The Burden of Bearing Witness: Digital Practices of Marginalized Social Media Users in High-Stakes Contexts

Social media platforms and their governance policies often fail marginalized users in high-stakes contexts, including war, violent attacks, human rights violations, humanitarian crises, and situations of systemic oppression. Through interviews, autoethnography, and digital ethnography, this paper presents three case studies from Venezuela, Nigeria, and the United States to examine how marginalized populations engage with social media in non-normative ways. We analyze how platform design and policies intersect with participants’ identities, marginalization, and labor. Our central finding is that users’ urgent infrastructural and contextual needs are often overlooked, revealing structural flaws in social media design that mimic physical-world power asymmetries. In response, users develop innovative workarounds, engage in self-censorship, and adopt coping strategies, undertaking additional, often invisible, sociotechnical repair work that reinforces their precarity. To address these complex needs, we urge social media companies to collaborate with marginalized users to integrate alternative infrastructural features, such as emergency response tools and exit mechanisms for wellbeing.