not okay.
The Reddit algorithm is a different thing than Instagram.
On Reddit, my photos this year have racked up something like 42 million views and a whole lot of comments. That’s because, for the most part, it’s democratized social media. If people see something they like, they click a little “up” arrow, and the post gets a teeny tiny algorithmic boost. If enough people click that “up” arrow — or, “upvote it,” as the site says — then it can potentially be seen by a whole lot of people.
But sometimes that can go sideways.
Yesterday I spent the day in Downtown Los Angeles for the 48th International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, an initiative started in the 1970s by the United Nations. There were two events happening on the same block outside City Hall: a group called SoCal Uprising held a rally for various labor groups to organize for Palestine, and then the LA-OC-IE chapter of Palestinian Youth Movement held a march around downtown. Many people from the first event joined in the second, and there were dozens of community groups represented.
“Solidarity,” indeed!
I was there about 4.5 hours and took several hundred photos. On the bus ride home — and on the couch for a while after — I went through them, picked my favorites, did some quick edits, and selected ~25 to tell the story of the day.
“Parts Of A Novel I’m Doing,” after all.
As I’ve done dozens of times this year, I shared an album of 20 photos to /r/pics and a slightly-different but mostly-overlapping album of 20 to /r/LosAngeles. (I’m interested in which photos spark discussion among which communities, and I often slightly mix it up to see what jumps out to people).
Unfortunately, the post on /r/LosAngeles lasted about three minutes.
Sending a message to the moderators got an auto-reply telling me that the post had been removed by their “AutoModerator,” and that a human would look at it in due time.
It was restored about an hour ago, after 17 hours evidently trapped in a queue. I’m guessing the word “Palestinian” tripped a filter, but I got nowhere when I asked for clarification so that I can avoid this in the future. As a result, the algorithm now thinks the post was so boring that no one interacted with it for 17 hours; there’s almost no chance it’ll be seen by the amount of people who usually see my protest photos.
Again: the point isn’t that I want the dopamine hit of the clicks. The point is that, even now, if you search Google for “los angeles day of solidarity palestinian people,” the only actual news article is from The Jerusalem Post, an Israeli outlet that only mentions Los Angeles incidentally. You can imagine the slant of their coverage.
In fact, there’s so little coverage that my Reddit post — with what little traction it got — is toward the top of the search results. Otherwise, there’s not even any local media, nearly no one giving people an indication of what the protest was actually like on the ground.
Angelenos should know that hundreds of people turned out yesterday in support of Palestine!
On /r/pics, I encountered a different issue.
As the “upvotes” barely moved, I saw the “Shares” metric tick upward very quickly — which tells me people were sending each other the link to the post. Today, the post is sitting at a perfect 50% upvote/downvote ratio, which evens out to a net score of “0.” As a result, the algorithm thinks this is content the community doesn’t want to see, and so the views are significantly lower than other albums of similar quality I’ve posted at the same time of day. (Only about ~33k views, as of this writing).
Those shares vs. views vs. upvotes metrics are, essentially, telling me that the post was mass-downvoted, and I think it’s safe to assume that it was for ideological reasons.
Eventually, one comment trickled in:
This person looked at 20 photos of people expressing their pain over the genocide of the Palestinian people — a genocide that has been a constant for over two years, and is the result of a sustained campaign of ethnic cleansing that goes back decades — and their one question is how I — the photographer — feel about Hamas.
Still.
After all this time.
You’d think that, after years of trying this same But why won’t you condemn Hamas? game and getting absolutely nowhere, they’d reconsider their tactics.
If you don’t ask people how they feel about the atrocities at Abu Ghraib every time you see the word “America,” there’s no need to bring up Hamas every time you see people calling for an end to the mass slaughter of Palestinians. If you don’t ask How do you feel about the KKK? on every post about the 4th of July, then there’s really no sense playing this “Gotcha!” game here.
Is the assumption that I’m going to reveal myself to be a supporter of terrorism? Well, since you asked, I think they’re great and I endorse every single thing they’ve ever done!
…c’mon.
I wanted to have conversations about the tow truck driver hauling away vehicles at the direction of LAPD.
I expected someone to ask me, as they always seem to, why I’d posted photos of bystanders reacting to the protest. (Protests don’t happen in isolation, I like to say, and I am interested in the way the protests are received by the community who sees them happen).
We didn’t even get to have a conversation about the Waymo-disabling methods used along the march route!
I saw a movie called Rebuilding last week, starring the excellent Josh O’Connor. He plays a rancher whose Colorado property is destroyed by a wildfire, and he has to learn to envision a radically different future for himself than the one he expected. I don’t want to spoil the end, but his future ultimately looks smaller and more focused on community, on his relationships with his similarly-affected neighbors. Instead of succumbing to the gnawing, unspoken despair of the climate crisis that awaits us all, he focuses instead on strengthening his bond with a small group of people he can help.
It feels like that’s where we’re headed with social media, and perhaps the world at large. Our information-sharing ecosystem is controlled by unimaginably-large corporations, and our ability to reach one another — even people who “follow” us! — is at the whim of unimaginably-opaque, repressive algorithms.
So, I guess this is all to say: I’m glad I started this newsletter, and thank you for subscribing!
And: you can find my Instagram album of yesterday’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People here:
Okay bye!