The war on terror has coincided with a global digital communication revolution: the diffusion of the Internet, the proliferation of smart phones, and the rise of social media. Over the past twenty years, these technologies have revolutionised the ways we communicate, consume news and witness war and conflict, which is what I focus on in this paper. Digital technologies allowed global audiences to witness conflict from the points of view of ordinary witnesses and this has had profound impact on the relation between media and publics. Rather than focusing on the technology, in this paper, I shift attention to thinking about the war on terror as the backdrop to the political ramifications of communication technological changes. I argue that the adverse political effects often blamed on digital media cannot be understood without considering the political backdrop of the war on terror. I first focus on the notion of post-truth. Media scholars have discussed the phenomenon in relation to the rise of algorithmic echo chambers that lead to the circulation of conspiracy theories, erode trust in truth, and fuel populism. Going beyond viewing post-truth as simply a by-product of the technology, I trace it back to the media spectacle in the build-up to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, which brought forth long-lasting mistrust in mainstream media and western political communication. Secondly, I focus on what I call post-morality in media. I argue that the idea of an inherent western moral political disposition when witnessing atrocity has also been disrupted by the war on terror. Many argue that western failures to act when witnessing distant suffering is due to new technologies of mediation, be it the view of social media as carriers of fake news or as responsible for the fragmentation of the public sphere. In my formulation, I bring back the discussion to the war on terror by highlighting how it exposed the limits of moral claims to justify intervention in other countries. This has been spectacularly demonstrated in what was widely viewed as the US abandonment of Afghanistan after decades of justifying occupation through moral claims of saving the Afghan people from the Taliban. I conclude by reflecting on the entanglements between geopolitics and technology and how the political implications of the latter cannot be understood without the former.