Since the full-scale Russian attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, warfare on social media and online platforms has introduced a new way of mediatizing war. A constant war-related newsfeed on social media and online platforms has emerged. Against this background the war in Ukraine represents a »fractal war - where you choose to subscribe to your own tailored version of warfare in your feed. This makes it the most personalized war in history« (Andrew Hoskins). This special issue investigates smartphone use, online media, platform politics, and the impact of the crowdsourced war. New forms of digital participation, collective witnessing and web archiving by media users and media providers are linked with new methodological and empirical challenges for source analysis of digital forensics, jurisdiction, and collective memory. The contributors analyze digital society and its relationship to war, violence, genocide, witnessing practices, and cultural appropriation in a critical and reflective manner.

Anna Näslund (former Dahlgren) is professor of art history at Stockholm University. She has written extensively on different aspects of visual culture, photography, media history, digitization, archives and museum practices. She has been the PI of several research projects, such as »The Politics of Metadata« and »Sharing the Visual Heritage« focusing different aspects of cultural heritage institutions image collections online, and media historical projects on social media photography and photo albums.
Ramón Reichert (Dr. phil. habil.) teaches and researches as a senior researcher at the Department of Cultural Studies at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Previously, he taught and researched in Basel, Berlin, Canberra, Fribourg, Helsinki, Sankt Gallen, Stockholm and Zurich and was EU project coordinator for many years. His current research project »Visual Politics and Protest. Artistic Research Project on the visual framing of the Russia-Ukraine War on internet portals and social media« (2022-2024) deals with the visual politics of violence, conflict and resistance.