By Gigevelor Bonhomme
Journalist at CPGNNews, CaribPulse Global News Network, and candidate for a Diploma in International Relations at the National Diplomatic and Consular Academy (ANDC).
With the support of the CPGNNews Editorial Committee.
CPGNNews | CaribPulse Global News Network | Special Report
Independent International Analytical Media.
The “Pornography of Poverty”: The Genesis of a Critical Concept in the Representation of Human Suffering
The expression “pornography of poverty” belongs to a long tradition of critical reflection on the ways societies represent suffering, marginalization, and human vulnerability. It is neither a formal legal concept nor a unified academic theory attributable to a single school of thought. Rather, it refers to an analytical notion that has progressively developed at the intersection of several disciplines, including media studies, development anthropology, postcolonial critique, humanitarian ethics, and, more recently, research on digital platforms and the attention economy.
Its use is based on a fundamental question: beyond their legitimate functions of informing, bearing witness, or mobilizing support, can certain representations of poverty contribute to transforming human suffering into an object of visual consumption? When vulnerability becomes the primary lens through which an individual or a community is perceived, there is a risk that they may be reduced to a fragmented image of themselves, obscuring the richness of their history, identity, culture, and personal journey.
From an etymological perspective, the term “pornography” derives from the Ancient Greek pornographía, composed of pornē (“prostitute”) and graphía (“writing,” “description,” or “representation”). Historically associated with the representation of sexuality, the word gradually acquired a broader metaphorical meaning to describe certain forms of excessive exposure of an intimate or human reality transformed into a spectacle, primarily intended to provoke an immediate reaction from the viewer. It is this logic of staging, exposure, and consumption of the gaze that explains its critical application to the field of poverty.
The work of Arturo Escobar on representations of development, the analyses of Pierre Bourdieu on the symbolic power of the media, the reflections of Susan Sontag on the photography of suffering, the research of Lilie Chouliaraki on humanitarian communication, as well as postcolonial critiques developed notably by Edward Said, have all contributed to illuminating a common question: the way images produce not only visibility, but also power relations, symbolic hierarchies, and lasting perceptions of the world.
In the digital age, this issue takes on a new dimension. The emergence of social platforms, algorithmic systems, and the attention economy has profoundly transformed the conditions under which images are produced, circulated, and consumed. Visibility is no longer merely an editorial matter; it has become a strategic resource shaped by technological architectures capable of amplifying certain narratives at the expense of others. Content that generates the strongest emotional reactions often receives greater visibility, creating an environment in which suffering can sometimes become more visible than the human trajectories surrounding it.
Breaking a Blind Spot of Our Time: Rethinking the Representation of Human Vulnerability
It is within this context of profound transformation that CPGNNews considers it necessary to open a reflection on the way the contemporary world looks at, represents, and narrates human vulnerability.
As societies undergo major transformations driven by technological change, evolving communication systems, and shifting social relationships, certain questions long relegated to the background are now emerging as unavoidable issues. The representation of poverty, suffering, and human fragility is among those questions that can no longer be ignored.
Faithful to its mission of informing, analyzing, and contributing to the development of critical awareness, CaribPulse Global News Network (CPGNNews) believes that it has become essential to open a debate on what remains, in many public spaces, a genuine blind spot of our time: our collective relationship with images of human vulnerability.
Breaking this silence does not in any way mean questioning the essential role of journalism, humanitarian action, or international solidarity. These commitments remain indispensable for exposing injustices, mobilizing public awareness, and supporting populations facing crises. Rather, it means raising a fundamental question: how can we continue to bear witness to the world’s most difficult realities while fully preserving the dignity and humanity of those who experience them?
Ignoring this reflection, or choosing not to address it, would mean failing to recognize one of the major responsibilities of our time. For informing is not only about showing what exists. Informing also requires questioning the way we look at, interpret, and transmit what we see.
Through this special study dedicated to the “pornography of poverty,” CPGNNews seeks to contribute to an international reflection on the ethics of the gaze, human dignity in the digital age, and the future of human representation in a world where images now circulate at unprecedented speed and scale.
Why This Investigation, and Why Now?
This editorial article was born out of frustration, inquiry, and conviction.
First, frustration. For several years, as a journalist with CPGNNews and CaribPulse Global News Network, I have reported on humanitarian crises across different regions of the world. I have watched powerful photographs used to mobilize donations, only to disappear from public view even as the situations they depicted continued to deteriorate. I have seen journalists, driven by the best of intentions, produce reports that I knew could never fully do justice to the complexity of the lives they claimed to portray. I have also read comments on social media where compassion sometimes merged with a form of voyeurism that even those expressing it did not fully recognize. This frustration was never an act of judgment. It reflected a deeper unease: that of a profession questioning its own responsibilities in a world where images travel faster than reflection.
Then came the questions. Why do some crises capture the attention of international public opinion while others, equally devastating, remain almost invisible? Why can the face of a single child move the world while statistics concerning millions of people leave it unmoved? Why are humanitarian organizations, whose daily mission is to preserve the dignity of the most vulnerable, compelled to rely on images whose limitations they themselves fully understand? These questions have no simple answers. They led me to undertake this research in the hope of shedding light on mechanisms that we often experience without ever fully understanding how they operate.
Finally, conviction. I remain deeply convinced that information is one of the essential pillars of any democracy. Societies need to know what is happening in the world—including, and perhaps especially, when those realities are painful. Transparency, eyewitness testimony, investigative reporting, and press freedom are fragile achievements that must be defended relentlessly. Yet this conviction does not exempt us from reflecting on how we exercise that freedom. Showing suffering is not, in itself, a moral act. It is the manner in which suffering is portrayed that determines whether an image serves justice or injustice, recognition or humiliation.
This work is the product of several years of research, reading, interviews, and field observation. It owes much to the work of scholars, journalists, humanitarian leaders, and activists who, long before me, examined the distortions inherent in the representation of poverty. It also owes a great deal to conversations I have had with Haitians, Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Americans who, each in their own way, helped me understand that dignity is not an abstract philosophical concept. It is a daily imperative, a struggle that is often silent, and a constant resistance to simplistic representations.
I chose to write this article from the Caribbean—and more specifically from Haiti. That choice is far from incidental. Few regions of the world have experienced the consequences of the external gaze as profoundly. The history of this island—the world’s first independent Black republic, the birthplace of a revolution that transformed the colonial order, a land of resilience and creativity—has too often been reduced to a succession of catastrophes. By writing from this place, I hope to contribute to reclaiming our narratives, broadening perspectives, and acknowledging the complexity of lives that international media sometimes reduce to overly simplistic portrayals.
This article is intended for everyone who has ever looked at a photograph of poverty and questioned the fairness of their own gaze. It is for journalists seeking to reconcile their duty to inform with respect for human dignity. It is for humanitarian leaders who must mobilize resources without turning beneficiaries into instruments of communication. It is for students of international relations preparing to participate in global governance. And finally, it is for citizens who, every day, share images across social media without always realizing the consequences of those seemingly ordinary actions.
This is not a book of moral instruction. Nor is it a manifesto against the media or digital platforms. It is an attempt to understand how the most advanced technologies of our time interact with the deepest mechanisms of human psychology, the most powerful economic interests, and the power structures that shape international relations. To understand in order to act more wisely. To understand in order to see more clearly. To understand so that visibility may cease to be a form of dispossession and finally become a pathway to recognition.
The writing of this article was accompanied by a certainty that gradually became self-evident: societies are defined less by the images they produce than by the way they look at the images they choose to display. A civilization is measured not by the power of its tools, but by its capacity to protect the most vulnerable when they become visible. Dignity is not a favor bestowed. It is a right acknowledged.
This article is an invitation to that recognition.
Gigevelor Bonhomme
Port-au-Prince, July 2026
Why This Reality Can No Longer Be Ignored?
Every era forges the language it needs to understand its own contradictions. During the twentieth century, terms such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and sustainable development gradually became part of the international lexicon because the realities they described demanded new conceptual frameworks. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, another concept has steadily gained prominence in academic, humanitarian, and journalistic circles: poverty porn.
Behind this deliberately provocative expression lies neither rhetorical exaggeration nor a simple moral judgment. Rather, it reflects a growing awareness of a profound transformation in the way contemporary societies perceive human suffering and deprivation.
The choice of the word porn is far from accidental. It is not intended to equate fundamentally different realities, but rather to highlight a common mechanism. In both cases, the individual gradually ceases to be regarded as a human subject endowed with history, identity, and dignity, becoming instead an object designed to provoke an immediate emotional response from the viewer. Just as pornography commodifies the human body, poverty porn commodifies human suffering. The objective is no longer merely to inform or bear witness. It also becomes to elicit an emotional reaction strong enough to generate a click, a share, a donation, a vote, an audience, or a measure of social recognition.
This transformation did not occur overnight. It is the culmination of a long historical process whose origins predate the internet by centuries. From the earliest European colonial expeditions, travel narratives devoted considerable attention to describing the peoples they encountered. Engravings, illustrations, and later photographs gradually constructed an imaginary in which colonized populations were portrayed primarily through the lens of their alleged material deprivation, supposed civilizational backwardness, or dependence upon European powers. These representations served a clear political purpose. They legitimized colonial domination by presenting it as a civilizing mission rather than an enterprise of conquest.
During the nineteenth century, Christian missionary societies developed their own visual language to mobilize public support. Brochures distributed throughout Western parishes frequently featured emaciated children, impoverished villages, and communities portrayed as abandoned to their fate. These images were never intended merely to inform. They also sought to inspire immediate generosity in order to finance missionary work. The intentions were often sincere. Yet the methods established a logic that would only strengthen over time: the more dramatic the suffering appeared, the more effective fundraising became.
The twentieth century ushered in a new phase with the rise of photojournalism and television. World wars, famines, natural disasters, and decolonization conflicts placed the media at the center of how international crises were represented. Certain photographs became iconic because they awakened the conscience of the world. The image of Kim Phúc fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War, photographs documenting the Biafran famine, and images from Nazi concentration camps profoundly shaped global public opinion. They demonstrated that photography could serve as a powerful catalyst for civic engagement and political action.
Yet this success also revealed a fundamental paradox. The more universally moving an image becomes, the greater the risk that it will erase the complexity of the reality it seeks to portray.
The major humanitarian campaigns of the 1980s perfectly illustrate this ambiguity. The Ethiopian famine triggered an unprecedented wave of international solidarity. Broadcast worldwide, the Live Aid concerts raised extraordinary sums to finance emergency relief. No one can dispute the historical significance of that mobilization. Yet subsequent scholarship demonstrated that the images disseminated during those campaigns also helped entrench a lasting perception of Africa as a continent perpetually associated with hunger, dependency, and despair. The continent’s cultural diversity, economic dynamism, political complexity, and remarkable resilience disappeared behind an endless succession of photographs depicting malnourished children, who came to symbolize an entire continent.
This critique gained momentum in the early 2000s, when British universities began using the term poverty porn to analyze certain television programs portraying disadvantaged communities. Researchers observed that these programs devoted far less attention to explaining the structural causes of poverty than to highlighting the most sensational circumstances, the most marginal behaviors, and the most emotionally compelling personal stories in order to capture viewers’ attention. Gradually, poverty ceased to be presented as a complex economic and social issue. Instead, it became a permanent spectacle constructed according to the same narrative conventions that govern entertainment programming.
The arrival of digital platforms accelerated this transformation dramatically. Unlike traditional news organizations, social media platforms do not rely on editorial teams to determine the newsworthiness of information according to professional journalistic standards. Instead, algorithms determine visibility. Their logic is straightforward: the more engagement a post generates, the more widely it is distributed. Images of suffering, distress, and disaster therefore receive disproportionate exposure because they produce more comments, shares, and emotional reactions. Technology does not create poverty. It fundamentally reshapes the way poverty is portrayed, circulated, and consumed.
It would nevertheless be simplistic to attribute this transformation solely to digital platforms. Equally decisive have been the economic changes reshaping the media industry itself. Declining advertising revenues, relentless competition among news organizations, accelerating news cycles, and the constant pursuit of audience attention have created an environment in which emotion increasingly functions as a competitive advantage. Time devoted to investigation, contextualization, and verification steadily diminishes, while instantly viral content proliferates. The photograph that shocks invariably travels farther than the analysis that explains.
The emergence of humanitarian influencers represents another defining development. Thousands of content creators now travel through some of the world’s poorest communities, distributing money, food, or gifts in front of their cameras. Some are driven by genuine generosity. Others seek visibility above all else. Between these two extremes lies a vast ethical gray area where personal motivations become intertwined with the economic incentives created by digital platforms. Every spectacular video attracts new followers. Every new follower generates additional revenue. That revenue finances yet more filmed charitable initiatives. Gradually, an economic model takes shape in which poverty itself becomes the raw material of the global attention economy.
This reality compels scholars to move beyond simplistic moral judgments. Poverty porn cannot be reduced to a handful of reprehensible individual behaviors. It is a systemic phenomenon emerging from the interaction of multiple actors whose interests converge without necessarily being coordinated. Platforms seek to maximize user engagement. Content creators seek visibility. Advertisers seek audiences. Humanitarian organizations seek funding. News organizations seek readership. Political leaders sometimes seek reputational advantage. Each pursues legitimate objectives of its own. Yet together they contribute to a system in which human suffering gradually acquires measurable economic value.
What makes this transformation especially troubling is that it frequently unfolds in the name of values that are themselves profoundly worthy of respect. Solidarity, civic engagement, the struggle against inequality, the defense of human rights, and humanitarian action remain indispensable aspirations. The difficulty arises when these legitimate objectives come to rely upon methods that ultimately reproduce the very dynamics of domination they seek to challenge. A photograph intended to denounce poverty may inadvertently imprison an individual within the identity of a victim. A fundraising campaign may reinforce deeply rooted cultural stereotypes. A video designed to celebrate generosity may, unintentionally, transform a person’s dignity into little more than a narrative device.
It is precisely because this boundary has become so blurred that ethical reflection must now be fundamentally renewed. The conceptual categories inherited from the twentieth century are no longer sufficient to understand a world in which virtually every citizen carries a camera connected to a global network capable of broadcasting any image instantaneously. The traditional distinction between professional journalists and ordinary spectators is rapidly disappearing. Every social media user has become, potentially, a producer of information, a distributor of images, and an actor in shaping public narratives. This new reality imposes a collective responsibility to reconsider the limits of our freedom to represent the suffering of others.
The purpose of this investigation is therefore neither to condemn images of poverty nor to advocate any form of censorship. Democratic societies must confront their own injustices if they hope to overcome them. What they must learn to distinguish, however, are representations that illuminate complex realities from those that exploit human vulnerability as an emotional commodity. Everything ultimately depends upon this distinction. It is determined neither by the technical quality of a photograph nor by the prestige of the news organization that publishes it. It rests upon a far more fundamental question: Does the image contribute to restoring the dignity of the person portrayed, or does it—even unintentionally—participate in stripping that person of it?
This question will serve as the central thread running through every chapter that follows. Before proposing new ethical principles, we must first understand with precision the economic, cultural, technological, and political mechanisms that have transformed poverty into one of the most profitable resources of the global attention economy. The stakes extend far beyond journalism alone. They concern the way contemporary societies choose to look at their own vulnerabilities and, above all, how they choose to safeguard the dignity of those whose voices are too often drowned out by the relentless noise of images.
When Suffering Becomes a Global Attention Economy
Understanding poverty porn requires moving beyond moral outrage to examine the economic mechanisms that fuel its expansion. No industry can thrive sustainably without responding to market forces, satisfying demand, or generating some form of value. If images of human vulnerability occupy such a prominent place across today’s global digital landscape, it is not simply because crises have become more frequent. It is also because they generate a resource that has become more valuable than oil, gold, or strategic raw materials: human attention.
Over the past two decades, economists have popularized an expression that captures this profound transformation: the attention economy. The concept rests on a simple observation. In a world saturated with information, true scarcity no longer lies in content itself. Every day, billions of photographs, videos, articles, and comments are published online. What has become scarce is the amount of time people can devote to them. The world’s largest technology companies therefore do not primarily trade in information. They organize, capture, and monetize our capacity to watch, click, react, and remain engaged.
This paradigm shift has fundamentally transformed the role of the image. For centuries, a photograph was primarily a testimony, a memory, or a document. Today, it is also a measurable economic asset. Every second spent watching a video increases its commercial value. Every comment enhances its algorithmic visibility. Every share expands its reach. Every interaction generates data that fuels advertising systems. An image of human distress is therefore no longer merely a visual narrative. It has become a digital asset whose profitability depends directly on its ability to capture attention.
This logic explains why certain portrayals of poverty achieve extraordinary visibility while others remain virtually unseen. A rigorous analysis of the structural causes of inequality requires time, concentration, and intellectual effort. By contrast, the photograph of a crying child, a displaced family, or someone living in extreme deprivation triggers an immediate emotional response. Emotion precedes reflection. Algorithms interpret that reaction as a signal of engagement and automatically amplify the distribution of such content. A self-reinforcing cycle then takes hold: suffering attracts attention, attention generates revenue, and that revenue encourages the production of more content built around suffering.
It would, however, be mistaken to view this phenomenon as the result of a coordinated strategy aimed at exploiting the most vulnerable. Reality is far more complex. Platforms seek above all to maximize user engagement. Advertisers look for the most effective spaces to reach their audiences. News organizations struggle to preserve their financial viability in an intensely competitive environment. Humanitarian organizations need resources to finance their operations. Content creators seek to expand their audiences in order to sustain their own work. Taken individually, each of these objectives may appear entirely legitimate. Collectively, however, they contribute to a system in which human suffering acquires market value.
Economics offers an illuminating framework for understanding this mechanism. A market is not defined solely by the exchange of tangible goods. It exists whenever one resource can be converted into another form of value. In the digital economy, that resource is attention. Platforms exchange visibility for personal data. Advertisers invest budgets in exchange for audiences. Creators transform their content into subscribers, influence, or revenue. Within this ecosystem, images of poverty sometimes become particularly effective instruments for generating the attention that every participant seeks.
Advances in artificial intelligence further reinforce this dynamic. Recommendation systems do not distinguish content according to its moral value. They evaluate, above all, its statistical capacity to sustain user engagement. A photograph that respects human dignity and one that violates it may be treated identically if both generate comparable levels of interaction. Algorithms reward neither compassion nor cruelty. They reward intensity. Yet this apparent neutrality conceals a profound ethical challenge. In the absence of effective safeguards, emotionally charged content enjoys a structural advantage over material that prioritizes explanation, nuance, and context.
Neuroscience sheds additional light on this phenomenon. The human brain is naturally wired to detect danger, suffering, and distress. This evolutionary mechanism, essential to the survival of our species, explains why dramatic images capture our attention more quickly than ordinary scenes. Digital platforms exploit this biological predisposition without having created it. The more a piece of content activates our primary emotions, the more likely we are to interrupt our scrolling, watch for longer, and engage with it. Repeated across billions of users, this individual behavior becomes one of the most powerful economic engines of the digital ecosystem.
The consequences extend far beyond social media. Twenty-four-hour news channels, digital news outlets, institutional communication campaigns, and even certain philanthropic initiatives now operate within the same attention economy. Competition is no longer based solely on the quality of information. It also depends on its ability to emerge from an uninterrupted stream of competing content. In such an environment, the temptation to prioritize the most spectacular narratives, the most emotionally compelling images, and the most extreme situations becomes increasingly difficult to resist.
This dynamic produces a striking paradox. The more visible humanitarian crises become, the greater the risk that they will eventually be perceived as ordinary events. Scholars refer to this phenomenon as the normalization of suffering, whereby the repeated exposure to dramatic images gradually diminishes their emotional impact. The public does not cease to feel compassion. Rather, compassion becomes increasingly difficult to sustain over time. To maintain attention, ever more powerful images, ever more dramatic narratives, and ever more extreme situations become necessary. The result is a form of emotional inflation that ultimately threatens the quality of public information itself.
The world’s poorest countries bear a disproportionate share of this burden. Their international visibility remains overwhelmingly associated with natural disasters, political crises, armed conflicts, and humanitarian emergencies. By contrast, their economic achievements, scientific advances, artistic creativity, and social innovation receive far less attention. This asymmetry shapes a profoundly unbalanced perception of entire regions of the world. The people concerned cease to be recognized in the full complexity of their societies. Instead, they become, in the eyes of international audiences, the permanent embodiment of poverty, despite belonging to cultures of extraordinary intellectual, economic, and social diversity.
Haiti illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. For decades, the images circulating internationally have focused almost exclusively on natural disasters, insecurity, mass displacement, and extreme poverty. These realities exist and deserve to be documented. They do not, however, define the history of a nation that became the world’s first independent Black republic, profoundly influenced abolitionist movements across the Atlantic, and continues to produce artists, scholars, entrepreneurs, and civil society leaders of remarkable creativity. When the media reduce a country to its tragedies, they do not necessarily lie. They present a partial truth that ultimately becomes a form of symbolic injustice.
That injustice extends well beyond the realm of images. It influences investment, tourism, international cooperation, public policy, and even the way citizens perceive their own country. Repeated representations gradually shape expectations, behaviors, and collective decisions. The attention economy therefore operates far beyond our screens. It actively participates in constructing political, economic, and cultural realities whose consequences may endure for generations.
For this reason, any reflection on poverty porn can no longer be confined to questions of journalistic ethics alone. It has become an issue of global governance. As digital technologies increasingly mediate our understanding of reality, the choices made by platforms, media organizations, humanitarian institutions, and individual citizens shape the way billions of people learn to see the world’s most vulnerable populations. The quality of that collective gaze will directly influence public policy, international solidarity, and the future of digital democracy itself.
The next chapter demonstrates that this responsibility extends well beyond the media and technology companies. It also encompasses humanitarian organizations, which face a constant dilemma: how to mobilize the resources essential for emergency relief while preserving, under all circumstances, the dignity of the very people they are committed to protecting.
Humanitarian Organizations and the Dilemma of Dignity
The history of humanitarian action is inseparable from the history of photography. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, images have been among the most powerful drivers of international solidarity. They have revealed forgotten famines, mass displacement, epidemics, armed conflicts, and natural disasters that would otherwise have remained largely invisible. Without such visual testimony, many emergency appeals would never have secured the resources needed to save millions of lives. This reality explains the unique relationship humanitarian organizations have with imagery: they understand both its extraordinary power to mobilize and its inherent risks.
Today, this paradox lies at the heart of one of the most significant ethical debates within the humanitarian sector. How can organizations capture the attention of an audience overwhelmed by information without reducing those they serve to the suffering they endure? How can they persuade donors to support emergency interventions without making vulnerability the centerpiece of their communication? How can they convey the severity of a crisis without confining entire communities to a permanent identity of distress? These questions are no longer merely theoretical. They now shape the day-to-day decisions of the world’s leading humanitarian organizations.
For much of the twentieth century, the answer seemed relatively straightforward. The more vividly a campaign illustrated the scale of a catastrophe, the more rapidly it generated financial support. Images of children suffering from malnutrition, displaced families, or devastated villages elicited immediate responses from public opinion. The intention was profoundly humanitarian: to make suffering visible in order to inspire solidarity. Yet this strategy often produced consequences that proved more ambiguous than originally anticipated.
As research in communication, anthropology, and sociology expanded, numerous studies demonstrated that some campaigns, despite their best intentions, contributed to confining the people they portrayed within a reductive narrative. Those depicted rarely appeared as individuals capable of shaping their own future. More often, they were presented as passive recipients waiting for international assistance to arrive. Even when driven by legitimate fundraising objectives, this narrative framework contributed to an imbalanced representation of the societies concerned.
The problem was not that these images were inaccurate. In most cases, they faithfully documented realities observed in the field. Their limitation lay in their unavoidable selectivity. A photograph captures a single moment; it never tells an entire story. When an organization predominantly disseminates faces marked by hunger, illness, or despair, it may unintentionally suggest that these realities define an entire population. Essential dimensions of collective life—local solidarity, civic initiatives, technical expertise, organizational capacity, and remarkable resilience—disappear from view.
This growing awareness prompted many international organizations to fundamentally rethink their communication practices. Beginning in the 1990s, a number of NGOs adopted internal guidelines governing the use of images. The informed consent of those photographed, respect for their dignity, careful contextualization, and the rejection of degrading representations gradually became core principles of humanitarian communication. This evolution, however, was far from uncontested. Many feared that more balanced portrayals would weaken fundraising campaigns and ultimately jeopardize life-saving operations.
These debates were particularly intense within major humanitarian organizations. Program teams warned that declining financial support could have immediate and devastating consequences in the field. Ethics specialists countered that assistance secured at the cost of lasting harm to the dignity of beneficiaries raised an equally serious moral concern. That tension remains one of the most complex dilemmas confronting contemporary humanitarian action.
Digital technologies have made this challenge even more profound. A photograph published in a printed brochure in the early 1980s had limited circulation and a relatively short lifespan. Today, an image uploaded to the internet can be copied, downloaded, shared, archived, altered, and redistributed indefinitely. The person portrayed loses almost all control over the future use of their image. Even when an organization rigorously respects standards of informed consent, nothing guarantees that a photograph will not later be reused, stripped of its context, or appropriated for purposes entirely unrelated to its original intent.
This digital permanence fundamentally transforms the responsibility of humanitarian actors. Photographing a child in a displacement camp no longer simply documents an immediate humanitarian emergency. That image may continue circulating long after the child has reached adulthood. It may reappear in search engine results, academic publications, digital archives, or future awareness campaigns decades after the crisis itself has ended. What began as a temporary emergency can therefore result in permanent public exposure—an exposure that may, in some cases, prove irreversible.
Organizations most deeply engaged in this ethical reflection have gradually come to understand that dignity extends far beyond the absence of humiliation. It also requires recognizing the autonomy, agency, and full humanity of the people represented. To portray a community solely through the lens of its material needs is to overlook its knowledge, aspirations, traditions, systems of organization, and capacity for self-determination. Truly respectful communication therefore involves more than avoiding shocking imagery. It seeks to restore the complexity of human lives and to recognize people as protagonists of their own history rather than merely as recipients of assistance.
This evolution marks a decisive break with certain practices inherited from the previous century. The objective is no longer simply to evoke compassion but to cultivate a more balanced relationship between donors and the communities they support. International solidarity is no longer presented as a one-way movement in which the privileged rescue the disadvantaged. Instead, it is increasingly understood as a partnership founded on shared responsibility, mutual recognition, and respect for local capacities.
This transformation is also reflected in the language adopted by international organizations. Expressions referring to “passive victims” or “dependent populations” are gradually giving way to a vocabulary centered on rights, participation, resilience, and empowerment. At first glance, this may appear to be little more than a linguistic adjustment. In reality, it signals a much deeper transformation. Language shapes collective perception. Changing the words we use also changes the way we perceive the people those words describe.
The challenge, however, remains immense. Digital platforms continue to privilege content that provokes the strongest emotional reactions. Campaigns that present more nuanced portrayals often struggle to achieve the visibility of those built around more dramatic images of suffering. Humanitarian organizations therefore face a permanent contradiction. They must capture public attention to finance their work while rejecting communication practices that risk undermining the dignity of the very individuals they seek to protect.
This contradiction cannot be resolved by any single group of actors. It calls for a collective effort involving humanitarian organizations, news organizations, researchers, digital platforms, public authorities, and citizens alike. Responsibility for representation no longer rests solely with those who create images. It also belongs to those who select them, distribute them, share them, comment on them, and monetize them. Every editorial decision, every social media share, and every algorithmic recommendation now contributes to shaping the collective perception of poverty and of the world’s most vulnerable populations.
The future of humanitarian action will depend, to a significant extent, on our ability to meet this challenge. A democratic society cannot accept that human suffering should become merely another instrument of communication. Nor can it afford to turn away from the crises affecting the world’s most vulnerable communities. Between invisibility and spectacle lies a more demanding path—one grounded in truth, respect, and the recognition of the equal dignity of every human being. It is this path that humanitarian institutions, news organizations, and digital platforms must now work together to build.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, immersive media, and generative technologies makes this responsibility more urgent than ever. The tools capable of creating, transforming, and disseminating images at unprecedented speed offer extraordinary opportunities to inform, educate, and mobilize. Yet they also create new possibilities for manipulation, decontextualization, and the exploitation of human vulnerability. The more powerful technology becomes, the stronger our ethical obligations must be.
The fundamental question is therefore no longer whether suffering should be shown. Humanitarian crises must be documented, explained, and brought into public view. The real challenge is determining how they should be represented. Every act of representation carries responsibility. An image can imprison a person within the identity of a victim, or it can affirm that person’s dignity, history, agency, and humanity. It is in this choice—made every day by journalists, photographers, humanitarian organizations, digital platforms, and ordinary citizens—that one of the defining ethical questions of twenty-first-century information is ultimately decided.
The Right to One’s Image, Human Dignity, and the New Frontiers of International Law
For centuries, the law primarily sought to protect individuals against physical violence, unlawful detention, arbitrary deprivation of property, or violations of personal liberty. The emergence of photography, followed by mass media and, more recently, digital technologies, has introduced an entirely new challenge: protecting individuals not only against harm inflicted upon their bodies, but also against the misuse of their image, identity, and dignity.
Today, the circulation of a single photograph can cross continents in a matter of seconds, reaching millions of viewers before the person depicted is even aware that the image exists online. This unprecedented reality has profoundly altered the relationship between law, technology, and fundamental rights. It has also revealed a significant gap between the extraordinary speed of technological innovation and the much slower pace at which legal systems evolve.
The concept of the right to one’s image is not entirely new. Long before the digital age, many legal systems recognized that every individual possesses a legitimate interest in controlling the use of their likeness. Originally, however, this protection was designed primarily to prevent unauthorized commercial exploitation or unwarranted invasions of privacy. Few lawmakers anticipated a world in which billions of people would carry permanently connected cameras capable of broadcasting images instantaneously to a global audience.
The digital revolution has transformed what was once an individual legal concern into an issue of global governance. A photograph taken in one country may be uploaded from another, stored on servers located in several jurisdictions, processed by artificial intelligence systems developed elsewhere, and viewed almost simultaneously across every continent. Determining which legal framework applies has therefore become increasingly complex. National laws stop at national borders; digital images do not.
International human rights law nevertheless provides a number of essential principles. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that every person is born free and equal in dignity and rights. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognizes the right to privacy and protection against arbitrary interference with one’s personal life. Regional instruments—including the European Convention on Human Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights—reinforce these protections in different legal contexts.
Although these instruments were drafted before the emergence of social media and artificial intelligence, their underlying principles remain remarkably relevant. Human dignity is not diminished by technological progress. If anything, the digital age has made its protection even more essential.
The challenge lies in translating these broad principles into practical standards capable of addressing entirely new realities. Is the publication of a photograph showing a vulnerable individual always justified if it serves the public interest? Does informed consent remain meaningful when the future uses of an image cannot reasonably be predicted? Can a person truly withdraw consent once an image has been copied thousands of times across multiple digital platforms? Existing legal frameworks offer only partial answers to these questions.
Children present perhaps the clearest example of this legal and ethical dilemma. International law grants children enhanced protection precisely because they cannot always appreciate the long-term consequences of decisions made on their behalf. Yet countless images of children affected by poverty, conflict, displacement, or humanitarian crises continue to circulate online indefinitely. Years later, those same individuals may discover that some of the most vulnerable moments of their childhood remain permanently accessible through search engines and digital archives.
The issue extends well beyond children. Adults experiencing extreme poverty, homelessness, displacement, illness, or psychological distress often find themselves in situations where genuine consent is difficult to establish. A person facing immediate survival needs may agree to be photographed without fully understanding how that image might later be used, monetized, manipulated, or permanently archived. Legally valid consent does not necessarily guarantee ethically meaningful consent.
Artificial intelligence introduces an additional layer of complexity. Images no longer remain static records of reality. They can now be enhanced, altered, combined, or entirely synthesized. Generative AI systems can produce realistic images depicting people who never existed or modify authentic photographs in ways that become almost impossible to detect. At the same time, facial recognition technologies can identify individuals across vast digital databases, linking photographs to personal information without their knowledge or permission.
These developments raise questions that extend beyond traditional privacy law. They concern identity itself. If an individual’s image can be reproduced, manipulated, and redistributed indefinitely by autonomous systems, what remains of that person’s control over their own digital presence? Protecting one’s image increasingly means protecting one’s identity, reputation, autonomy, and dignity in environments where information never truly disappears.
Courts around the world have begun confronting these challenges. Landmark decisions increasingly recognize that digital technologies amplify the potential harm caused by unauthorized image dissemination. Several jurisdictions have strengthened protections concerning biometric data, facial recognition, and the “right to be forgotten,” allowing individuals under certain conditions to request the removal of outdated or harmful personal information from search engines. Yet these legal innovations remain fragmented and unevenly enforced across jurisdictions.
The international dimension further complicates enforcement. A platform headquartered in one country may operate under legal standards entirely different from those of the country where the photographed individual resides. Humanitarian organizations, journalists, technology companies, and governments often navigate multiple legal systems simultaneously, each imposing different obligations concerning privacy, consent, freedom of expression, and the public interest. What is permissible under one legal framework may constitute a violation under another.
For this reason, many legal scholars argue that existing human rights instruments should be interpreted dynamically rather than narrowly. Human dignity, they contend, is not a static concept confined to the circumstances envisioned by lawmakers decades ago. It is a living principle capable of guiding responses to technological developments that could never have been anticipated when these treaties were drafted.
Increasingly, discussions are shifting from legal compliance alone toward broader questions of ethical responsibility. An action may be lawful while remaining ethically questionable. Publishing the photograph of a vulnerable individual may violate no statute, yet still undermine that person’s dignity. Conversely, choosing not to publish certain images may reflect not censorship, but editorial judgment grounded in respect for fundamental human rights.
This evolution suggests that the future of international law will depend not only on new legislation but also on the development of shared ethical norms governing the production, circulation, and consumption of digital images. Governments alone cannot regulate a global ecosystem shaped simultaneously by technology companies, news organizations, humanitarian institutions, artificial intelligence developers, civil society, and billions of ordinary users.
Ultimately, the question is not whether technology should continue to expand humanity’s capacity to document reality. It undoubtedly should. The challenge is ensuring that technological progress strengthens rather than weakens the principles upon which democratic societies are founded. Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the public’s right to know, and the protection of human dignity must never be viewed as competing values. They are complementary principles that derive their legitimacy from one another.
As the digital age continues to redefine the boundaries between public visibility and private life, protecting the right to one’s image is becoming far more than a matter of individual privacy. It is emerging as one of the defining human rights challenges of the twenty-first century—a challenge that will shape not only the future of journalism and humanitarian action, but also the moral foundations of the global digital society we are collectively building.
The Right to One’s Image, Human Dignity, and the New Frontiers of International Law
The rise of digital technologies has profoundly disrupted the balance that once existed between freedom of information and respect for privacy. For much of the twentieth century, the circulation of a photograph remained relatively limited. An image published in a newspaper or magazine could reach a broad audience, but its existence remained tied to a physical medium, a specific period, and a defined geographical space. Archives certainly existed, but accessing them remained exceptional. An image could define its era without continuing to follow indefinitely the person depicted in it.
The digital environment has eliminated this natural limitation. Today, a photograph taken within seconds can be reproduced endlessly, copied onto thousands of servers, indexed by search engines, analyzed by artificial intelligence systems, translated into multiple languages, incorporated into commercial or academic databases, and continue circulating decades after its initial publication. This permanence fundamentally transforms the legal and moral significance of every image. Photographing a person in a vulnerable situation no longer consists solely of documenting an event. It also creates a digital trace capable of accompanying that individual throughout their entire life.
This technological transformation requires the law to evolve at an unprecedented pace. Fundamental principles, however, remain relatively stable. Human dignity, respect for privacy, freedom of expression, and the right to information continue to constitute the foundations of contemporary democracies. What changes, however, is the manner in which these principles interact within an environment where data circulates instantly across the world, often beyond the reach of national legal systems.
Human dignity occupies a unique place within this legal architecture. Unlike other fundamental rights, it depends neither on nationality, social status, nor economic resources. It is inherent to every human being. Following the tragedies of the twentieth century, the international community made it the foundation of numerous legal instruments designed to prevent all forms of dehumanization. Constitutions, international conventions, and judicial decisions consistently affirm that no individual may be reduced to the status of an object or used merely as a means to serve another purpose.
This principle, relatively straightforward in a world dominated by printed media, becomes far more complex within the digital environment. A photograph intended to raise public awareness of a humanitarian crisis may simultaneously serve a legitimate purpose and, despite the best intentions, undermine the dignity of the person represented. The law is therefore confronted with a fundamental question: at what point does the faithful representation of reality become its instrumentalization?
The answers vary according to legal traditions. Yet a gradual convergence is emerging. Courts increasingly consider the context in which an image is produced, the consent of the person concerned, the purpose pursued, the proportionality of its dissemination, and the foreseeable consequences of that dissemination. The analysis is therefore no longer limited to the photograph itself. It now encompasses the entire life cycle of the image, from its creation to its worldwide circulation.
Consent naturally constitutes one of the first criteria of assessment. Yet granting it absolute value would be insufficient. In situations of extreme poverty, natural disasters, forced displacement, or humanitarian crises, the relationship of power between the photographer and the person photographed is rarely balanced. Can consent be considered fully free when a family depends on assistance provided by the organization producing the images? Does a person living in a displacement camp truly understand the consequences of the global dissemination of their image on social media platforms? Can they anticipate that this photograph may be copied, analyzed by facial recognition software, or reused in contexts entirely unrelated to the circumstances in which they agreed to be photographed? These questions demonstrate that consent, although indispensable, cannot by itself constitute a sufficient guarantee.
This reflection has led legal scholars to favor a more demanding approach based on the principle of dignity. From this perspective, a photograph does not become acceptable solely because authorization has been granted. It must also preserve the moral integrity of the person represented and avoid reducing their identity to a condition of vulnerability. An image may be legally permissible while remaining ethically questionable. Long underestimated, this distinction now occupies a central place in international debates.
The development of artificial intelligence further intensifies these concerns. Systems capable of automatically extracting information from millions of images transform every photograph into a potential source of data. A face captured within a humanitarian context may thus contribute to training databases intended for applications entirely unrelated to the mission that originally justified its collection. Advances in facial recognition, behavioral analysis, and predictive technologies now make possible uses that no photographer could have imagined only fifteen years ago. The risk therefore no longer lies solely in the public dissemination of an image. It also concerns the invisible processing to which that image may be subjected, often without the knowledge of the person concerned.
This evolution has led several international institutions to advocate for a more ambitious conception of digital rights. The issue is no longer limited to protecting privacy in its traditional sense. It has become necessary to guarantee every individual genuine control over the information that contributes to shaping their digital identity. This reflection is closely linked to the emergence of the right to erasure, often referred to as the right to be forgotten, which recognizes that certain personal data should not remain accessible indefinitely when their retention causes a disproportionate infringement of fundamental rights.
It is within this context that the concept of digital dignity is gradually emerging. It may be defined as the right recognized to every individual to preserve, within the digital environment, the same level of respect, autonomy, protection, and control over their identity as they enjoy in the physical world. It implies that technologies, institutions, and practices must not reduce a human being to a mere piece of data, an object of exploitation, or a vehicle for representation, but must guarantee, under all circumstances, respect for their personality, integrity, and fundamental rights. Although this concept does not yet have a universally recognized definition under international law, it is progressively establishing itself as one of the foundational concepts of contemporary digital governance.
Populations living in situations of vulnerability remain particularly exposed to these emerging risks. They are often the ones with the most limited means to exercise their digital rights, request the removal of a photograph, or initiate legal proceedings against the abusive use of their image. A new form of inequality is therefore emerging. People who are already economically vulnerable are becoming the most exposed within the global digital space as well. The divide is no longer limited to income, access to technology, or education. It is also becoming legal, informational, and digital.
This reality requires states to reconsider their responsibilities. For a long time, the protection of dignity fell primarily within the scope of civil law or press law. It now involves digital law, international law, data protection, cybersecurity, and platform regulation. The boundaries between these fields are gradually becoming less distinct in favor of a more integrated approach, in which the protection of the human person becomes the point of convergence among several branches of law.
This evolution does not in any way mean that freedom of information should be restricted. On the contrary, free information can only sustainably fulfill its mission if it inspires trust. This trust rests on the certainty that the pursuit of truth is never carried out at the expense of respect for the human person. The more powerful technologies become, the more this requirement becomes an essential condition of democratic legitimacy.
The representation of poverty therefore ceases to be merely a matter of journalistic ethics. It becomes a genuine issue of global governance. The decisions made today by courts, legislators, international institutions, and technology companies will contribute to defining how future generations understand the relationship between information, freedom, and human dignity.
Law nevertheless remains a tool, not an end in itself. It establishes limits, creates safeguards, and provides remedies. On its own, however, it cannot transform collective perceptions, cultural practices, or the economic mechanisms that structure the global circulation of images. Legal standards can regulate behavior; they are not sufficient to change the way societies perceive vulnerability.
To understand why certain representations continue to prevail despite advances in law, it is now necessary to explore another territory: the psychological mechanisms that shape our perception. If images of poverty exert such powerful attraction, it is also because they activate profound mechanisms of human cognition. They simultaneously engage empathy, fear, feelings of guilt, the need for protection, and the search for meaning in the face of another person’s suffering. These reactions, extensively studied by neuroscience, social psychology, and anthropology, help explain why contemporary societies remain so sensitive to representations of human vulnerability.
The following section will demonstrate that these mechanisms arise neither from chance nor solely from culture. They also originate in the functioning of the human brain. Understanding the cognitive processes that guide our perception constitutes an essential step toward developing an ethics of the image founded not only on law, but also on a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that influence our emotions, judgments, and behaviors.
Key References: The Main International Instruments Protecting Digital Dignity
The protection of image rights, privacy, and dignity within the digital environment today relies on a set of complementary legal instruments. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) affirms, in Article 12, the right of every person to protection of their private life. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) prohibits arbitrary interference with privacy and protects the reputation of individuals. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) strengthens this protection by placing particular emphasis on minors and their exposure in the media.
These instruments have been complemented by texts specifically devoted to the digital environment. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (2016) established the right to erasure of certain personal data and strengthened requirements relating to consent. The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, revised in 2022, expanded mechanisms for international cooperation concerning digital data. More recently, the European Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), adopted in 2024, introduced new obligations regarding transparency, risk management, and accountability for artificial intelligence systems.
Taken individually, these instruments pursue distinct objectives. Together, they outline the emerging contours of an international law of digital dignity, which is expected to play a central role in the protection of fundamental rights in the twenty-first century. The challenge is no longer limited to protecting personal data, but rather to ensuring that digital technologies remain at the service of the human person and respect, under all circumstances, their dignity, autonomy, and integrity.
Why Do We Look at Suffering?
The Psychological Mechanisms of Empathy and Voyeurism
The history of humanity is also the history of its gaze. From the earliest cave paintings to contemporary digital platforms, societies have never ceased to represent suffering. Battles, famines, epidemics, public executions, natural disasters, and individual tragedies occupy an important place in our visual heritage. This persistence raises a fundamental question. Why do human beings feel such a profound need to look at the pain of others? Does this attraction stem from compassion, curiosity, survival instincts, or from far more complex psychological mechanisms?
No single discipline can answer this question alone. Neuroscience, social psychology, anthropology, and moral philosophy increasingly converge toward the same conclusion: human beings are biologically predisposed to pay particular attention to situations of distress. This predisposition does not represent a weakness of our species. On the contrary, it constitutes one of the foundations of human evolution. For hundreds of thousands of years, the ability to quickly identify an injured individual, an imminent danger, or an exceptional situation increased the chances of group survival. The human brain gradually specialized in detecting anything that disrupts normality.
This mechanism remains fully active, even though our environment has profoundly changed. When a person scrolls through content on a smartphone, the brain continues to respond with remarkable speed to faces expressing fear, pain, or sadness. Such images interrupt the movement of the gaze more easily than ordinary scenes. They immediately engage attention networks, activate emotional circuits, and often trigger measurable physiological responses. This sensitivity partly explains why content depicting suffering receives greater visibility on digital platforms. Algorithms do not create this reaction. They exploit a characteristic deeply rooted in human cognitive functioning.
However, attention must never be confused with compassion. Observing a person in difficulty does not necessarily mean wanting to help them. Psychologists have long distinguished several forms of empathy. Emotional empathy refers to the ability to feel, at least partially, the emotions experienced by others. Cognitive empathy refers to the ability to understand what another person is experiencing without necessarily sharing their emotional state. Finally, a third dimension, less frequently discussed, concerns the transition to action. Feeling sadness in response to an image does not automatically imply a willingness to intervene. Between emotion and commitment stand values, beliefs, education, social norms, and individual interests.
This distinction is essential to understanding the limitations of communication strategies based exclusively on emotional shock. A deeply disturbing photograph may provoke an immediate reaction without producing any lasting change. The most intense emotions are often the shortest-lived. They capture attention powerfully before fading with the arrival of new stimuli. Digital platforms, which constantly renew the content offered to users, further intensify this volatility. Today’s suffering is quickly replaced by tomorrow’s, and then by another tragedy after that. Emotion circulates. Commitment, however, often remains temporary.
Researchers in social psychology describe this phenomenon as emotional saturation. The more individuals are exposed to images of distress, the more their psychological systems develop protective mechanisms designed to prevent permanent emotional exhaustion. This adaptation is essential for mental balance. No human being could sustainably endure continuous exposure to the tragedies of the world without developing a certain emotional distance. Yet this mechanism creates a paradox. Images intended to awaken solidarity may gradually diminish our ability to experience that same solidarity.
Compassion fatigue does not mean that societies are becoming more indifferent. It primarily reveals the natural limits of our capacity to process a large number of individual sufferings simultaneously. The human brain reacts more intensely when it can identify a specific person, understand their story, and recognize the causes of their situation. Conversely, when victims become countless, anonymous, or interchangeable, emotional engagement tends to decline. This is why certain individual narratives generate stronger responses than statistics that are far more alarming. A personal story possesses a narrative power that large numbers often struggle to achieve.
This reality places the media and humanitarian organizations before a major challenge. How can the scale of a catastrophe be conveyed without transforming victims into an indistinguishable mass? How can the humanity of each individual be preserved when crises sometimes affect hundreds of thousands of people? The answer probably does not lie in multiplying the most shocking images. Rather, it requires another way of telling stories. Vulnerable individuals must appear not only as victims, but also as citizens, parents, workers, students, artists, or community leaders whose existence cannot be reduced to a moment of suffering.
Another psychological dimension also deserves attention. Cognitive sciences show that individuals spontaneously interpret images through their own representations of the world. A photograph never communicates only what it displays. It also activates pre-existing beliefs, memories, stereotypes, and collective narratives already present in the viewer’s mind. Two people looking at exactly the same image may therefore attribute profoundly different meanings to it depending on their personal history, level of education, or cultural environment.
The gaze is therefore never passive. Seeing is an intellectual activity. Every photograph is interpreted before it is understood. When certain groups of people are repeatedly represented from a single perspective, these representations eventually become deeply embedded within the public’s mental frameworks. Prejudices do not always emerge from explicitly discriminatory statements. They are often constructed through the accumulation of incomplete narratives that, over time, acquire the appearance of objective truths.
Digital platforms amplify this dynamic through the very operation of their recommendation systems. Users receive more content similar to the material with which they have previously interacted. This process gradually creates homogeneous informational environments in which certain representations reinforce one another. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as confirmation loops. Users no longer see the world only as it exists. They increasingly see the world as algorithms determine they are likely to want to see it. This personalization of information, particularly effective from a commercial perspective, contributes to freezing simplified perceptions of poverty, migration, conflicts, and social inequalities.
The question of voyeurism therefore appears in a new light. It is no longer limited to the pleasure of observing the suffering of others. Contemporary voyeurism also takes the form of a continuous consumption of intense emotions, encouraged by digital architectures that reward immediate curiosity rather than deeper understanding. The viewer does not necessarily seek to humiliate the person being observed. Yet they participate in a system where emotional intensity becomes a commodity, where visibility is transformed into revenue, and where the most spectacular narratives gain a structural advantage over complex analyses.
This evolution invites a reconsideration of the role of education. Educating citizens in the twenty-first century no longer consists only of teaching them how to read, write, or verify sources. It has become equally essential to develop a genuine education of the gaze. Understanding how an image is produced, why it triggers certain emotions, what economic interests may accompany its circulation, and which realities remain invisible has become a fundamental democratic skill. A society capable of interpreting images with discernment is also a society less vulnerable to manipulation, stereotypes, and new forms of misinformation.
The pornography of poverty therefore does not thrive solely because certain actors choose to produce questionable images. It also develops because it encounters deeply human psychological dispositions that contemporary economic models know how to exploit on a massive scale. Understanding these mechanisms does not mean condemning our empathy. On the contrary, it allows us to better protect empathy from systems that seek to transform it into a mere commercial resource.
These individual mechanisms do not remain confined to the private sphere. They accumulate at the level of entire societies. When millions of people observe, interpret, and share the same images of suffering, their reactions eventually shape collective memory. What is at stake is no longer only our empathy, but also the way peoples remember themselves and how they are perceived by the rest of the world. This memorial dimension is essential for understanding why certain representations endure over time while others disappear almost without leaving a trace.
The history of humanity is also the history of its gaze. From the earliest cave paintings to contemporary digital platforms, societies have never ceased to represent suffering. Battles, famines, epidemics, public executions, natural disasters, and individual tragedies occupy an important place in our visual heritage. This persistence raises a fundamental question. Why do human beings feel such a profound need to look at the pain of others? Does this attraction stem from compassion, curiosity, survival instincts, or from far more complex psychological mechanisms?
No single discipline can answer this question alone. Neuroscience, social psychology, anthropology, and moral philosophy increasingly converge toward the same conclusion: human beings are biologically predisposed to pay particular attention to situations of distress. This predisposition does not represent a weakness of our species. On the contrary, it constitutes one of the foundations of human evolution. For hundreds of thousands of years, the ability to quickly identify an injured individual, an imminent danger, or an exceptional situation increased the chances of group survival. The human brain gradually specialized in detecting anything that disrupts normality.
This mechanism remains fully active, even though our environment has profoundly changed. When a person scrolls through content on a smartphone, the brain continues to respond with remarkable speed to faces expressing fear, pain, or sadness. Such images interrupt the movement of the gaze more easily than ordinary scenes. They immediately engage attention networks, activate emotional circuits, and often trigger measurable physiological responses. This sensitivity partly explains why content depicting suffering receives greater visibility on digital platforms. Algorithms do not create this reaction. They exploit a characteristic deeply rooted in human cognitive functioning.
However, attention must never be confused with compassion. Observing a person in difficulty does not necessarily mean wanting to help them. Psychologists have long distinguished several forms of empathy. Emotional empathy refers to the ability to feel, at least partially, the emotions experienced by others. Cognitive empathy refers to the ability to understand what another person is experiencing without necessarily sharing their emotional state. Finally, a third dimension, less frequently discussed, concerns the transition to action. Feeling sadness in response to an image does not automatically imply a willingness to intervene. Between emotion and commitment stand values, beliefs, education, social norms, and individual interests.
This distinction is essential to understanding the limitations of communication strategies based exclusively on emotional shock. A deeply disturbing photograph may provoke an immediate reaction without producing any lasting change. The most intense emotions are often the shortest-lived. They capture attention powerfully before fading with the arrival of new stimuli. Digital platforms, which constantly renew the content offered to users, further intensify this volatility. Today’s suffering is quickly replaced by tomorrow’s, and then by another tragedy after that. Emotion circulates. Commitment, however, often remains temporary.
Researchers in social psychology describe this phenomenon as emotional saturation. The more individuals are exposed to images of distress, the more their psychological systems develop protective mechanisms designed to prevent permanent emotional exhaustion. This adaptation is essential for mental balance. No human being could sustainably endure continuous exposure to the tragedies of the world without developing a certain emotional distance. Yet this mechanism creates a paradox. Images intended to awaken solidarity may gradually diminish our ability to experience that same solidarity.
Compassion fatigue does not mean that societies are becoming more indifferent. It primarily reveals the natural limits of our capacity to process a large number of individual sufferings simultaneously. The human brain reacts more intensely when it can identify a specific person, understand their story, and recognize the causes of their situation. Conversely, when victims become countless, anonymous, or interchangeable, emotional engagement tends to decline. This is why certain individual narratives generate stronger responses than statistics that are far more alarming. A personal story possesses a narrative power that large numbers often struggle to achieve.
This reality places the media and humanitarian organizations before a major challenge. How can the scale of a catastrophe be conveyed without transforming victims into an indistinguishable mass? How can the humanity of each individual be preserved when crises sometimes affect hundreds of thousands of people? The answer probably does not lie in multiplying the most shocking images. Rather, it requires another way of telling stories. Vulnerable individuals must appear not only as victims, but also as citizens, parents, workers, students, artists, or community leaders whose existence cannot be reduced to a moment of suffering.
Another psychological dimension also deserves attention. Cognitive sciences show that individuals spontaneously interpret images through their own representations of the world. A photograph never communicates only what it displays. It also activates pre-existing beliefs, memories, stereotypes, and collective narratives already present in the viewer’s mind. Two people looking at exactly the same image may therefore attribute profoundly different meanings to it depending on their personal history, level of education, or cultural environment.
The gaze is therefore never passive. Seeing is an intellectual activity. Every photograph is interpreted before it is understood. When certain groups of people are repeatedly represented from a single perspective, these representations eventually become deeply embedded within the public’s mental frameworks. Prejudices do not always emerge from explicitly discriminatory statements. They are often constructed through the accumulation of incomplete narratives that, over time, acquire the appearance of objective truths.
Digital platforms amplify this dynamic through the very operation of their recommendation systems. Users receive more content similar to the material with which they have previously interacted. This process gradually creates homogeneous informational environments in which certain representations reinforce one another. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as confirmation loops. Users no longer see the world only as it exists. They increasingly see the world as algorithms determine they are likely to want to see it. This personalization of information, particularly effective from a commercial perspective, contributes to freezing simplified perceptions of poverty, migration, conflicts, and social inequalities.
The question of voyeurism therefore appears in a new light. It is no longer limited to the pleasure of observing the suffering of others. Contemporary voyeurism also takes the form of a continuous consumption of intense emotions, encouraged by digital architectures that reward immediate curiosity rather than deeper understanding. The viewer does not necessarily seek to humiliate the person being observed. Yet they participate in a system where emotional intensity becomes a commodity, where visibility is transformed into revenue, and where the most spectacular narratives gain a structural advantage over complex analyses.
This evolution invites a reconsideration of the role of education. Educating citizens in the twenty-first century no longer consists only of teaching them how to read, write, or verify sources. It has become equally essential to develop a genuine education of the gaze. Understanding how an image is produced, why it triggers certain emotions, what economic interests may accompany its circulation, and which realities remain invisible has become a fundamental democratic skill. A society capable of interpreting images with discernment is also a society less vulnerable to manipulation, stereotypes, and new forms of misinformation.
The pornography of poverty therefore does not thrive solely because certain actors choose to produce questionable images. It also develops because it encounters deeply human psychological dispositions that contemporary economic models know how to exploit on a massive scale. Understanding these mechanisms does not mean condemning our empathy. On the contrary, it allows us to better protect empathy from systems that seek to transform it into a mere commercial resource.
These individual mechanisms do not remain confined to the private sphere. They accumulate at the level of entire societies. When millions of people observe, interpret, and share the same images of suffering, their reactions eventually shape collective memory. What is at stake is no longer only our empathy, but also the way peoples remember themselves and how they are perceived by the rest of the world. This memorial dimension is essential for understanding why certain representations endure over time while others disappear almost without leaving a trace.
Why Do We Look at Suffering?
The Psychological Mechanisms of Empathy, Voyeurism, and the Emotional Economy
If the pornography of poverty has become a global phenomenon today, it is because it does not rely solely on editorial choices, communication strategies, or economic interests. It also originates in the way the human brain functions. Digital platforms, media organizations, and humanitarian institutions sometimes exploit, consciously or unconsciously, psychological mechanisms deeply rooted in human evolution. Understanding these mechanisms does not mean condemning human nature. On the contrary, it allows us to better understand why certain images capture our attention with such intensity, while others disappear almost immediately from our memory.
For several decades, neuroscience has shown that the human brain does not assign equal importance to all the information it receives. Its primary objective is not the pursuit of truth, but the preservation of survival. Long before the emergence of modern societies, our ancestors had to identify, within fractions of a second, threats capable of endangering their existence. This rapid selection of information remains at the core of our cognitive functioning today. An expression of pain, a worried face, or a scene of disaster spontaneously activates neural circuits specialized in detecting danger. This biological reflex explains why images of suffering so easily interrupt our browsing on social media platforms.
Digital platforms did not create this predisposition. They transformed it into an economic model. Recommendation systems constantly analyze user reactions in order to identify content capable of holding attention for longer periods. Every pause in scrolling, every click, every share, and every comment is interpreted as a signal of interest. Algorithms do not distinguish compassion from voyeurism, nor solidarity from morbid curiosity. They measure only the intensity of engagement. As a result, the most emotionally powerful content receives a structural advantage in the global competition for visibility.
This reality does not mean that human beings naturally seek the suffering of others. On the contrary, social psychology research shows that our initial reaction when confronted with a person in distress is often empathetic. However, empathy has several dimensions that must be distinguished. Emotional empathy consists of experiencing part of the emotions felt by another person. Cognitive empathy allows us to understand someone’s situation without necessarily sharing their emotional state. Finally, behavioral empathy leads to concrete action aimed at alleviating that suffering. These three dimensions do not always coincide. An image may generate intense emotion without producing any lasting action.
This distinction highlights one of the main limitations of communication campaigns based exclusively on emotional shock. Emotions are powerful accelerators of attention, but they are rarely solid foundations for long-term commitment. A disturbing photograph may trigger an immediate wave of reactions, generate millions of shares, and disappear only a few hours later into the continuous flow of new publications. Emotion circulates rapidly. It becomes much more difficult for it to take root.
Researchers describe this phenomenon as compassion fatigue. The more individuals are exposed to images of distress, the more they unconsciously develop mechanisms designed to preserve their psychological balance. This adaptation is essential. No human being could sustainably endure permanent exposure to the tragedies of the world. Yet this protective mechanism produces a paradox. Images intended to awaken solidarity may gradually reduce our ability to experience that same solidarity. As crises accumulate, the emotional threshold rises. Stories must become increasingly dramatic in order to generate a comparable effect.
This emotional escalation directly connects with the economic dynamics analyzed in previous chapters. The attention economy rewards content that produces the strongest reactions. Human psychology gradually adapts to this constant exposure. Content producers then respond by creating increasingly striking images in order to maintain visibility. A self-reinforcing cycle emerges, in which suffering gradually becomes a competitive resource.
Cognitive sciences provide a second essential perspective. The human brain understands the story of one person far more easily than that of a multitude. Psychologists refer to this as the identifiable victim effect. A photograph showing a specific child generally generates a stronger emotional response than a statistic describing several million people facing famine. This difference does not reflect a lack of compassion toward anonymous victims. It simply reveals the natural limits of human cognitive capacity. Our minds process individual narratives more effectively than statistical abstractions.
This characteristic explains why some humanitarian campaigns prioritize personal portraits. However, when pushed to the extreme, this strategy can produce an effect opposite to the one intended. The photographed person ceases to be recognized in the full richness of their identity and becomes a universal symbol of suffering. Their personal story disappears behind a narrative function. They are no longer presented as a subject with a life trajectory, but as a medium designed to generate collective emotion.
The human gaze is never a neutral operation. Seeing always means interpreting. Every photograph activates memories, cultural references, beliefs, and representations already present in the viewer’s mind. Two individuals observing exactly the same image may attribute profoundly different meanings to it depending on their history, level of education, or cultural environment. Images therefore do not create prejudices on their own. They interact with existing social imaginaries and may gradually reinforce them.
Digital platforms further intensify this phenomenon through their personalization systems. The content presented to each user is selected according to their previous behaviors. The more a person shows interest in certain representations of poverty, the more similar content they are likely to receive. Researchers describe this process as an algorithmic reinforcement loop. Gradually, individuals risk becoming trapped within a worldview that confirms their initial expectations rather than challenging them with the complexity of reality.
Within this context, contemporary voyeurism no longer necessarily corresponds to a conscious pleasure derived from observing the suffering of others. It takes a much more diffuse form. It lies in the repetitive consumption of intense emotions produced by digital systems that transform every psychological reaction into exploitable data. The viewer does not always seek to humiliate the people they observe. Yet their attention contributes, often unintentionally, to sustaining an economy in which emotional intensity has commercial value.
This evolution profoundly transforms the demands of contemporary education. Educating a twenty-first-century citizen no longer consists solely of teaching them how to verify information or distinguish truth from falsehood. It has become equally essential to teach them how to look. Understanding why a photograph generates a particular emotion, identifying the economic interests accompanying its dissemination, and recognizing the realities it leaves in the shadows have become essential civic skills.
The reflection developed in this chapter leads to a major conclusion. The pornography of poverty does not thrive solely because certain actors choose to produce questionable images. It also thrives because it relies on universal psychological mechanisms that the digital economy has learned to exploit with unprecedented efficiency. Defending human dignity therefore does not require fighting against our empathy. Rather, it requires protecting empathy from systems that seek to transform it into a mere economic variable.
These individual mechanisms, however, do not stop at the level of personal psychology. When millions of individuals observe, interpret, and share the same images, their perceptions eventually construct a collective memory. What is at stake is no longer only the way we experience suffering. It is also the way peoples will be represented throughout history. It is this memorial dimension that the following chapter will explore.
Who Writes the Memory of Peoples?
Images, Narratives, and Power in the Construction of History
Collective memory never emerges spontaneously. It is gradually constructed at the intersection of events, narratives, and representations that a society chooses to transmit to future generations. Contrary to a widely held belief, history is not merely a succession of objective facts carefully preserved in archives. It is also the result of a continuous process of selection. Some images become universal, some events acquire exceptional symbolic significance, while others fade into oblivion. This selection is never entirely neutral. It reflects power relations, political interests, cultural choices, and media hierarchies that profoundly influence the way peoples are perceived over time.
For centuries, this power belonged primarily to rulers, chroniclers, religious institutions, and historians. Those who controlled writing also controlled memory. Peoples deprived of this ability often saw their histories narrated by others, frequently from perspectives that served the interests of the victors more than those of the defeated. Colonial empires played a significant role in this asymmetrical production of knowledge by imposing narratives that legitimized their political, economic, and cultural domination. Formerly colonized societies are now undertaking a vast process of historical reclamation, not in order to rewrite the past, but to restore its complexity.
Photography, followed by digital technologies, has profoundly transformed this dynamic. Images now occupy a central place in the construction of global memory. For a large part of humanity, the major events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are first encountered through a small number of photographs that have become iconic. Military landings, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the September 11 attacks, migration crises, major famines, and natural disasters are often condensed in the collective imagination into a handful of immediately recognizable images. Their power does not lie solely in their aesthetic quality. It lies in their ability to condense extraordinarily complex historical realities into a single representation that can be easily remembered.
This capacity for synthesis represents both the strength and the weakness of the image. A photograph illuminates a moment, but it never tells the whole story. When it becomes the primary reference point of an event, it risks erasing the less visible dimensions that nevertheless give that event its meaning. Political processes, social transformations, economic dynamics, cultural resistance, and civic initiatives often disappear behind a spectacular scene. Attention becomes fixed on the moment of crisis and overlooks everything that preceded it as well as everything that followed.
This reduction is particularly visible in the representation of societies confronted with poverty or conflict. International media rightly document disasters, violence, famines, and population displacement. Yet these episodes sometimes end up occupying a disproportionate place in global memory. Scientific innovations, artistic creations, educational achievements, democratic debates, and economic transformations receive far less attention. Gradually, certain nations become identified almost exclusively with their most difficult periods.
Haiti illustrates this phenomenon with particular force. In contemporary international memory, the country frequently appears through images of the 2010 earthquake, natural disasters, security crises, or political instability. These realities unquestionably belong to its recent history. However, they cannot summarize the destiny of a nation that profoundly transformed universal history. The first Black independent republic, the first state born from a victorious revolution led by enslaved people against a colonial empire, Haiti opened a decisive breach in the global slave system. Its influence on abolitionist movements, anti-colonial struggles, and universal ideas of freedom extends far beyond the borders of the Caribbean. Yet this contribution remains frequently marginalized in contemporary media representations.
This separation reveals a fundamental characteristic of collective memory. Societies do not always remember the most significant events. They often remember those that have been the most visible. Visibility gradually becomes a factor of historical legitimacy. What is extensively photographed eventually appears more important than what is not. Conversely, realities that are insufficiently represented gradually slip into oblivion, regardless of their true significance.
The digital economy considerably intensifies this tendency. Search engines, video platforms, and social networks favor content that has already demonstrated its ability to attract user interest. A widely viewed photograph is more likely to be recommended again. A viral video can continue appearing in search results years after its initial circulation. Algorithmic systems therefore produce a form of automated memory in which the most popular representations also become the most enduring. The past is no longer preserved solely by libraries, museums, or national archives. It is also organized by private platforms whose visibility criteria are primarily driven by statistical logic.
This evolution profoundly changes the conditions under which historical memory is produced. Historians, educators, and cultural institutions naturally continue to play an essential role. However, they are no longer the only actors capable of influencing how societies will remember themselves. Technology companies, news agencies, digital platforms, content creators, and even ordinary users now participate, often without fully realizing it, in the selection of images that will survive the constant flow of information.
This responsibility is particularly significant when representations concern people living in situations of extreme vulnerability. A photograph taken in a refugee camp or in the aftermath of a disaster may become, decades later, the primary testimony preserved of an existence that was in fact far richer. The person photographed may then risk being reduced forever to the most difficult moment of their life. Their personal history disappears behind an image that ultimately defines their identity in the eyes of the world.
The same mechanism applies to nations. No people can be reduced to their tragedies. Every society experiences periods of expansion and crisis, achievements and failures, democratic progress and institutional setbacks. When media attention systematically favors the most dramatic episodes, it produces an unbalanced memory that can have lasting effects on investment, international cooperation, academic exchanges, tourism, and even public policy. Representation then becomes either a factor of development or, conversely, an additional obstacle to development.
The social sciences remind us that narratives do not merely describe reality: they contribute to producing it. A population constantly portrayed as incapable of acting may gradually come to be perceived in that way, including by its own members. Representations shape expectations, influence behaviors, and affect collective decisions. Memory is therefore never simply a reflection of the past. It actively participates in shaping the future.
This responsibility gives the media a mission that extends far beyond the daily dissemination of information. Informing means, of course, documenting crises when they occur. But it also requires documenting reconstruction efforts, innovations, local achievements, intellectual creations, and social dynamics that enable societies to transform themselves. Truly balanced information does not mean hiding difficulties. It means restoring the full complexity of reality.
The pornography of poverty represents, from this perspective, far more than an individual violation of dignity. It also constitutes a threat to the balance of global memory. When a civilization comes to remember peoples primarily through their suffering, it produces an incomplete history. This fragmented memory harms not only the societies concerned. It also impoverishes humanity’s understanding of itself.
Preserving a more accurate memory therefore requires moving beyond individual responsibilities alone. Journalists, photographers, researchers, and humanitarian organizations play an essential role, but they cannot act alone. States, international institutions, universities, digital platforms, and citizens now share a collective responsibility in shaping the narratives that will endure over time.
Because what is photographed today will become tomorrow’s archive. What is shared today will contribute to tomorrow’s textbooks, documentaries, academic research, and national memories. Every image contributes, in its own way, to writing history. The true question is therefore no longer only how to represent poverty with dignity. It is to determine what memory of our era we wish to leave to future generations.
This question naturally opens the next chapter. If collective memory is now shaped by images circulating on a global scale, then these images also become instruments of power. States, international organizations, and private actors increasingly seek to influence this memory in order to shape perceptions, political decisions, and international power relations. Attention itself has become a strategic issue in foreign policy. It is this emerging geopolitics of information that will be examined in the following chapter.
Attention as a Weapon of Foreign Policy
For a long time, the power of states was measured through relatively tangible indicators. The size of armies, industrial capabilities, natural resources, control over maritime routes, and economic weight constituted the main foundations of international influence. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new element has gradually emerged among the instruments of power. It cannot be measured in square kilometers or billions of dollars. It is based on the ability of a state, an organization, or a private actor to shape global attention.
This evolution marks a profound transformation of international politics. Contemporary conflicts are no longer fought solely on battlefields, in diplomatic forums, or within multilateral organizations. They also unfold in the digital sphere, where billions of individuals construct their understanding of the world every day through the images, videos, and narratives circulating on their screens. In this environment, controlling representations often means influencing political decisions, civic mobilizations, international investments, and even humanitarian interventions.
Information has therefore become a strategic arena. Governments naturally seek to defend their interests, but they now understand that the battle for perceptions often precedes the battle for decisions. A convinced public opinion can exert pressure on political leaders. A global emotional response can accelerate the adoption of economic sanctions, reshape diplomatic priorities, or encourage the delivery of international assistance. Images are therefore no longer merely testimonies. They participate in creating the context in which political decisions become possible.
Recent conflicts clearly illustrate this transformation. In Ukraine, photographs of bombed cities, displaced populations, and civilian victims have profoundly shaped Western public opinion. They have contributed to strengthening political, military, and humanitarian support for Kyiv. At the same time, Russia has developed a communication strategy aimed at presenting its intervention through the lens of national security, the protection of Russian-speaking populations, or the fight against what it describes as external threats. Two competing narratives have therefore confronted one another far beyond the military battlefield. The confrontation has also taken place in the media, on digital platforms, and across social networks.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict demonstrates with equal intensity that images can become diplomatic actors in their own right. Photographs of injured children, destroyed hospitals, hostages, or devastated neighborhoods immediately generate international reactions. Each side seeks to impose its interpretation of events through a selection of images capable of producing the strongest emotional response. Governments, international organizations, and media outlets are therefore confronted with a major challenge: documenting reality while preventing these images from becoming instruments of propaganda.
This transformation extends far beyond the framework of armed conflicts. Major powers now invest massively in public diplomacy, international media, and digital platforms in order to strengthen their influence. The United States has maintained for several decades an extensive network of international media organizations designed to promote its vision of global affairs. China has developed a different strategy, highlighting its investments, infrastructure projects, cooperation initiatives, and discourse on shared development. Russia emphasizes the dissemination of alternative narratives challenging dominant interpretations promoted by Western media. The Gulf monarchies, through their major media groups, also participate in this global competition for control over representations.
None of these strategies relies exclusively on the dissemination of information. More fundamentally, they seek to shape collective imaginaries. States are less concerned with proving that their opponents are always wrong than with establishing interpretive frameworks favorable to their own interests. This narrative competition has become a natural extension of traditional diplomacy.
Digital platforms now occupy a central position in this new geopolitics of information. Their influence extends far beyond that of traditional media. They determine which content becomes visible, which narratives gain global reach, and which events quickly disappear from public attention. Algorithms obviously do not make diplomatic decisions. Yet by ranking content according to its ability to generate reactions, they indirectly participate in shaping international priorities.
This logic produces particularly significant consequences for the most vulnerable countries. States with limited media capacities often struggle to tell their own stories. Their international image depends largely on foreign correspondents, international news agencies, or humanitarian organizations operating within their territory. The narratives produced about them frequently escape their control.
Haiti illustrates this asymmetry with remarkable clarity. For several decades, international representations of the country have primarily emphasized natural disasters, political crises, insecurity, and poverty. These realities exist and must naturally be documented. Yet they represent only one part of a much broader history. The first Black independent republic, the decisive role of the Haitian Revolution in the collapse of the global slave system, artistic creations, social innovations, community initiatives, intellectual production, and entrepreneurial achievements receive far less visibility. Haiti’s image has therefore gradually become confined within an incomplete representation that influences investment, tourism, academic cooperation, and even certain diplomatic decisions.
This narrative vulnerability does not concern Haiti alone. Many countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America experience comparable dynamics. Their international visibility depends more on the crises that affect them than on the societies they are building. Poverty then becomes not only an economic reality, but also a geopolitical resource that can be used by external actors to legitimize intervention, mobilize international assistance, strengthen diplomatic influence, or support a strategic narrative.
Humanitarian organizations themselves operate within this complex environment. The images they distribute in order to raise awareness among donors can be reused by governments, armed groups, or disinformation campaigns pursuing entirely different objectives. A photograph intended to mobilize solidarity can, only hours later, be manipulated to justify a military operation, fuel a propaganda campaign, or discredit an opponent. In a globalized digital space, no image remains permanently under the control of its creator.
This reality profoundly transforms the responsibility of journalists. Their mission no longer consists solely of verifying facts. It also requires anticipating the possible uses of the images they publish. An accurate photograph can produce a misleading interpretation if it is removed from its context or integrated into a narrative foreign to its original meaning. As technologies of manipulation advance, this responsibility becomes increasingly demanding.
International institutions are gradually becoming aware of these new challenges. The United Nations, UNESCO, the International Telecommunication Union, and several regional organizations are now working on principles designed to strengthen digital platform transparency, combat disinformation campaigns, and promote more responsible governance of the information space. These initiatives reflect an important shift in awareness, but they remain largely insufficient in the face of the speed of technological innovation and the intensification of geopolitical competition.
Attention has now become a strategic resource comparable to the raw materials that shaped international rivalries in previous centuries. Those who succeed in sustainably directing the world’s gaze also influence public debates, diplomatic choices, and the priorities of international cooperation. Within this new configuration, the most vulnerable populations risk becoming the first victims of a political economy of emotion in which their suffering can be transformed into an argument, a justification, or an instrument of power.
This evolution calls for reflection that extends beyond international relations alone. It requires reconsidering the very foundations of global governance in the digital age. For an international system built upon the permanent manipulation of emotions cannot sustainably produce high-quality information, authentic solidarity, or lasting peace.
The following chapter will specifically explore the contours of a new global ethics of representation. The objective will no longer be merely to identify the excesses of the pornography of poverty, but to define principles capable of guiding journalists, humanitarian organizations, digital platforms, researchers, public decision-makers, and citizens toward an information culture in which human dignity remains the primary criterion of every representation.
Poverty as a Global Industry of Visibility
One of the most profound transformations of the contemporary economy lies in the conversion of elements that were once considered outside the sphere of market value into strategic economic assets. Personal data, users’ attention, social interactions, cultural preferences, and even human emotions have become essential resources within the digital economy. This represents a major departure from traditional industrial models. The most influential companies of the twenty-first century do not primarily extract raw materials from the physical world; they capture flows of information, behavioral patterns, and human attention. Within this new environment, poverty is no longer only a social reality to be addressed and overcome. In certain circumstances, it also becomes a vehicle for visibility, influence, and value creation.
Such an argument may appear controversial because it seems to assign economic value to human suffering. Yet the reality is not about attributing intentional exploitation to every actor involved. Rather, it describes a structural mechanism embedded within the architecture of digital platforms. A video showing a food distribution campaign, a report about a disadvantaged neighborhood, or a photograph taken in a displacement camp does not circulate solely because it documents a serious humanitarian situation. It also circulates because such content generates significant levels of interaction. Each view contributes to platform performance indicators. Each share expands the reach of a message. Each comment extends the lifespan of a publication. Each reaction produces behavioral data that increases the commercial value of the broader digital ecosystem. In this environment, attention itself has become a measurable economic resource.
It is important to emphasize that this value does not originate from poverty itself. It emerges from the structure of digital platforms, which are designed to maximize the amount of time users spend consuming content. Recommendation systems prioritize material likely to retain attention for extended periods. Emotionally powerful narratives, dramatic situations, and psychologically intense images are particularly effective within this framework. By contrast, content focusing on gradual social progress, institutional reforms, educational achievements, or long-term transformations often receives less visibility—not because it lacks importance, but because it generally produces fewer immediate reactions.
This creates a profound paradox. The most dramatic human situations frequently receive greater visibility than ordinary realities because they are more successful at capturing attention. It is not suffering itself that possesses intrinsic economic value; rather, it is suffering’s ability to generate engagement that grants it indirect value within contemporary digital systems. Platforms do not deliberately seek to promote distress. They optimize performance indicators that, through their cumulative effects, tend to favor content capable of producing the strongest emotional responses.
This dynamic extends far beyond social networks. Twenty-four-hour news channels, digital media outlets, advertising industries, humanitarian organizations, documentary producers, and content creators increasingly operate within an environment defined by permanent competition for attention. Every actor seeks to make its message visible within a global stream containing billions of daily publications. In this saturated information landscape, human suffering possesses a particular ability to interrupt the continuous flow of content. As a result, vulnerability can become, often despite the intentions of those documenting it, a competitive advantage in the struggle for visibility.
This transformation has profoundly reshaped humanitarian communication. For decades, humanitarian campaigns relied primarily on institutional credibility. Individuals supported organizations because they trusted their history, reputation, or effectiveness. Today, these organizations must also compete for digital visibility. They operate under many of the same algorithmic pressures affecting commercial, cultural, and political content. Humanitarian emergencies now compete for attention alongside entertainment, sporting events, political controversies, and influence campaigns. The urgency of human suffering must therefore find its place within an environment governed increasingly by the rules of digital attention.
Communication professionals are consequently encouraged to prioritize narratives most likely to overcome algorithmic barriers. Individual stories often replace structural explanations. Faces sometimes replace broader contexts. Emotional responses frequently dominate analytical understanding. This transformation does not necessarily result from ideological choices. It is often an adaptation to the conditions imposed by the digital environment. Organizations are not always attempting to manipulate emotions; they are attempting to survive within a system where visibility directly affects their ability to mobilize resources and maintain public support.
However, it would be overly simplistic to identify humanitarian organizations as the primary causes of this phenomenon. They operate within a much larger system that exceeds their individual control. Platforms establish the rules of distribution. Advertisers finance significant portions of the digital ecosystem. Users reward certain types of content through their interactions. Media organizations adapt their formats according to audience behavior. Governments increasingly communicate according to similar principles. No single actor controls the entire system, yet all contribute, to varying degrees, to its functioning.
Economists sometimes describe such situations as collective equilibria. Each actor adopts strategies that appear rational given the behavior of others. Yet the accumulation of these individual decisions can produce a global outcome that no one explicitly intended. The repeated representation of poverty as an emotional spectacle is one such systemic consequence. It does not result from a conspiracy or a single coordinated intention. Rather, it emerges from the interaction of economic, technological, psychological, and cultural forces that reinforce one another over time.
This analysis raises an even deeper question. For decades, economic systems have primarily measured value creation through financial indicators: advertising revenue, audience size, market share, or profitability. Yet these measurements often ignore a crucial dimension: the human cost of economic models built around the continuous extraction of attention.
When an individual living in extreme vulnerability becomes, without meaningful control over their own image, the subject of a global communication campaign, that person may unintentionally contribute to the creation of economic value from which they receive little or no benefit. This separation between the production of value and its redistribution represents one of the most significant challenges of the contemporary digital economy. The most vulnerable individuals can become invisible producers of digital wealth that primarily benefits other actors.
Without establishing a direct equivalence between historically distinct realities, it is nevertheless possible to identify a recurring pattern throughout history. Societies have often developed mechanisms through which forms of vulnerability become sources of economic value. In previous centuries, these resources took the form of territories, natural resources, or labor. Today, they may take the form of data, images, emotions, and attention. The mechanisms have changed, but the underlying question of extraction remains a legitimate subject of global debate.
This observation requires us to broaden our understanding of poverty itself. Poverty no longer refers only to a lack of income, housing, or access to essential services. Within the contemporary digital environment, poverty may also involve a reduced ability to control one’s identity, image, personal data, and the narratives produced about one’s own life. A new dimension of inequality is therefore emerging. Those who are already socially and economically vulnerable are often the least equipped to defend their rights within the global digital sphere.
Addressing this challenge requires far more than improved journalistic ethics. Professional standards remain essential, but they cannot alone correct economic mechanisms deeply embedded within digital infrastructures. A broader reflection must examine platform governance, transparency in recommendation systems, the responsibility of advertising-based business models, international protection of personal data, and the recognition of a universal right to digital dignity.
These transformations will only succeed if they are accompanied by a deeper cultural evolution. Societies must gradually learn to evaluate information not only according to its ability to generate immediate emotional reactions, but also according to its capacity to strengthen understanding, justice, and respect for human beings. As long as visibility continues to be rewarded primarily for emotional intensity, the most dramatic narratives will maintain a structural advantage within the public sphere.
The issue therefore extends far beyond digital platforms. It concerns how democratic societies will define the rules of public debate in the decades ahead. A society that accepts suffering as a raw material of the attention economy risks gradually transforming compassion into a commodity. Conversely, a society that places human dignity at the center of its development model affirms that certain values cannot be subordinated entirely to market logic.
At the conclusion of this analysis, one fundamental question remains. The issue is no longer whether poverty can generate visibility. It is whether democratic societies are willing to accept that such visibility becomes a source of economic value without sufficient guarantees for the dignity and autonomy of those whose lives are represented. This question naturally leads to the next chapter, which examines the respective responsibilities of governments, international institutions, technology companies, media organizations, and citizens in building a global governance framework capable of reconciling freedom of information, technological innovation, and the unconditional protection of human dignity.
The Attention Economy in Numbers
Attention has become one of the most valuable resources in the digital economy. Every minute, more than 16 million text messages are sent worldwide, nearly 700,000 hours of video are watched on YouTube, more than 347,000 Instagram Stories are published, and approximately 138 million videos are viewed on TikTok. During that same minute, millions of additional posts are shared across Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms.
According to the Pew Research Center, the average internet user spends just 2.5 seconds deciding whether to continue engaging with a piece of content or move on to the next one. Researchers studying digital behavior also note that the first 3 to 5 seconds are often enough to determine whether a video will retain a viewer’s attention.
Data published by DataReportal show that, in 2025, the world was home to approximately 5.56 billion internet users, representing nearly 68% of the global population. Of these, 5.24 billion were active social media users, spending an average of 2 hours and 21 minutes each day on social platforms. Meanwhile, the GSMA estimates that more than 5.8 billion people own a mobile phone, including approximately 4.7 billion who use an internet-connected smartphone.
Statistics released by TikTok indicate that short-form videos achieve the highest completion rates. For videos lasting less than one minute, the proportion viewed from beginning to end can reach 90% to 95%, depending on the type of content and the target audience. This helps explain why creators increasingly favor images capable of triggering an immediate emotional response.
Research conducted by the MIT Media Lab, Stanford University, the Wharton School, and scholars publishing in Nature Human Behaviour and the Journal of Communication points to a broadly shared conclusion. Content that evokes compassion, outrage, fear, sadness, or anger generates, on average, 2 to 5 times more engagement than content that is primarily informative or analytical. Platform algorithms then reinforce this dynamic by giving greater visibility to posts that already attract the highest levels of interaction.
Studies examining digital humanitarian campaigns also show that photographs or videos depicting people in visible distress frequently receive 3 to 4 times more reactions, comments, and shares than images portraying those same individuals working, studying, caring for their families, or rebuilding their lives. This finding highlights one of the defining paradoxes of the attention economy. The more visible human suffering becomes, the more likely it is to spread across digital platforms. Stories of resilience, restored dignity, and long-term development, by contrast, often receive far less attention, even though they provide a far more accurate picture of the human experience.
Toward a New International Doctrine of Digital Dignity
Toward a New International Doctrine of Digital Dignity
The history of fundamental rights can be understood as a progressive expansion of the protection afforded to the human person. As societies transform, they discover new forms of vulnerability that escape the legal frameworks inherited from previous eras. Civil liberties were first asserted against the arbitrariness of monarchies. The Industrial Revolutions made it necessary to recognize social rights. The catastrophes of the twentieth century then led to the internationalization of human rights protection through the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the International Covenants of 1966, as well as the entire body of conventions designed to protect individuals against torture, discrimination, persecution, and mass violence. These developments were never merely technical adjustments. Each one reflected a collective realization that existing instruments were no longer capable of responding to the profound transformations taking place within societies.
The twenty-first century now places the international community before a transformation of a different nature. The threats facing human dignity no longer arise exclusively from physical violence, political authoritarianism, or the deprivation of fundamental freedoms. They may also result from far more diffuse mechanisms, embedded in the everyday functioning of digital infrastructures that now organize the global circulation of information. Digital platforms, artificial intelligence systems, search engines, social networks, and algorithmic architectures are progressively shaping the conditions under which individuals are seen, known, interpreted, and remembered. This evolution does not in any way challenge the achievements of international human rights law; rather, it reveals that these achievements must now be extended in order to address unprecedented forms of vulnerability that did not exist at the time of their creation.
For centuries, social identity remained primarily attached to a territory, a community, a profession, or a network of personal relationships. Collective memory relied on material archives whose access remained limited. Information circulated slowly, its dissemination remained geographically restricted, and forgetting constituted, in practice, a natural component of social life. Even the most significant events eventually faded under the effect of time. The digital environment has radically disrupted this historical balance. A photograph, a video, or a testimony no longer constitutes merely a document intended to inform a specific audience. They become informational objects capable of being copied infinitely, permanently archived, indexed by search engines, analyzed by automated systems, integrated into artificial intelligence models, and reused in contexts that are completely beyond the control of the individuals concerned. Digital memory has virtually no territorial boundaries and no genuine expiration date.
This transformation profoundly alters the human condition within the public sphere. An image created in an isolated village can be viewed, only seconds later, across several continents, automatically translated into dozens of languages, reproduced by thousands of accounts, and incorporated into databases whose purposes are sometimes unknown. The person represented no longer controls either the future uses of their image or the narratives that will be constructed around it. More importantly, this representation may continue to shape the way the world perceives that individual for years to come, even when their personal circumstances have profoundly changed. A period of distress can therefore follow a person throughout their entire digital existence, regardless of their later journey, achievements, or the recovery of their autonomy. The digital environment thus introduces a major rupture: vulnerability ceases to be merely a moment in a person’s life and can, in some cases, become a lasting public identity.
This permanence exposes the limitations of traditional legal categories. The concepts of privacy, the right to one’s image, honor, reputation, and even consent remain naturally essential. They continue to protect fundamental dimensions of personality. However, they were developed in a context where the circulation of information remained relatively limited, both because of the material constraints of reproduction and because of geographical or institutional boundaries. Digital technologies have profoundly altered these conditions. Today, a representation that was lawfully distributed may, through its continuous reproduction and algorithmic reuse, generate effects that extend far beyond the original intentions of its creator. A photograph published for a legitimate informational purpose may, years later, become a training element for an artificial intelligence system, a commercial illustration, a documentary resource, or viral content, without the person concerned being informed or having any reasonable ability to control its uses.
It is precisely this evolution that leads to distinguishing digital dignity from more traditional concepts of privacy protection. Privacy essentially protects the intimate sphere of the individual against unjustified intrusions. Digital dignity pursues a broader ambition. It protects the way a person is represented within the global information ecosystem and ensures that this representation never reduces their humanity to a single dimension of their existence. A person living in poverty remains simultaneously a parent, a citizen, a worker, a believer, a student, an artist, a neighbor, an entrepreneur, or an active member of their community. When media and algorithmic systems retain only their vulnerability, they produce an identity reduction that, without necessarily violating traditional legal rules, nevertheless infringes upon their dignity.
This distinction is particularly important in the humanitarian field. An awareness campaign may comply with consent requirements, pursue a legitimate objective of mobilizing resources, and still produce an unbalanced representation of the person being photographed. By systematically favoring the most striking images of suffering, contemporary communication mechanisms risk permanently confining certain populations to an identity exclusively associated with dependency, disaster, or assistance. The question is therefore no longer solely whether an image could legally be published; it also requires examining the cumulative effects of its circulation within an environment where algorithms prioritize content capable of generating the strongest emotional reactions.
Understood in this way, digital dignity does not constitute an additional restriction imposed on freedom of information. On the contrary, it represents a condition for its legitimacy within a profoundly transformed information environment. The more powerful the technical capacities for dissemination become, the more demanding the responsibilities attached to their use must be. Democratic societies have always recognized that the exercise of a freedom is accompanied by obligations intended to protect the rights of others. The digital environment does not challenge this principle; it simply expands its scope by incorporating new actors — platforms, artificial intelligence developers, content producers, humanitarian organizations, and ordinary users — whose decisions, often insignificant when considered individually, collectively produce considerable effects on the global representation of the human person.
This evolution ultimately leads to an essential conclusion. Digital dignity can no longer be understood as a simple sectoral issue falling exclusively within the field of personal data protection or platform regulation. It must gradually become a structuring principle of international digital governance, in the same way that human dignity became, after the Second World War, the foundation of contemporary fundamental rights. It is under this condition that societies will be able to preserve the immense democratic potential of digital technologies while preventing human vulnerability from being progressively transformed into a mere economic, media, or algorithmic resource. The challenge is therefore not to limit technological progress, but to provide it with a normative horizon capable of keeping the human person at the center of the global digital order.
If digital dignity is to become a guiding principle of global governance, it is necessary to define the normative content of such a doctrine. The history of international law demonstrates that no major transformation has ever been built around an abstract concept alone. The notions of sovereignty, international responsibility, common heritage of humanity, or sustainable development acquired genuine legal significance only when they were translated into guiding principles capable of directing the actions of States, courts, and international organizations. Digital dignity cannot escape this requirement. It cannot remain a mere ethical aspiration; it must gradually become an interpretive framework applicable to public policies, professional practices, and the technologies that now organize the global circulation of information.
The first principle of this doctrine could be described as the indivisibility of human dignity. It is based on a simple yet fundamental idea: no economic, social, migratory, or humanitarian situation can justify a representation that reduces an individual solely to their state of vulnerability. Poverty does not suspend a person’s rights. It diminishes neither their moral worth nor their status as a legal subject. Yet contemporary communication mechanisms often produce the opposite effect by favoring representations in which the human being disappears behind the suffering they endure. Such a logic creates an implicit hierarchy among individuals based on their ability to control their public image. The most privileged individuals generally possess the legal, economic, and cultural resources necessary to protect their digital identity; the most vulnerable, by contrast, remain the most exposed to contemporary forms of symbolic appropriation. An international doctrine of digital dignity should precisely reaffirm that the strongest protections must benefit those whose capacity for self-defense is the weakest.
The second principle could be that of contextualization. An image is never neutral. Its meaning depends on the narrative surrounding it, the information it excludes, the editorial choices that frame it, and the interpretive context in which it is presented. A photograph showing a child suffering from malnutrition may provoke legitimate emotion; it may also, when stripped of all context, reinforce simplistic representations of a country, a population, or an entire continent. Conversely, when placed within a historical, economic, institutional, and cultural analysis, the same image becomes an instrument of understanding rather than a vehicle for stigmatization. Contextualization therefore does not seek to diminish the seriousness of crises. It aims to restore their complexity so that the representation of poverty is never separated from the social, political, and historical dynamics that explain it.
To this requirement must be added a third principle: that of temporality. Democratic societies have long recognized that individuals cannot be indefinitely confined to the mistakes of their past. Criminal rehabilitation mechanisms, the right to be forgotten provided for in certain legal frameworks, as well as reintegration procedures, reflect this conviction that human identity remains constantly evolving. Yet the digital universe sometimes tends to produce the opposite effect. A photograph taken during a disaster, a war, or a humanitarian crisis may continue circulating for several decades without any indication of the subsequent evolution of the person represented. This digital permanence therefore risks transforming an exceptional event into a permanent identity. Recognizing the principle of temporality would mean affirming that no individual should remain eternally imprisoned by the representation corresponding to the most difficult moment of their existence. Collective memory cannot become a mechanism for permanently fixing vulnerabilities.
The fourth principle concerns participation. Narratives concerning poor or marginalized populations are still, to a very large extent, produced by external observers: journalists, researchers, international organizations, communication agencies, or content creators. This asymmetry often contributes to reinforcing an imbalance in the production of knowledge. The people concerned appear as the subjects of a narrative whose language, categories, and purposes they do not control. A doctrine of digital dignity should encourage a shift in perspective by promoting the ability of individuals and communities to become actors in their own representation. This does not merely involve obtaining their consent before the dissemination of an image; it also requires recognizing their capacity to participate in the construction of the narrative itself, to offer their own interpretation of events, and to make heard voices that remain too often absent from international communication spaces.
Finally, a fifth principle should establish algorithmic responsibility. Digital systems no longer simply distribute content; they select, rank, and amplify certain representations at the expense of others. Recommendation algorithms prioritize content likely to capture attention, generate emotional reactions, or increase the time users spend on platforms. This economic logic, extensively examined in research on the attention economy, produces effects that go far beyond the intentions of their own designers. The most dramatic narratives therefore receive disproportionate visibility, while stories of reconstruction, social innovation, resilience, or local development often remain marginalized. Governance based on dignity cannot ignore this structural dimension. Without requiring the complete disclosure of recommendation systems, it could promote stronger obligations regarding transparency, independent auditing, and the assessment of the social impacts of algorithms when these systems significantly influence the representation of vulnerable populations.
These five principles do not constitute a complete legal code. Rather, they outline the foundations of a doctrine intended to accompany a historic transformation whose contours are still being shaped. Their value lies less in their definitive formulation than in the shift in perspective they propose. For several decades, digital policies have focused primarily on issues of cybersecurity, data protection, economic competition, or digital sovereignty. These dimensions remain essential, but they are no longer sufficient to fully address the anthropological questions raised by the digital revolution. Beyond infrastructures, platforms, and algorithms, it is now the very representation of the human person that is becoming an object of governance.
This evolution also invites a reconsideration of the relationship between freedom of expression and the protection of dignity. Too often, public debate presents these two requirements as opposing forces. Such an opposition is nevertheless largely artificial. Contemporary democracies were precisely built upon the idea that the most valuable freedoms can only be sustainably preserved when they are exercised within a framework that guarantees respect for the individual. Freedom to inform loses none of its strength when it refuses humiliation; on the contrary, it gains credibility. Likewise, the protection of dignity is not intended to conceal crises, conflicts, or disasters. It simply requires that their representation remain faithful to the complexity of human experience and that no individual be reduced to the sole function of serving as an emotional instrument within a global economy of attention.
This is why the doctrine proposed in this work should not be understood as a set of additional constraints imposed on the media, researchers, or humanitarian organizations. Rather, it ‘2represents an attempt to reconcile the demands of freedom, truth, and justice within a digital environment where technical capacities for dissemination now far exceed the institutional frameworks inherited from the previous century. The fundamental question is no longer whether this evolution is desirable, but rather which institutions, norms, and forms of international cooperation will allow it to be translated into concrete action. It is precisely this institutional dimension that constitutes the subject of the following chapter, devoted to the governance of the representation of human dignity in the twenty-first century.
Governing the Representation of Human Dignity in the 21st Century
The history of modern societies shows that major technological transformations almost always precede legal transformations. Innovations emerge rapidly, alter behaviors, disrupt economic exchanges, and redefine social relationships, while public institutions generally intervene at a later stage in order to establish the rules intended to regulate these new spaces of freedom. The printing press, the industrial revolution, radio, television, civil aviation, the Internet, and, more recently, artificial intelligence illustrate this historical pattern. Law rarely immediately accompanies technological progress; it often intervenes when the social, economic, or ethical consequences of innovations become sufficiently visible to require a collective response.
The digital representation of poverty is today part of this same historical dynamic. Technologies enabling the production, dissemination, archiving, analysis, and monetization of images have undergone unprecedented development, profoundly transforming the ways in which human narratives circulate. By contrast, governance mechanisms remain largely inherited from an era when information moved more slowly and responsibilities could still be attributed to a limited number of actors. This disconnect between the speed of innovation and the slowness of institutions explains part of today’s tensions. States still frequently attempt to regulate twenty-first-century technologies through legal categories designed in the previous century.
This situation does not necessarily reflect a weakness of democracies; rather, it reveals the complexity of a phenomenon that extends far beyond national borders. A photograph taken in a rural area of Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Caribbean may be hosted on a server located on another continent, analyzed by an artificial intelligence system developed in a third country, distributed by a global platform, and viewed simultaneously by millions of users subject to different legal frameworks. No State possesses, by itself, the instruments required to govern such a profoundly transnational space.
This reality inevitably leads to reflection on global governance. Since the creation of major international organizations in the aftermath of the Second World War, the international community has gradually recognized that certain issues could no longer be resolved exclusively at the national level. The protection of human rights, the fight against pandemics, aviation safety, international trade, responses to climate change, and the preservation of world heritage now rely on cooperation mechanisms involving States, international institutions, civil society organizations, scientific communities, and the private sector. Digital dignity calls for a comparable approach: it requires collective reflection capable of integrating the power of contemporary technologies while maintaining the human person as the central reference point.
This does not mean creating a global authority responsible for controlling all images circulating on the Internet. Such an ambition would be both unrealistic and incompatible with the fundamental principles of democratic societies, particularly freedom of expression and the plurality of public spaces. Contemporary governance no longer relies primarily on the centralization of power, but rather on the ability of actors to coordinate their actions around shared principles. It consists of establishing reference frameworks, promoting transparency, harmonizing certain fundamental standards, and encouraging the adoption of responsible practices, while respecting the diversity of legal, cultural, and political traditions. The governance of digital dignity should therefore be inspired by a logic of cooperation rather than a model based on surveillance or control.
The first pillar of such an architecture should be the explicit recognition of human dignity as a guiding principle for all digital policies. Contemporary debates often focus on personal data protection, cybersecurity, regulation of major platforms, economic competition, or the fight against disinformation. These issues are essential, but they are frequently addressed in a fragmented manner, as if they exclusively concerned technical or economic questions. Introducing dignity as a cross-cutting principle would make it possible to recall that digital technologies do not merely transform communication methods or economic models; they also influence the way individuals and communities are perceived, represented, and recognized within the global public sphere.
The second pillar concerns the differentiated responsibility of actors involved in the production and circulation of images. For a long time, the media representation of poverty was primarily the responsibility of professional journalists, news agencies, and organizations with institutional dissemination capacity. That era now belongs to the past. Smartphones, social networks, and instant distribution platforms have transformed every individual into a potential producer of content. This development represents a major advancement for freedom of expression and the democratization of public discourse, but it also requires a new reflection on the responsibilities that accompany this unprecedented ability to show the world. Obligations obviously cannot be identical for a citizen sharing an image on a social network, an international media organization with considerable influence, a humanitarian organization collecting funds, or a technology company controlling a global distribution infrastructure. However, all should be guided by a common requirement: never reduce a person to their vulnerability.
This approach also requires redefining the responsibility of digital platforms. Companies managing the main spaces for the circulation of information can no longer be considered merely as technical intermediaries entirely separate from the social consequences of the content they help distribute. Recommendation systems, publication-ranking mechanisms, moderation policies, and engagement-based business models directly influence the visibility granted to certain representations of poverty and human suffering. This does not mean challenging their entrepreneurial autonomy or imposing editorial responsibility comparable to that of traditional media outlets, but it appears legitimate to demand greater transparency regarding the mechanisms that favor certain types of content over other forms of narrative, particularly when these mechanisms contribute to amplifying simplified or dehumanizing representations.
This requirement for transparency should not be interpreted as opposition to technological innovation. Economic history demonstrates, on the contrary, that the most sustainable companies are often those that succeed in integrating the ethical expectations of their time. Concerns relating to environmental protection, consumer rights, organizational governance, or product safety have gradually led economic actors to transform their practices without preventing industrial or technological development. Digital dignity could follow a comparable trajectory, in which responsibility would not be perceived as a limitation on creativity, but rather as a source of trust, legitimacy, and sustainability.
The media occupy, within this architecture, a unique position. Their fundamental mission remains to inform the public about the realities of the world, including when these realities are difficult, painful, or disturbing. It would be contrary to democratic principles to ask them to conceal poverty, humanitarian crises, or situations of injustice that require collective attention. The visibility of human suffering can be essential in raising awareness, mobilizing solidarity, and encouraging public action. However, this responsibility to inform also implies a responsibility regarding the manner in which realities are represented. The choice of images, headlines, historical context, collected testimonies, and voices given prominence contributes to constructing a more or less complete perception of the societies concerned. Governance based on dignity therefore does not seek to restrict editorial freedom; rather, it invites the exercise of this freedom with greater depth, rigor, and awareness of the effects produced.
The central question is not whether poverty should be shown, but rather how it should be shown without transforming human vulnerability into a spectacle. Responsible representation does not mean erasing suffering, nor producing an artificially positive vision of social realities. It means placing individuals back within the totality of their existence, recognizing their difficulties but also their capacities for action, their survival strategies, their cultures, their knowledge, and their aspirations. A person facing poverty is never solely a victim; they remain a historical subject, a citizen, a member of a community, and an actor capable of participating in the transformation of their own environment.
Universities and research centers also play an essential role in this evolution. The most effective public policies rarely rely solely on moral intuitions or emotional reactions. They require knowledge produced through empirical investigations, international comparisons, and rigorous evaluations. It therefore becomes necessary to develop a genuine field of research dedicated to the ethics of digital representation, capable of studying the links between images, power, social perception, and human dignity. Such a field could not be limited to a single discipline. It should bring together law, information and communication sciences, psychology, economics, philosophy, anthropology, political science, as well as emerging research on artificial intelligence. The complexity of contemporary challenges precisely requires an approach capable of moving beyond traditional boundaries between fields of knowledge.
Education finally constitutes the most sustainable pillar of this architecture. Twenty-first-century societies will need to train citizens capable not only of producing and sharing information, but also of understanding the mechanisms that influence its circulation. Digital literacy cannot be limited to mastering technological tools or knowing how to use a platform. It must include reflection on the responsibilities linked to the dissemination of images, the effects of algorithms, cognitive biases, attention-based economic models, and the ethical principles that should guide public communication. A democracy in which citizens understand how narratives are constructed, selected, and amplified possesses greater means to resist excessive simplifications, manipulation, and contemporary forms of exploitation of vulnerability.
Beyond institutions, this governance rests on a fundamental conviction: human dignity is not an obstacle to information; it is the very condition of its legitimacy. A photograph that illuminates without humiliating, a report that explains without reducing, a humanitarian campaign that mobilizes without instrumentalizing, and a platform that encourages understanding rather than sensationalism all contribute to strengthening the quality of the democratic space. Conversely, when visibility becomes an autonomous objective, when the image of suffering becomes more important than the human reality it represents, there is a risk that vulnerability will be transformed into a narrative, economic, or political resource.
The question is therefore not to choose between freedom of information and the protection of dignity. This opposition is based on a conception of the problem that is too limited. The strongest democratic societies are precisely those that succeed in preserving both of these fundamental requirements simultaneously. Freedom without responsibility can lead to abuses; responsibility deprived of freedom can become a form of control incompatible with the democratic spirit. The governance of digital dignity rests on a third path: that of a dynamic balance in which the search for truth remains inseparable from unconditional respect for the human person.
A Civilization Is Recognized by the Way It Looks at the Most Vulnerable
Every era is confronted with a question that extends far beyond political debates, economic interests, and technological progress. This question remains fundamentally the same throughout history: what value does a society place on the dignity of the human person? Civilizations are not judged solely by their scientific discoveries, material wealth, or the strength of their institutions. They are also judged by the way they regard those who possess fewer resources, less visibility, or less power to make their voices heard.
History demonstrates that societies do not automatically become more humane as they develop more advanced tools. Technological innovations have made it possible to significantly improve living conditions, expand access to knowledge, facilitate exchanges, and bring closer populations once separated by distance. Yet these same innovations have also been used to monitor, exploit, discriminate, or dehumanize. Every technological revolution therefore creates new spaces of possibility, while simultaneously generating new moral and political responsibilities. The digital environment is no exception to this historical reality.
Never before in human history have individuals possessed a comparable ability to observe, record, and disseminate the reality of the world. Every day, billions of images, videos, and testimonies cross borders at a speed that would have seemed unimaginable only a few decades ago. This permanent circulation represents one of the greatest achievements of freedom of information. It makes it possible to document human rights violations, expose long-ignored injustices, mobilize international solidarity, and provide unprecedented visibility to situations that might once have remained unseen.
However, this unprecedented power carries an equally significant risk. When the human person ceases to be regarded as a subject of rights and becomes primarily an audience instrument, an emotional tool, a monetizable piece of content, or an exploitable form of data, an essential boundary has been crossed. Technology is no longer merely a tool serving humanity; humanity itself risks becoming a resource serving technological, economic, or political logics.
The pornography of poverty represents one of the most visible expressions of this transformation. It is not limited to a few inappropriate images, certain questionable humanitarian campaigns, or problematic individual practices. It reveals a deeper imbalance in the contemporary way societies produce, distribute, and consume narratives. When suffering becomes more visible than the capacity for resistance, when vulnerability attracts more attention than resilience, and when disasters occupy more public space than reconstruction efforts, societies gradually alter their own understanding of the world.
This imbalance first affects the individuals directly represented. Being constantly associated with a moment of extreme vulnerability means having one’s identity reduced to a particular circumstance of existence. Yet no human being can be defined solely by the hardship they endure. Every life is composed of continuities and ruptures, difficulties and achievements, wounds and hopes, inheritances and transformations. Human dignity rests precisely on the recognition of this irreducible complexity.
The consequences, however, extend beyond individual experiences. Entire peoples can also become trapped within partial representations of themselves. A nation is never merely the sum of its crises, disasters, or vulnerabilities. It is also the product of its history, culture, institutions, creativity, struggles, knowledge, and collective aspirations. When a society is reduced over time to its wounds alone, global memory becomes incomplete because it preserves only part of its existence while erasing the human forces that contribute to its reconstruction.
The analysis developed throughout this work leads to a fundamental conclusion: human dignity can no longer be considered solely as a legal or philosophical concept. In the digital age, it must become a structuring principle of global information governance. This evolution does not represent a break with the tradition of human rights; on the contrary, it constitutes a logical extension of that tradition within an environment transformed by digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and the attention economy.
Such a transformation requires collective commitment. Governments must adapt their legal frameworks to new digital realities. International organizations must promote a gradual convergence of protection standards. Technology platforms must strengthen the transparency of their mechanisms for content distribution, recommendation, and ranking. Media organizations must continue reflecting on the responsibilities that accompany editorial freedom. Universities must produce the knowledge necessary to develop evidence-based public policies. Finally, citizens must learn to exercise their digital freedom with discernment, understanding that every image created, shared, or amplified contributes to constructing a particular representation of the world.
This collective responsibility should not be perceived as a restriction imposed on technological development. On the contrary, it represents a historic opportunity. For the first time, humanity possesses the technical means necessary to tell the story of the world with unprecedented richness, diversity, and precision. Nothing condemns these tools to serve only the amplification of fear, stereotypes, or humiliation. They can also become instruments for a more accurate, balanced, and respectful representation of the human condition.
The true question is therefore not only technological. It is profoundly political, cultural, and moral. Algorithms do not determine by themselves the values that organize our societies; they reflect the objectives, priorities, and economic models that human beings choose to assign to them. Platforms evolve according to the incentives that societies accept or challenge. Media organizations transform according to the expectations of their audiences. Institutions embody the principles that citizens decide to protect. Ultimately, the way we represent the most vulnerable reveals less about who they are than about who we collectively are.
Every civilization leaves behind monuments, texts, artistic works, institutions, and scientific discoveries that bear witness to its era. The twenty-first century will also leave behind an unprecedented quantity of images and digital traces in human history. These billions of photographs, videos, and data points will likely constitute one of the largest archives ever produced by a human generation. Future historians will attempt to understand our era through these fragments of collective memory. They will search within them for signs of our progress, our contradictions, our fears, but also our fundamental values.
The question therefore remains open: will they discover a civilization fascinated by the permanent spectacle of suffering, a civilization that confused visibility with understanding, or will they discover a humanity capable of using the most advanced technologies to strengthen justice, solidarity, and mutual recognition? The answer will not depend on machines themselves. It will depend on the ethical, political, and cultural choices we make today regarding the way we wish to see, tell, and transmit the world.
The true challenge of our time does not lie in the ever-growing accumulation of images of suffering, but in the quality of the gaze we direct toward those who experience injustice, poverty, or exclusion. Human dignity is not a reward granted to those who achieve economic or social success; it is the very foundation of every community that aspires to freedom and justice. A democracy is not measured solely by its institutions, elections, or economic performance. It is also measured by the way it treats the most vulnerable, by the manner in which it listens to them, recognizes them, and represents them. True progress therefore does not consist simply in seeing more, but in learning to see more justly.
Learning to look without reducing, to bear witness without exploiting, to inform without humiliating, to show without dispossessing, to tell stories without confiscating voices: this may be the greatest moral challenge of the twenty-first century. A civilization that protects the dignity of the most vulnerable ultimately protects the very foundation of its own humanity. For a society is revealed not only by what it builds for the most powerful, but also by the way it regards those who possess the fewest means to defend their own image.
The digital future will therefore be judged not only by the power of its technologies, but also by the wisdom with which they are used. If humanity chooses to regard every person as an end in themselves rather than as an instrument of visibility, audience, or influence, then the digital age may transcend the status of a mere information revolution and become a new chapter in the long history of human dignity.
Intellectual References and Documentary Sources
The reflection on the representation of poverty, human dignity, the digital economy, and the global circulation of images draws upon several disciplines: social sciences, moral philosophy, media studies, law, international relations, artificial intelligence, and postcolonial studies. This selection of references aims to guide readers in exploring more deeply the main issues developed throughout this dossier. It does not claim to be exhaustive, but brings together the works and institutions that have contributed to illuminating contemporary challenges related to the representation of human vulnerability.
I. Attention Economy, Digital Media, and Information Capitalism
Herbert A. Simon
Simon, Herbert A.
“Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” In Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, edited by Martin Greenberger. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.
Herbert Simon was one of the first researchers to formulate the idea that, in an information-saturated society, human attention becomes the scarce resource around which new economic and social relationships are organized. His analysis constitutes one of the theoretical foundations of the contemporary attention economy.
Tim Wu
Wu, Tim.
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
Tim Wu traces the history of the transformation of human attention into an economic resource, from mass media to contemporary digital platforms. His work helps explain why certain images become extremely visible while other realities remain marginalized.
Jonathan Crary
Crary, Jonathan.
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013.
(French edition: 24/7: Le capitalisme à l’assaut du sommeil. Paris: La Découverte.)
Jonathan Crary analyzes a society in which attention, time, and permanent availability have become resources exploited by the contemporary economy. His approach sheds light on the cultural mechanisms that encourage the continuous consumption of images and information.
Shoshana Zuboff
Zuboff, Shoshana.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.
(French edition: L’Âge du capitalisme de surveillance. Paris: Zulma, 2020.)
Shoshana Zuboff analyzes how digital platforms transform human behaviors, personal data, and attention into economic resources. Her work represents a major reference for understanding the power dynamics associated with the digital economy.
Yves Citton
Citton, Yves.
Pour une écologie de l’attention. Paris: Seuil, 2014.
Yves Citton offers a philosophical reflection on the collective management of attention in contemporary societies. He demonstrates that what captures our gaze is never neutral, but depends on economic, political, and cultural structures.
Manuel Castells
Castells, Manuel.
Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Manuel Castells demonstrates that contemporary power largely depends on the ability to produce, organize, and disseminate meanings within global communication networks.
II. Poverty, Mediated Suffering, and Humanitarian Representation
Susan Sontag
Sontag, Susan.
Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
(French edition: Devant la douleur des autres. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2003.)
Susan Sontag analyzes the role of images of war, disaster, and suffering in shaping collective perception. She examines the boundary between necessary testimony, compassion, and the symbolic consumption of pain.
Luc Boltanski
Boltanski, Luc.
La Souffrance à distance: morale humanitaire, médias et politique. Paris: Métailié, 1993.
Luc Boltanski studies how modern societies respond to the suffering of others when it becomes visible through the media. His work remains fundamental for understanding the connections between emotion, morality, and humanitarian action.
Lilie Chouliaraki
Chouliaraki, Lilie.
The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: SAGE Publications, 2006.
Lilie Chouliaraki analyzes the relationship between distant audiences and populations affected by crises. She demonstrates how humanitarian representations influence contemporary forms of solidarity.
Nandita Dogra
Dogra, Nandita.
Representations of Global Poverty: Aid, Development and International NGOs. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.
Nandita Dogra studies the images produced by international organizations and development actors. She demonstrates how certain representations can simplify social realities and confine populations of the Global South within limited narratives.
Roger Silverstone
Silverstone, Roger.
Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Roger Silverstone analyzes the moral role of media in shaping our relationship with others. His work reminds us that every public representation possesses an ethical dimension.
III. Psychology of Empathy, Compassion, and the Perception of Vulnerability
Paul Bloom
Bloom, Paul.
Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: Ecco, 2016.
(French edition: Contre l’empathie: Plaidoyer pour la raison. Paris: Premier Parallèle, 2019.)
Paul Bloom distinguishes between the immediate emotional reaction provoked by the suffering of others and compassion based on reflection and sustained action.
C. Daniel Batson
Batson, C. Daniel.
Altruism in Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
C. Daniel Batson presents several decades of research on empathy, altruism, and prosocial behaviors, allowing for a better understanding of the psychological mechanisms behind solidarity.
Jodi Halpern
Halpern, Jodi.
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Jodi Halpern analyzes the balance between professional distance and emotional engagement in situations involving human suffering.
Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman, Daniel.
Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
(French edition: Système 1 / Système 2 : Les deux vitesses de la pensée. Paris: Flammarion, 2012.)
Daniel Kahneman demonstrates how intuitive and emotional reactions influence human judgments, particularly when confronted with highly emotionally charged images.
UNESCO
UNESCO.
Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Paris: UNESCO, 2021.
This international framework affirms the principles of human dignity, transparency, accountability, and the protection of fundamental rights in the development of artificial intelligence.
V. Postcolonial Studies, the Global South, and Representations of Otherness
Frantz Fanon
Fanon, Frantz.
Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: François Maspero, 1961.
Edward W. Said
Said, Edward W.
Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
(French edition: L’Orientalisme. Paris: Seuil, 1980.)
Achille Mbembe
Mbembe, Achille.
Politiques de l’inimitié. Paris: La Découverte, 2016.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty.
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 1988.
Homi K. Bhabha
Bhabha, Homi K.
The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
VI. Collective Memory, Digital Archives, and Human Heritage
Maurice Halbwachs
Halbwachs, Maurice.
La Mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950.
Pierre Nora
Nora, Pierre.
Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992.
Aleida Assmann
Assmann, Aleida.
Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
VII. International Institutional Sources
United Nations
United Nations.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Paris, 1948.
UNESCO
UNESCO.
Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Paris, 2021.
OCHA
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Global Humanitarian Overview. Geneva: United Nations.
UNICEF
UNICEF.
Ethical Guidelines for Communication and Media Representation of Children. New York: UNICEF.
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
ICRC.
Professional Standards for Protection Work. Geneva: ICRC.
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
UNDP.
Human Development Report. New York: United Nations.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
OECD.
Development Co-operation Report. Paris: OECD.
World Bank
World Bank.
World Development Report: Data for Better Lives. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2021.
Editorial Note from the CPGNNews Editorial Board
Representing Humanity in the Age of Permanent Images
Through this dossier entitled “Poverty Pornography: Chronicle of a Confiscated Dignity,” the editorial board of CaribPulse Global News Network (CPGNNews) offers an international reflection on one of the major issues of our time: the way contemporary societies represent poverty, vulnerability, and human suffering in a world marked by the constant circulation of images, digital acceleration, and the profound transformation of the ways in which reality is collectively perceived.
As an international media organization dedicated to news, analysis, and strategic reflection, CPGNNews considers that the major issues of the twenty-first century can no longer be understood solely through national frameworks. Technological transformations, humanitarian crises, economic inequalities, migration, climate change, and geopolitical shifts are now interconnected through global dynamics that require an understanding extending beyond the immediacy of current events.
From the Caribbean, a historical region situated at the crossroads of several civilizations, shaped by experiences of vulnerability but also by trajectories of resilience, creativity, and social transformation, CPGNNews develops an open perspective on the world. Our ambition is to analyze local and regional realities within their international dimension while offering an independent reading of the major forces shaping contemporary societies.
Never before in human history have individuals, media organizations, and institutions possessed such an extraordinary capacity to produce, disseminate, and preserve images. This revolution of visibility represents a major advance for journalism, the defense of human rights, and international mobilization. It makes it possible to document injustices, bring forgotten crises to light, and create new forms of solidarity among populations separated by thousands of kilometers.
Yet this new power also entails a new responsibility. The fundamental question is not only to determine which realities should be shown, but also how they should be represented. An image can reveal an injustice and trigger collective mobilization. However, when it is detached from its context or used without consideration for the person portrayed, it can also transform human vulnerability into an object of emotional consumption.
It is this essential tension that CPGNNews examines in this dossier. Our approach is neither to challenge the fundamental mission of journalism, nor to weaken the role of humanitarian organizations, nor to restrict freedom of expression. Rather, it seeks to examine the responsibilities associated with the power to represent others in an era in which attention has become an economic, social, and political resource.
For CPGNNews, poverty is never an identity. It represents a human, social, and historical condition that cannot, by itself, define a person, a community, or a people. Behind every image are individual stories, cultures, knowledge, aspirations, and capacities for action that disappear when individuals are portrayed exclusively through the lens of their vulnerability.
Through this dossier, our editorial board seeks to contribute to a global reflection on the ethics of the contemporary gaze. The objective is not to see less, but to see more deeply. It is not to conceal difficult realities, but to represent them with greater context, greater accuracy, and greater respect for those who experience them.
Since its creation, CaribPulse Global News Network has championed journalism founded on rigorous information, in-depth analysis, and a thorough understanding of the complex phenomena shaping our era. In a media environment dominated by speed, competition for attention, and the multiplication of digital content, our responsibility is to provide information that does not merely present events but also seeks to explain their causes, consequences, and human implications.
The issues addressed in this dossier—human dignity, media representation, the attention economy, artificial intelligence, humanitarian communication, digital memory, and platform responsibility—concern the entire international community today. They challenge media organizations, public institutions, international organizations, researchers, technology companies, and every citizen who participates daily in the global circulation of information.
In the digital age, representation has become a profoundly responsible act. Images no longer merely record reality; they also contribute to shaping collective memory, influencing social perceptions, and determining the way societies understand other peoples as well as their own responsibilities.
For CPGNNews, genuine progress cannot be measured solely by technological power, the speed of networks, or the quantity of available information. It must also be measured by the capacity of societies to use these tools in a manner that respects human dignity, freedom, and mutual recognition.
Contemporary technologies can reinforce simplifications, prejudices, and divisions. Yet they can also become powerful instruments of knowledge, justice, and closer understanding among peoples. The true challenge of our time is therefore not merely technological; it is also cultural, political, and moral.
Through its dossiers, analyses, and international investigations, CaribPulse Global News Network will continue to defend independent journalism capable of shedding light on the transformations of the world, giving meaning to events, and placing the human being back at the center of the major issues of our time.
Because informing is not merely about making reality visible; it is also about understanding it, placing it in context, and respecting those who are its primary protagonists.
The Editorial Board of
CaribPulse Global News Network (CPGNNews)
Inform. Analyze. Understand a Changing World.
CaribPulse Global News Network (CPGNNews)
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This is why the multilingual dimension constitutes an essential component of the editorial mission of CaribPulse Global News Network (CPGNNews). It does not simply represent an additional service offered to readers, but rather a fundamental commitment aimed at promoting the circulation of ideas, strengthening connections between societies, and building a global space for reflection.
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Beyond linguistic accessibility, multilingualism reflects a profound conviction: language constitutes one of the most powerful instruments for bringing peoples closer together. It enables different societies to share their experiences, compare their perspectives, and fully participate in the major debates shaping the future of humanity.
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We believe that no individual, institution, or nation possesses a monopoly on knowledge. The most enduring ideas emerge from collaboration, advance through critical dialogue, and achieve their full significance when they contribute to improving humanity’s understanding of the challenges it faces.
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We believe that a better-informed society is a society better prepared to respond to present challenges and future transformations.
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