Executive & Brand Communications Strategist
Executive & Brand Communications Strategist
I have friends in every country currently making headlines. Every single one of them is watching their own country shift beneath their feet.
If you live anywhere that looks like the world most of us actually live in, a world of expat/immigrant communities and international schools and WhatsApp groups that span six time zones, so do you.
That’s the part we keep forgetting when we post.
Somewhere between the 24-hour news cycle and the algorithm’s obsession with outrage, we started confusing sharing with doing. Reposting became activism. A flag in the bio became a stance. A five-second scroll became enough to form an opinion worth broadcasting to everyone we know.
I understand the impulse. I feel it. When something unconscionable is happening, when children are dying, when hospitals are hit, when families are fleeing with nothing, sitting in silence feels intolerable. You want to say something. You want to do something. The least you can do is share.
But here’s the question nobody’s stopping long enough to ask: Is what you’re sharing actually helping anyone? Or is it helping you feel like you’ve helped?
Those are two very different things.
We are swimming in information right now. More of it than any generation in human history has ever had to process. A startling amount of it is designed to make you feel, not think. To trigger a reaction, not inform a response.
The media knows this. The influencers know this. The algorithms definitely know this.
A headline that makes you angry gets shared. A post that makes you cry gets engagement. A take that sounds righteous, even if it’s dangerously oversimplified, gets applause. Every time we engage without questioning what we’re engaging with, we become part of the machine. Not observers of it. Part of it.
I’m a communications strategist. I can tell you from 25 years of studying how words move people, most of what fills your feed during times of conflict is not designed to inform you. It’s designed to activate you.
There’s a difference.
Here’s what breaks my heart, and what I think gets lost in the noise more than anything else.
Civilians, real people with school pick-up schedules and grocery lists and the same mundane worries you and I have, are caught in the middle of political agendas they didn’t create, don’t endorse, and can’t escape.
They didn’t choose the strategies carried out in their name. They’re not points on a map. They’re people trying to get through the day.
But when we reduce entire populations to their government’s actions, when we paint millions of people with the brush of their country’s worst decisions, we do something dangerous. We dehumanise the very people we claim to care about.
We do it from our phones, between meetings, with a latte in hand.
Let me be specific about what I see happening, because it’s worth naming.
Someone with a large following posts a graphic. It has a statistic, a powerful image, a bold claim. It looks credible. It feels true. Within minutes, it has been shared thousands of times by people who didn’t check the source, didn’t verify the number, didn’t consider the context, and didn’t ask whether the account posting it has any interest in accuracy, or only in reach.
This isn’t activism. It’s amplification without accountability.
The damage is real. Misinformation during conflict doesn’t just distort understanding. It shapes public opinion. It influences policy. It fuels hatred toward entire groups of people. It makes your colleagues feel unsafe at work. It makes your neighbours wonder if you see them as people or geopolitical talking points.
When you share something you haven’t verified, you’re not just passing along information. You are lending your name, your credibility, and your relationships to content you can’t vouch for.
That should give anyone pause.
I’m not saying be silent. I don’t believe silence is the answer.
I’m not saying don’t have a position. Some things are clear. War crimes are war crimes. The deliberate targeting of civilians is indefensible. Full stop. You don’t need to be neutral on that.
I’m also not saying both sides are always equally right or equally wrong. That kind of false equivalence is its own form of intellectual laziness.
What I’m saying is this: before you post, pause. Before you share, verify. Before you take a side, make sure you’re not accidentally erasing the humanity of people who are on no side, who are just trying to survive.
The question I wish we asked more often isn’t whose side are you on? It’s whose lives are you willing to see?
Can you hold the grief of two families on opposite sides of the same conflict at the same time? Can you care about what’s happening in places the algorithm has decided don’t generate enough clicks?
Compassion isn’t a finite resource. You don’t run out of it by extending it to more than one group. Empathy, real empathy, not the performative kind, doesn’t require you to choose a uniform. It requires you to stay human.
You don’t need a million followers for your words to matter. If you have a feed, you have a platform. If you have a platform, you have a responsibility.
Not to have all the answers. Not to become an overnight expert on geopolitics. But to be thoughtful. To be honest about what you know and don’t know. To consider who might be reading your words, including the friends and colleagues who come from the very places you’re so confidently posting about.
These are the questions I ask myself before I share anything:
Did I read past the headline?
Do I know where this information came from?
Am I sharing this to inform, or to perform?
Would I say this to the face of someone who lives in the country I’m posting about?
Is this contributing to understanding, or just to noise?
When I can’t answer yes to most of those, I don’t post. Not because I don’t care. But because I care enough to get it right.
If you want to help, donate. Volunteer. Call your representatives. Check on your friends. But don’t confuse reposting with impact.
I’m first-generation Canadian. My parents fled Hungary during the revolution. My family has fought, lived, and died through wars not dissimilar to the ones unfolding right now. My children are growing up celebrating a heritage that spans continents, cultures, and languages. I’ve lived in Dubai for over 15 years. My world, personally and professionally, is built on relationships that cross every border currently in the news.
This isn’t abstract for me. It never has been.
My dinner table has held conversations in more languages and perspectives than most newsrooms represent. That’s not unusual here. That’s Tuesday.
It is exactly why I can’t stay quiet about this, even though I know it’s uncomfortable.
Every time someone I respect shares something reckless, something unverified, something that reduces an entire population to a political caricature, it doesn’t just pollute a feed. It chips away at the trust between real people. People who sit next to each other at school drop-off. People who work together. People who, until that post, didn’t feel the need to wonder where they stood with each other.
Words have consequences. Online and off. In wartime and in peace.
That is something every single one of us has the power, and the responsibility, to remember.
Andrea Antal is a strategic communications consultant and copywriter based in Dubai, with over 25 years of experience helping businesses and leaders communicate with clarity, credibility, and conscience.