In recent years, visual journalism has embraced a new form of storytelling alongside photographs and videos: the photographic GIF (graphics interchange format). Despite its association with humor on social media, the GIF has unexpectedly become a legitimate tool for documenting disasters and tragedies in online news. This challenges the traditional solemn tone of journalism, as the GIF's short, repetitive, and silent nature is reminiscent of humorous content rather than serious news representation.

Photojournalism traditionally utilizes still images and videos for narrative storytelling, each having distinct characteristics and narrative possibilities. In contrast, the photographic GIF emerges as a hybrid format, combining photography and film elements. Its unique attribute of the looped movement stands in overt contrast with conventional news formats but reflects the transformations in visual news production following the widespread use of smartphones and social media. These changes shifted news consumption habits and have caused news organizations to adopt new designs and forms for online news outlets.

This research focuses on the photographic GIF as a new visual form in online news, particularly in representing tragic events. It uses semiotic visual analysis and interviews with senior online news editors to explore the uses, meanings, and editorial considerations behind GIF production in newsrooms. The findings reveal the GIF's expansion beyond its initial contexts, demonstrating its legitimacy in the journalistic sphere and uncovering its means of conveying informative and traumatic content. The research underscores how the digital journalism industry adapts to the contemporary environment by integrating GIFs into storytelling practices.

Wars have always been mediated. However, the tools and techniques for mediation, facilitation, and creation of knowledge about the war have significantly changed in the last decade with the fast growth of new media and technologies. Understanding the details of military operations by civilians has become possible nowadays with social media and digital technology that change people's perception of war. This research focuses on Ukrainian Telegram channels that position themselves as open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigators and provide detailed information for civilians on types of missiles or drones in the air during the ongoing attack. They use information from military and open sources to facilitate the war for the general public and mediate the attacks. The paper explores how those Telegram channels became essential players in military communication during the active phase of the war in Ukraine. It also discusses the emergence of a new digital industry of monitoring the air in Ukraine for war participation and mediation. The research uses a digital ethnographic observation method to explore the ten most popular Ukrainian Telegram channels that provide information about attacks and examine types of messages, framing, wording, and other information-specificities for participatory warfare and constructing knowledge about the war. Also, textual and visual analysis of the messages and comments allows us to identify patterns in the work of those Telegram channels. This paper is a work in progress.

COVID-19 has been one of the most disruptive and devastating social and epidemiological events the world has experienced in the past century. The untimely death of loved ones, coupled with lockdowns and social isolation, impacts people's physical and mental health severely. In this study, I focus on stories about the pandemic from Gaza written by Palestinian youth and published online by the nonprofit organisation We Are Not Numbers between 2020-2024.

Scholarships on the uses of digital media during the pandemic show how they create supportive, safe spaces to discuss the hardships caused by the disease and mitigate trauma. Gaza is a unique case study because the arrival of COVID-19 generated a unique situation of a double lockdown; Gazans were unable to travel and receive quality medical care for more than a decade before the pandemic started due to a devastating military siege imposed by Israel in 2007. Therefore, digital media has crucially become their only access to a virtual world while their physical world is continuously shrinking. In my presentation, I will conceptualise the double lockdown and argue for the liberatory potential of digital media. I will contend that the multimodal storytelling of Gazan youth inspires hope and resilience in a place usually defined by despair. The digital platform We Are Not Numbers invites visitors to experience Gaza through the eyes of ordinary people. Visitors can modestly contribute to Gaza's struggle for a healthy and free life by considering how the pandemic's harm is multiplied by a suffocating military occupation.

This research examines the concept of "disconnective action" during crises, positing it as a necessary counterpart to "connective action" (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). While digital media is typically lauded for fostering connectivity during socio-political controversies, it also presents affordances for disconnectivity, such as unfriending, unfollowing, and banning. This project aims to understand the dynamics and implications of digital disconnection, particularly during crises that serve as catalysts for revealing divergent opinions among social network users (Sibona, 2014; John & Dvir-Gvirsman, 2015; John & Gal, 2018). The theoretical backdrop of this study involves "disconnective power" (Light & Cassidy, 2014), which refers to the ability of dominant actors to employ digital media as tools for political, cultural, and social fragmentation. The research proposes that this form of power is particularly evident in the strategic use of digital technologies to isolate political systems and promote societal disintegration. Accordingly, the new forms of propaganda utilize disconnective affordances to undermine cross-conflict horizontal networks. By framing disconnection as a performative "speech act" (Austin,1962; Butler, 1990) and examining the role of social media as both a unifying and divisive force, this study contributes to a nuanced understanding of digital interaction in times of socio-political unrest. Over five years, data on public unfriending announcements were collected, particularly from Russian-speaking Facebook users during the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. The research reveals the dominant logics behind publicized disconnective actions and the influence of individual users in initiating broader disconnective trends.