In the early 2010s, activists around the world often organized together with the expectation of good faith. There was a sense in the early 2010s that awareness in and of itself mattered, that the new mediums making people more aware of citizens’ suffering would therefore make them more empathetic and more likely to stand up for the afflicted. This was most evident in Syria, where activists in 2011 and 2012 sent out daily documentation of Assad’s brutality, with the hope that if his war crimes were witnessed, rather than masked by state propaganda, they would be stopped. Instead, Syria became
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