Context matters: Understanding the platformization of violence

Abstract

This introductory paper outlines the conceptual foundations and research agenda for our special issue Contextual Complexities of Violence on Digital Platforms. We argue that violence on digital platforms cannot be understood as a fixed or self-evident category, but must be situated within the sociotechnical, cultural and political environments that shape its production, circulation and recognition. Drawing on cross-disciplinary scholarship, we develop the framework of contextualized platformized violence, which explains how harm arises through the interaction of platform infrastructures, cultural narratives, governance regimes, and local power dynamics. We identify key challenges that complicate efforts to study violence across digital environments, emphasizing the need for thick, reflexive and contextually grounded approaches. We conclude by introducing the 10 contributions in this special issue, each of which demonstrates how attending to context transforms our understanding of platformized violence and provides conceptual, empirical and methodological pathways for advancing research in this rapidly evolving field.

Introduction

Our world is violent. Opening news websites or social media platforms often means encountering violence directly, including armed conflict (Gozzi and Chater, 2025), gender-based violence (Zakrzewski et al., 2025) and racism (Okafor, 2025). Faced with this seemingly ubiquitous presence, it is tempting to treat violence as a fixed feature of life, something we assume we can readily and objectively identify and name as violence (Zizek, 2008). Yet violence is not a stable category. It is a contested field of meaning, constituted via competing definitions and interpretive struggles (de Haan, 2008).

Understanding violence in this way highlights how decisions about what counts as violence and whose suffering becomes recognizable are never neutral: they are embedded in asymmetries of power that determine whose pain becomes intelligible and whose remains unspoken (Chouliaraki, 2024). From this perspective, far-right mobilizations, for example, do more than invoke the language of violence; they actively reshape it, transforming narratives of victimhood into instruments of domination (Switzer, 2024). Likewise, the manosphere is not simply a gathering place for men expressing grievances, but an ecosystem in which women are constructed as inherently subordinate and positioned as legitimate targets of hostility (Marwick and Caplan, 2018). Violence, then, is more than a singular act. Rather, it is a discourse – a performative apparatus – through which bodies are ranked, hierarchies are naturalized, and injustice and war crimes are made ordinary. It is never abstract but situated, enacted and inscribed within the political economies of visibility and refusal.

Building on the conception of violence as socially and culturally constructed, violence thus materializes through multiple and intersecting modalities, including physical (e.g. bodily harm), structural (e.g. institutionalized discrimination) and symbolic (e.g. cultural erasure) (Bourdieu, 2003; Fuchs, 2025; Galtung, 1969). These modalities of harm are not discrete but mutually constitutive, forming a continuum through which harm is enacted, legitimized and normalized. In digital environments, this continuum of violence takes a mediated form through acts of hostility, intimidation, or exclusion that circulate across social media infrastructures (Dunn, 2021; Gosse, 2021; Schoenebeck et al., 2023). Even when such violence appears disembodied, its effects are palpably real, producing emotional and psychological injuries that reverberate far beyond the screen (Brydolf-Horwitz, 2022; Donato et al., 2022).

These intersecting modalities then require attention to how violence adheres to, circulates within and shapes online experiences. Here, faced with the increasing presence of violence on digital platforms (and the growing difficulty of mapping its shifting contours), Zelizer (2023; drawing on Sara Ahmed, 2010) calls for attention to the stickiness of mediated violence. She urges scholars to explore how mediated violence adheres to and unfolds within specific spatial, temporal and emotional configurations. Hate speech epitomizes this condition, functioning both as a symbolic weapon that reaffirms hierarchies of power and as an incitement to material violence (Saresma et al., 2021). Scholars increasingly interrogate how hate speech operates within particular sociotechnical, affective and political contexts. Rather than treating hate speech as an isolated phenomenon, our approach turns towards the infrastructures and cultural territories through which hate circulates and gains traction – attending, for instance, to its stickiness to the social, cultural and material structures of patriarchy and misogyny. As Pohjonen and Udupa (2017: 1186) argue, this requires ‘developing a more situated understanding of the cultures of communication and online practices that have been obfuscated by the overarching category of hate speech’.

Our special issue responds to these calls by foregrounding the diverse contexts – technical, cultural, ideological, geographical and social – that both shape and are shaped by platformized violence. In doing so, we take up Zelizer’s (2023) invitation to consider the stickiness of mediated violence: how it adheres to, emerges from and circulates through the contexts that shape our encounters with it. We focus on forms of violence that emerge through what van Dijck et al. (2018: 4) describe as ‘the penetration of platform mechanisms [. . .] into the organization of social, cultural, and institutional practices’. We use the idea of platformization to capture the processes via which platforms’ logics – algorithmic ranking, data extractivism, automation and interface design – become embedded in everyday life (Nieborg and Poell, 2018). These logics mediate, amplify and normalize violence as it circulates across online environments, shaping how harm becomes visible, actionable, or obscured (Recuero, 2024). To address the shifting multiplicity of violence, we argue that it must be understood within its sociotechnical and cultural infrastructures.

In this introduction, we direct attention to the situated ways in which platformized violence is conceptualized, experienced and studied. We advance the framework of contextualized platformized violence, which holds that violence across the digital ecosystem cannot be reduced to isolated acts but must be understood as emerging from the interplay of algorithms, platform policies, cultural narratives, and local and global power dynamics. This perspective underscores that what counts as violence is never stable or self-evident but is continually contested, mediated and shaped by cultural, social and technological conditions. By centering both platformized violence and its contextual entanglements, this framework provides to a conceptual foundation for future research on the situated practices of violence across different actors and media environments (Barth et al., 2023; Cover, 2023).

Across ten contributions, our special issue explores how actors, platforms and users interpret and negotiate violence in diverse settings, advancing a more nuanced understanding of how online harms manifest, circulate and persist. We begin by engaging with scholarship that foregrounds the contextual nature of violence, then trace how digital mediation transforms, extends and complicates these contexts – underscoring the need for flexible, situated approaches to its analysis. Finally, we introduce the ten contributions featured in this special issue, highlighting the distinct insights each offers into the dynamics of violence within platformed environments.

Researching violence in context

Building on our discussion of platformized violence, understanding violence then requires close attention to the specific contexts – social, historical and discursive – through which it acquires meaning and force. To study violence, therefore, is not only to examine acts of harm themselves but also their representation, circulation and interpretation within cultural frameworks. It also entails reflecting on our own position as scholars: how our vantage points, methods and ethical orientations shape what becomes visible, sayable and knowable about violence (Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, 2021). Indeed, scholars have long argued that what counts as violence is inseparable from the broader settings in which it is enacted, felt and analysed. As Dwyer (2017) observes,

Understanding moments and ‘cultures’ of violence not only involves understanding behaviors, but also representations, narratives, and discourses of violence that help both define and shape people’s attitudes. Interpreting the meanings of violence that use new theoretical frameworks (such as affect and the body), and that link violence to other aspects of human behavior, will help us better understand what it is to be human.

In essence, context shapes not only how violence occurs but also what becomes recognizable as violence in the first place. As Harju and Kotilainen (2023: 1272) remind us, this is a question of perception and power: ‘who is seen, and who is recognized, but also how, when, where, and by whom?’ Violence does not simply erupt; it is mediated through everyday structures of meaning and practice. Collective forms of violence often become absorbed into routine life, shaping national, ethnic and religious boundaries in ways that render harm invisible. As Das (2007: 16) observes, ‘Everyday life absorbs the traumatic collective violence that creates boundaries between nations and between ethnic and religious groups’.

And while our understanding of violence is thus materialized in the everyday of our social lives, it is not merely shaped by it. Indeed, both Bourdieu (2003) and Foucault (1980) show that discursive and institutional frameworks define and limit our epistemological frameworks that shape what comes to count as violence. Such symbolic violence operates through language, norms and practices that render certain forms of harm acceptable within social hierarchies (Kramsch, 2020). This dynamic is evident in the Israeli–Palestinian context, where the normalization of systemic oppression is sustained not only via state infrastructures but also through the indoctrination of societies. Bureaucratic, educational and media systems work in tandem to legitimize domination while concealing its violent foundations under the language of security and self-defence (Tamari, 2013). As Galtung and Fischer (2013) claim, the narratives, laws and routines that organize civic life can themselves become vehicles of violence. Thus, both Israeli and global publics are conditioned to perceive Palestinian dispossession as ordinary, even inevitable – a normalization that embeds the logics of occupation into everyday life. Similar dynamics of normalization, circulation and invisibilization of violence are also at play in digital spaces (Cristiano and Distretti, 2021; Harel et al., 2020), highlighting the need for research approaches that capture both structural and cultural contexts of platformed violence.

Through these (online and offline) processes of legitimization and normalization, violence becomes woven into the very narratives that sustain power within specific communities. Such normalization can obscure our very capacity to see violence when it must be seen, producing what Butler (2020) terms ungrievable lives: existences excluded from dominant regimes of visibility, recognition and mourning. When context is ignored, invisibility not only deepens, but it is also sedimented. As such, the failure to situate violence within its social and historical conditions gives rise to epistemic violence, in which the conceptualization of harm no longer aligns with the lived realities of those who endure it, effectively silencing their voices (Gur-Ze’ev, 2001). In colonial and postcolonial settings, these dynamics are further entangled with enduring histories of domination and dispossession. As Spivak (2023) cautions, efforts to define or redress violence without confronting these contextual legacies risk perpetuating the very exclusions they claim to resist.

Considering these dynamic of power, discourse, and positionality, what does it mean to study violence in context? Here, a necessary first step is to engage in what Geertz (1973: 6) termed a thick description of the setting in which violence occurs: ‘a detailed account of field experiences in which the researcher makes explicit the patterns of cultural and social relationships’. Such an approach moves beyond the surface of (online) interactions to illuminate the cultural meanings, social dynamics and power relations that give violence its specific form and force. In digital environments, this entails attending not only to user behaviour but also to the technological structures, platform logics and cultural practices that shape and circulate online practices (Markham, 2017), including the enactment and circulation of violence. This stands in contrast to what arguably remains a dominant paradigm in many studies of digital violence: thin description, characterized by ‘(a) acceptance of data material taken at face value, [which is] (b) used to move on the categorization/abstraction ladder with limited concern for complexity, variation and ambiguity’ (Alvesson, 2023: 6–7).

Given the profound ambivalence that often surrounds (and even defines) contemporary digital culture (Phillips and Milner, 2018), reliance on thin rather than thick description risks flattening the complexity of online environments and obscuring the sociotechnical and affective conditions through which violence is enacted and experienced. Such approaches ultimately fail to capture the layered terrains in which people experience, interpret and negotiate their mediated encounters with violence (Martín-Barbero, 1993; Morales, 2024). To move beyond such reduction, Berger (2022) offers a working definition of context on digital platforms – a definition that provides a conceptual basis for guiding the work of those seeking to better ground their thick description of violence in context:

Context is a set of conditions involving space, time, objects, symbols, and transactions between people, culture, and reality. The conditions are functions of one another and of the media through which they are conducted, and they allow us to label the situations we find ourselves in. The conditions also enable us to predict how others will behave and their expectations of us. These situations or contexts assign us roles. They tell us who we are. Context helps us concentrate on what is relevant and ignore what is irrelevant. It helps us make sense of the world. (Berger, 2022: 5)

The platformization of context

Urgent scholarly calls to understand violence within its situated environments become even more pressing as shifting sociotechnical infrastructures – particularly digital platforms that both host and reorganize the very conditions of interaction – continually reshape how violence emerges and is interpreted (Recuero, 2024). First, the platformization of context begins with the transformation of meaning-making environments, embedding communication within infrastructures governed by algorithms, defaults and data logics that redefine what context is and how it operates. Boundaries that once structured social life (between publics and privates, audiences and non-audiences, or local and global spheres) become increasingly porous or may collapse entirely (Davis and Jurgenson, 2014). Although context has long been central to analyses of social media (e.g. Marwick and Boyd, 2011), platformization renders it more unstable and unpredictable. Studying violence in digital settings, therefore, requires attending to how platforms actively refashion contextual cues, reshaping what users can see, interpret, or respond to at any given moment. Instead of treating context as a backdrop, platformization demands that we see violence as a moving target, continually reconfigured by design decisions, data systems and user practices.

A second, related dimension of the platformization of context concerns the collapse and collision of social boundaries within these transformed environments. As Davis and Jurgenson (2014: 477) observe, platforms enable situations in which ‘people, information, and norms from one context seep into the bounds of another’, dissolving boundaries that once regulated communication. They further describe context collusion as the blurring and flattening of social environments, while emphasizing that an even more disruptive dynamic – context collisions – occurs when ‘different social environments unintentionally and unexpectedly come crashing into each other’ (p. 480). These phenomena have become routine rather than exceptional within platformized environments. Importantly, such reconfigurations extend beyond digital spaces to influence how users understand themselves over time, how past and present identities blur (Brandtzaeg and Lüders, 2018) and even how societies collectively remember violent or traumatic events (Adriaansen and Smit, 2025). Through these mechanisms, platformization not only disrupts existing contexts but actively compresses, remixes and reorders them, producing volatile interpretive conditions in which the trajectories of violence are continually reshaped.

A further dimension of platformization lies in how it produces new forms of contextual negotiation. Digital cultures are constituted through platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2015): the situated, culturally specific repertoires through which users tailor messages to the norms and expectations of particular platforms and audiences. These vernaculars are not superficial stylistic quirks; they constitute forms of contextual labour that shape what can be said, shown, or felt. They operate in tandem with the emergence of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015), collectives formed through shared emotional, sensory and bodily attunements driven by an ‘ongoing quest for affective sparks’ (Lupinacci, 2021: 274) that platforms cultivate through their rhythms of liveness and connectivity. Within these publics, context is not merely inherited but actively produced, forming new contours through which violence is expressed, sensed and mobilized. For instance, platforms create spaces in which communities negotiate and construct new social meanings around violence, such as acts of terrorism, which in turn (re)shape public policy (Duncombe, 2020; Tambuscio and Tschiggerl, 2023).

A fourth dimension through which platformization shapes context emerges from the structural and geopolitical forces that guide platform operation. Critical Internet scholars – especially those studying coloniality, race and gender – have shown that algorithms do not neutrally mirror social environments; they actively construct them by privileging, filtering and amplifying signals aligned with commercial and political priorities (Noble, 2018; Ricaurte, 2019). These are extensions of structural power that reproduce hierarchies of race, gender, class and nationality (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Context further matters in governance: the sociopolitical settings in which platforms are embedded profoundly influence what is permitted to circulate and what is made to disappear (Are, 2024; DeCook et al., 2022; Viejo Otero, 2024). These forces play out unevenly across geocultural spaces. Platforms headquartered in and shaped by the Global North often impose epistemological and ontological assumptions on users in the majority world, echoing long-standing colonial structures (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). In this sense, platformization does not simply destabilize context; it operationalizes context as a governance instrument, allocating visibility, enforceability and harm unevenly across populations.

A final dimension of the platformization of context concerns the erosion of users’ very capacity to see and recognize context. In an environment where platforms automate relevance, suppress nuance and dictate what surfaces (and what remains hidden from) our interpretive faculties become increasingly dependent on algorithmic cues. Berger (2022: 8) warns that ‘the danger is not that the technology knows what we want, but that it knows what we may not even realize that we want for lack of context to recognize it’. The erosion of contextual awareness is not a trivial by-product; it constitutes a profound epistemic shift that impacts how violence is perceived, misrecognized or rendered invisible. When platforms mediate not only what we see but also how we understand the conditions of seeing, they shape both the interpretation of violence and the very possibility of witnessing it (Tait, 2008).

The manifold challenges of contextualizing platformized violence: a research agenda

The same dynamics that make violence platformized – the collapse of sociality into mediated interaction, the vernacular logics of digital culture, algorithmic systems that shape visibility and deep structural power asymmetries – simultaneously complicate our ability to identify, interpret and meaningfully respond to it. These conditions generate a dense set of questions across epistemic and methodological terrains, linguistic and cultural translation, social and political stakes, and the definitional and technological ambiguities that govern digital harm.

First, tracing platformized violence demands careful engagement with both methodological and epistemological challenges. Methodologically, scholars must contend with how platforms obscure, compress and reconfigure the very spaces, boundaries and temporalities in which interaction occurs (Cobbe, 2021), making it difficult to situate violence within a stable context. The despatialization of digital life and the ongoing blurring of personal and professional domains unsettle conventional understandings of ‘the field’, raising new questions about how to account for the situated, relational conditions through which violence becomes legible (Käihkö, 2020). At the same time, platform infrastructures – both established and emergent – shape, constrain and at times collapse the methodological possibilities available for studying violence as it unfolds in these environments (Oh and Downey, 2024).

Epistemologically, approaches that detach platformized violence from its social and geopolitical context risk misinterpretation, especially where platform spaces shape how users narrativize their lived experiences and where analytic assumptions fail to align with users beyond the Global North (Gómez-Cruz et al., 2023). Platformized violence can also produce epistemic exclusion by delegitimizing marginalized scholars and researchers who document violence, while shaping which knowledge is recognized as credible in public and academic discourse (Galpin and Vernon, 2024).

Linguistic and cultural complexities further challenge attempts to contextualize platformized violence. Linguistically, interpreting violence requires sensitivity to how meaning shifts across languages, cultures and communities, complicating efforts to determine when speech is injurious and when it is not (Lee et al., 2024). Harmful expressions may be embedded in platformed dialects, such as humour, irony or stylized play, demanding attention to how language operates within particular relational and situational contexts (Schmid and Greipl, 2025). Moreover, many forms of violence on digital platforms do not rely on explicit slurs or overtly hostile language. They become recognizable only when read against their sociocultural, historical or interactional backgrounds (Serafis and Assimakopoulos, 2024).

Culturally, local identities, values and norms shape how individuals perceive, interpret and respond to violence (Lundqvist, 2023), as well as how they imagine appropriate interventions or solutions (Schoenebeck et al., 2023). At the same time, platform-specific vernaculars, meme cultures and digital repertoires generate their own cultural logics that often evade external interpretation. These logics are further amplified by forms of templated violence, in which platforms provide ready-made units of content, such as challenges, trending formats or audio templates (Bösch and Divon, 2024) that users can repurpose as vehicles for harassment, humiliation or political aggression. Such templates circulate as participatory scripts, enabling violence to be reframed as play, spectacle or collective performance (Divon and Eriksson Krutrök, 2025; Matamoros-Fernández et al., 2022).

Third, social and political challenges reveal that platformized violence is deeply woven into the relational and power-saturated dynamics of everyday digital life. Socially, acts of online violence are rarely random. They emerge from specific gratifications, motivations, and interpersonal tensions that shape why violence takes hold and how it circulates within and across communities (Morales et al., 2025). Local social dynamics further condition the persistence and spread of violent practices, reproducing patterned hierarchies of visibility, attention, and legitimization (Walther, 2024). In many cases, these dynamics reflect the internal normativity of particular groups, for whom exclusionary, aggressive, or humiliating behaviors are treated as routine, even identity-affirming community practices (Marwick, 2021). For example, “playful” harassment in the form of social media “challenges” — documented in antagonistic exchanges between Israeli and Palestinian participants who are prompted to hit one another and share the acts online (Divon, 2022) — mobilizes shared antagonisms through platform-native formats that invite participatory harm and encourage offline violence rooted in conflict dynamics. In such cases, attacking a target becomes a platform-mediated social practice for signaling belonging, gaining status, and performing opposition toward a perceived other.

Politically, platformized violence plays a dual role. On one hand, it can animate local forms of mobilization that respond to immediate grievances, injustices, or community needs (McCosker, 2014). On the other hand, it can erode or obscure political projects that rely on inclusive participation, shared narratives, or the public presence of marginalized groups (Harel et al., 2020). Crucially, these dynamics hinge on how violent acts are performed in ways that command the attention and gaze of diverse audiences (Ette, 2024), shaping which struggles and identities become politically visible. These social and political dynamics underscore that platformized violence is never merely interpersonal. It is embedded in broader struggles over authority, legitimacy and the conditions of collective life.

Finally, definitional and technological challenges complicate efforts to adequately situate platformized violence. Definitional ambiguity remains a core obstacle. Concepts such as ‘toxicity’, ‘harm’ and ‘violence’ are profoundly context-dependent, raising questions about how scholars and practitioners can meaningfully distinguish harmful conduct when its interpretation varies across cultures, communities and situational contexts (Sheth et al., 2022). These definitions are far from neutral. Platforms and user communities strategically invoke particular framings of harm and toxicity to reinforce hierarchies, allocate visibility, or legitimize exclusionary practices (Gibson et al., 2024). Consequently, legal frameworks face similar difficulties, often relying on rigid categorizations that fail to capture the sociocultural dynamics and lived textures of digital harm (Wilson and Land, 2021).

Technological infrastructures compound these challenges. Platform design shapes what forms of violence become possible, perceptible, or actionable (Munn, 2020), while specific affordances – from algorithmic curation to moderation systems – mediate how violence is produced, circulated, resisted, or reinterpreted (Wood et al., 2023). Governance mechanisms then further modulate these dynamics, structuring the conditions under which users adapt, negotiate, or contest violent practices (de Keulenaar, 2023). To this, one must consider the economic mechanisms embedded in these infrastructures: engagement-driven business models and data-extractive logics tend to amplify content that provokes strong reactions, confrontation, or emotional intensity, creating structural incentives for violent or aggressive material to gain visibility. In this sense, platformized violence is made economically productive within the broader political economy of platform operations.

Taken together, these challenges show that contextualizing platformized violence is not a matter of adding more variables to an already stable concept of harm. Instead, it requires confronting how platforms reorganize the very processes through which meaning and legibility are made. The methodological, epistemic, linguistic, cultural, social, political, definitional and technological difficulties outlined above demonstrate that platformized violence is never a self-evident object of analysis. It is produced, interpreted and governed through shifting sociotechnical arrangements that unsettle conventional research categories. As such, any attempt to understand or address platformized violence must grapple with its inherently multi-layered nature, recognizing that context is neither stable nor singular, but constantly reconfigured through interactions between users, infrastructures and systems of power.

Our issue: the platformization of violence in context

Our ten papers in this special issue show not only why it is essential to surface the contextual specificities through which platformized violence unfolds, but also the epistemological and ontological consequences of doing so. Each contribution offers a pathway for addressing the challenges outlined above – methodological, linguistic, cultural, social, political, definitional or technological – by demonstrating that violence becomes legible only when situated within the infrastructures, histories and power relations that shape it. Rather than treating context as a static backdrop, these papers illuminate points of intersection between contexts: moments where local meaning-making encounters platform infrastructures, where user practices meet governance and where everyday experience collides with wider sociopolitical formations. Together, they model an approach to studying platformized violence that is attentive, situated and analytically responsive to the layered complexity of contemporary digital life.

In the first paper, ‘Race, Ethnicity, and Technology-Facilitated Violence’, Cabanzo Valencia and Guntrum draw on interviews with activists in Colombia to foreground the complex ways in which race and ethnicity shape the experiences of those encountering technology-facilitated violence in a setting of armed conflict. They identify four key dimensions of racialized violence on platforms: (1) structural racism, (2) legacies of oppression and coloniality, (3) the intersectionality of identities and embodiments and (4) cultural harms. By mapping the overlapping factors that transform how people encounter and interpret technology-facilitated violence, they not only provide a critical framework for understanding the platformization of violence in context – they also clearly exemplify why platformized violence cannot be understood without deep contextual grounding.

Further underscoring the need to contextualize not only experiences but also the governance of platformized violence, de Keulenaar and Alves introduce the concept of ‘normative dislocation’ to show how platform moderation failed to account for Brazil’s long-standing histories of political violence. Drawing on a digital methods analysis of militaristic discourse, they demonstrate that moderation standards – heavily informed by US electoral concerns – prioritized the detection of election misinformation while overlooking unregulated calls for a military coup circulating prominently on Telegram. In doing so, de Keulenaar and Alves reveal how platforms routinely misalign their normative boundaries with national contexts, disregarding local narratives, political conditions and collective memories of violence that should inform governance practices.

In ‘The Violence of Online Conspiracy Theories’, Petersen and Johansen examine the tensions between global and local narratives of platformized violence by analysing an online harassment campaign against a Danish television personality that drew heavily on QAnon-adjacent conspiracy imaginaries. They show how participatory vitriol emerges through a form of hybridity, as users eclectically pick and choose from a wide repertoire of global conspiracy tropes – many of them American in origin – while simultaneously adapting these narratives and practices to align with Danish cultural and political contexts. Their study demonstrates that the national context is not a backdrop but an active condition for how platformized violence travels, mutates and ‘successfully’ propagates across social media.

In the fourth paper, ‘Memeing the moniker’, Eriksson Krutrök and Mitchell examine the Swedish media landscape to trace how narratives of gang violence move between legacy media and TikTok. They identify a striking divergence in how criminal gangs are represented: legacy media predominantly frame them as an urgent societal threat, while on TikTok, they are reworked via humour, intertextuality and playful appropriation, effectively subverting the threat narrative that dominates traditional news coverage. They show how violence is not simply transmitted across media systems but actively reframed, resignified and made culturally legible through platform vernaculars and participatory practices. In doing so, the authors demonstrate that understanding platformized violence requires attention to how media infrastructures and user creativity reshape the meaning and affective force of violence as it circulates.

In ‘Affordance Folklore’, Ryder examines Sri Lanka’s recurring Internet shutdowns by tracing the imaginaries that form around these outages – understood as a form of symbolic violence – during moments of political unrest. Focusing on three key episodes in which the Internet was conspicuously unavailable, Ryder explores how Sri Lankans who lived through these events interpret and make sense of the shutdowns. At the core of the argument is the claim that such interpretations reveal how users conceptualize the affordances of social media: what they believe these platforms enable, constrain, or foreclose. By tracing how Sri Lankan users understand Internet shutdowns as symbolic violence, Ryder demonstrates how platform affordances and infrastructural limitations shape both the experience and the meaning of platformized violence within a specific sociopolitical context.

Next, in ‘Witnessing carnage’, Morse and Altaratz analyse the violence in the October 7 attacks in Israel as a hybrid media event, showing how Hamas used wearable cameras and Telegram to collapse the boundary between perpetration and mediation. They demonstrate that first-person footage and mission-like sequencing effectively ‘gamify’ violence, dehumanizing victims and transforming terror into a shareable spectacle that bypasses journalistic gatekeeping. Their findings reveal that on decentralized platforms, witnessing becomes participatory: audiences recontextualize, amplify and circulate graphic content in real time, turning platforms into sites where violence is not only observed but enacted through mediation. In doing so, Morse and Altaratz show how decentralized infrastructures transform witnessing into a participatory form of violence, raising ethical, interpretive and governance challenges central to understanding platformized harm.

In the seventh paper, ‘Androcentric Hegemony on Twitch.tv’, Harris, Tran and Persaud interrogate how Twitch’s governance produces contextual inequalities that fuel platformized harm. Through an inductive reading of Twitch’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines and two heuristic case studies, they show that policy enforcement hinges on opaque contextual exceptions (for safety, edgy humour, attire/nudity). These exceptions normalize toxic gamer cultures and disproportionately burden women, queer and BIPOC streamers with self-protection and compliance labour, while high-profile male streamers face minimal consequences, reinforcing an androcentric hierarchy in which men’s performances are treated as the default ‘streamer’ identity and women’s bodies become problems to be governed. They demonstrate how platform governance itself becomes a vector of violence – showing, in situ, how definitions of harm are negotiated, deferred and unevenly applied within Twitch’s cultural and technical infrastructures.

Henry and colleagues examine image-based sexual abuse not from the perspective of victims but from that of perpetrators. Drawing on a digital ethnography of 47 websites, the authors show how users ‘do gender’ through the online sharing of non-consensual intimate images – identifying how interactional dynamics work to ritualize objectification and othering, build homosocial bonds and social capital, and normalize intimate image abuse while fostering new forms of gendered violence. In foregrounding perpetration as a homosocial practice, they show how platform infrastructures facilitate and normalize gendered harms, thus underscoring the importance of examining not only victims’ experiences but also the larger contexts involved in sustaining platformized violence, including but not limited to social relations, rituals and economies of recognition. This perspective is crucial for understanding the contexts of platformized violence, where digital architectures and community practices converge to sustain, reproduce and expand cultures and structures of gendered violence.

Exploring the ‘mythologies of memetic misogyny’, Özkula and Prieto-Blanco explore how implicit, polysemous and ephemeral visual misogyny circulates across multiple platforms. Focusing on memes as vehicles of affective and contextual meaning, they examine how gendered hate is co-produced by content, by both real and imagined platform affordances, and by the discursive practices of online communities across Twitter/X, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube. Using a feminist ethnographic lens, they show how memetic misogyny materializes in three case studies – Greta Thunberg, ‘Karens’ and #SisterIDoBelieveYou – revealing how humour, irony and repetition disguise harm while embedding misogynistic narratives into the vernacular of digital culture. They argue that these memes are not isolated artefacts but part of a wider myth-making process in which play, participation and contextual ambiguity normalize gendered hostility.

Closing this special issue, Chonka’s contribution, ‘(De)constructing research “expertise” in transnational participatory warfare’, presents a case study of online and offline violence in Somalia/Somaliland. Specifically, Chonka engages an auto-ethnography of how the construction of ‘researcher expertise’ plays into violent conflict dynamics. Thus, in this sense, the researcher, along with their expert status and extended professional network, becomes part of the context in which digital violence is experienced and enacted, raising difficult questions about the researcher’s positionality within such contexts. By foregrounding researcher positionality and the entanglement of expertise with conflict, this paper underscores the methodological and ethical complexities of studying platformized violence, setting the stage for broader reflections on research challenges in these contexts.

The ten papers illustrate the importance of re-centring context when studying platformized violence, while at the same time unsettling any neat distinction of what context is. Indeed, as these papers clearly demonstrate, researchers often mobilize context in myriad different ways, variably conceptualized as platform infrastructure, military discourse and national politics, to name but a few. Just as violence, context proves a slippery concept, deployed in unruly ways. This is neither surprising nor problematic, considering the great diversity of the contributions in this volume. What is needed moving forward is perhaps not a standard definition of context, but rather a shared commitment to a meta-discussion about which contextual considerations matter in which cases, and why. We encourage researchers to pursue an even thicker description (Geertz, 1973) of the contexts in which platformized violence unfolds: to explicitly interrogate which contextual layers matter, which do not and why, so that the object of inquiry becomes as intelligible and meaningful as possible to diverse readers. Such transparent meta-reflection can help surface the often taken-for-granted role that context plays in shaping both the enactment and the study of violence online. In doing so, we position context not as a vague backdrop but as a tangible analytical object that must remain at the centre of any effort to make sense of violence on digital platforms. And don’t forget yourselves in the process. As we noted at the beginning, our world is violent, and as we – researchers – explore, inquire, challenge, and work to make it better, that same ethic of care should also be directed toward ourselves.