Colonising the narrative space: unliveable lives, unseeable struggles and the necropolitical governance of digital populations

Social media platforms play a critical civic role during times of conflict, war, and crises as spaces for people to document and share content that publicises instances of human rights violations, graphic violence, and material destruction. Such content not only function as primary materials in the narration of social and political realities, but also operate as intense sites of control when platforms, state, and non-state actors seek to censor them for various political and opaque reasons. This article argues the gradually increasing intertwinement of corporate-government power, and the asymmetrical application of power to govern our lives in platform spaces, constitutes the necropolitical governance of digital populations. I delineate how the contours of platform necropolitics manifest through asymmetrical content moderation processes, platform policies, and alternative enforcement systems, and describe its operational registers: acts of commission (overenforcement), omission (underenforcement), and exceptionalism (extraordinary exceptions). The article’s theoretical resourcefulness and analytical significance is demonstrated through three qualitative case studies: 2021 Israeli–Palestinian conflict, ‘rest of the world’ counties, and 2022-ongoing Russian–Ukrainian War. The article problematises conventional understandings of necropolitics while providing nuanced conceptualisation into the narrative and curatorial power of corporate-government assemblages of control for digital subjects–especially those most at-risk.