Watching a tragedy unfold from the other side of the world can at once be deeply moving and terribly frustrating. It can be hard to know what to do, how to react. Even if the events have no tangible, concrete effect on your day-to-day life, the urge to express empathy with the victims can be powerful.

And now — whether you think it’s for the better or the much, much worse — social media has made doing so a whole lot easier.

Following the Paris terror attacks last Friday, Facebook rolled out a new temporary profile picture feature. It allowed users to overlay a semi-transparent French flag on their avatar and set a time for it to expire. Many people used it. In the wake of these confusing and disturbing events, it was a quick and easy way for anyone on Facebook to show solidarity with the French people.

While social science suggests such a gesture is motivated at least in part by quasi-narcissistic “self-presentational needs” (what social media post isn’t?), in large part it seemed to be, at least for most people, a very small, simple expression of the empathy they were feeling at that moment.

For others on the internet, it signaled something entirely different. Some argued it “minimizes (even cheapens) the tremendous, horrific reality of what is going on all around the world, not just in Paris.” Many assumed people were using small social media gestures in place of taking real action that could help the victims in tangible ways.

One friend of mine put it this way on Instagram:

I think the idea that you can alter your Facebook picture or retweet a hashtag and that somehow suffices for actual support, or better yet supplants actual action, is an embarrassment of the social media generation.

We were in conversation about this meme he had posted, which sums up his point quite nicely and quite derisively, and which had garnered plenty of likes:

It was a fairly common sentiment, seemingly — the backlash to the social media reaction to the attacks. The main lines of criticism seemed to fall into two camps:

1. People are using hashtags or profile pictures in place of meaningful action, and are convincing themselves they are doing something useful for the victims, when in fact they are not.
2. The media’s and the public’s focus on Paris belies a harmful ignorance of the very real suffering that is happening elsewhere in the world every day.

I know and respect a lot of the people I saw making these points. And they do raise some important questions. For instance:

1. Does expressing sympathy for victims of one attack mean you do not care about the victims of another?
2. Does changing your profile picture make you less likely to donate to the Red Cross or support relief efforts?
3. Does posting that your “thoughts and prayers” are with Paris yield any psychic benefit for anyone other than you?
4. If not, does that make the post a bad thing?

These are worth considering. For my part, I’ve been mulling them over for the past week. In terms of answers, here’s where I’ve landed:

1. Of course not.
2. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest it.
3. I believe it can (see below).
4. N/A — but even if I’m wrong on #3, no.

So, I’m not persuaded by the criticisms against small social media gestures. Not even a little, actually.

I often think about the “We Are All Americans” cover of Le Monde after the 9/11 attacks. At the time I was in India on a semester abroad, feeling incredibly distant and removed from what was happening at home. It was confusing; it felt like the world was crashing down on us, and I was powerless to help. When I saw that edition, I remember being touched and comforted by this show of solidarity from a friend and ally. It helped me come to grips with the reality, and find my place in it.

To me, these small social media gestures are an attempt by individuals to reciprocate that emotion. I believe they can be valuable in many of the same ways, albeit on a much smaller scale. Certainly no one should kid themselves that a tweet or a temporary profile picture is going to fix anything. But that doesn’t mean such a gesture can’t bring comfort — to those feeling vulnerable in that moment who may see it and appreciate what it means, as well as to the person posting it in search of a way to voice their support from afar. Is that not worthwhile?

On the question of the Paris attack overshadowing other global tragedies, Maxim Mayer-Cesiano explored this reasoning in the Washington Post last week (in an article with, I think, an unnecessarily inflammatory headline). If you felt more emotionally affected by the Paris attacks than by other global tragedies, he argued, there may be good reasons for that:

People are allowed to grieve the way they want to grieve. If something moves them more than something else, that is fine. Many people have visited the City of Lights and found meaningful experiences there. Many other people have cherished family, friends or colleagues there who loom larger than an anonymous victim. That affinity doesn’t necessarily come from a hateful, ignorant or otherwise bad place. That’s just being a human and having feelings. No one has the right to police that. …

 

Paris, meanwhile, is usually a safe city… It is simply not as surprising when suicide bombers kill 37 people near a prolonged civil war as when six coordinated large-scale attacks unfold in a city that is nowhere near any kind of active conflict.

Of course it is worth examining why the Paris attacks received so much more real-time press than the Beirut bombings, or the plane apparently brought down by a bomb over Egypt, or the earthquake near Japan. Or any number of incidents of domestic gun violence in the United States. The biases that shape how we react to events always deserve examination. But it does not follow that people expressing empathy with victims of one tragedy and not another are by definition being somehow ignorant or immoral.

The overarching point in my mind is that, to the extent that these social media gestures are driven at least in part from a place of empathy, then there is no good reason to mock or ridicule them. Displays of empathy and “actual action” are absolutely different in terms of impact. But both are valid. Each can add value, and each has its place. (They are also not mutually exclusive — why not do both?)

If recent tragedies teach us anything — whether in Paris, Lebanon, Egypt, or anywhere people are intentionally hurting and killing others — it’s that we need more empathy, not less.