ABSTRACT
Icons are key to media coverage and popular memory of conflicts. Over the past years, social media have left a distinctive mark on which images gain iconic status. This chapter explores “social media icons”, an umbrella term for different forms of icons emerging through social media processes of production, dissemination and mobilisation. While the popular appeal of icons is often ascribed to their emotional plea, this chapter posits that they are recurrently understood in a tension between evidence and emotion. Accordingly, this chapter develops the theoretical underpinnings for this framework and explores the intricate entanglement of emotion and evidence through social media icons of child victims from the Syrian civil war. Social media icons provide evidence of specific violations against this vulnerable group, while also showing children in an emotionally compelling way. The analysis shows that emotions are key in the mobilisation of these social media icons but at the same time their emotional appeal is used to dispute their value as evidence as they are habitually accused of being propaganda or fake news.
