Digital hauntings: Spectral demands and the politics of war memory on YouTube

Digital platforms transform how traumatic pasts circulate across temporal and cultural distance, yet existing frameworks do not explain why some circulating memory generates demands for historical accountability while other memory, equally visible and emotionally resonant, produces only grief. This article develops the concept of “digital haunting” to address this gap, distinguishing mobilized haunting, in which discourse communities sustain demands for justice through “failed mourning,” from domesticated haunting, which absorbs emotional engagement into heritage and private grief. A matched comparison of two Philippine documentaries on Japanese wartime atrocities, drawing on 1024 YouTube comments, shows the comfort women documentary generating demand-articulating comments at over four times the rate of the Manila massacre documentary despite shared production and platform conditions. The divergence tracks the structural ecology surrounding each reception: advocacy infrastructure, contemporary flashpoints, transnational solidarity networks, and the singularity or diffusion of responsibility. The evidence suggests that domestication is the default tendency of platform circulation, and that mobilized haunting depends on scaffolding built beyond it.