Relentlessly watching graphic violence on the internet is probably bad for you
The assassination of Charlie Kirk was horrifying, dangerous, reckless, and tragic.
And as an aside: so is the way that social media services gleefully amplifies the gore.
Obviously visceral videos like this are important and should be a meaningful part of the reporting, but is it a great idea to expose everyone on the internet to a seemingly endless feed of snuff videos?
Here’s Adam Clark Estes for Vox:
If you haven’t seen the video of a bullet killing Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah, you’re one of the lucky ones. When most people opened X, Instagram, YouTube, or any other platform on Wednesday afternoon, the gore was there waiting for them.
This was by design. While images of graphic violence have always spread online, users once had to search them out. But more recently social media companies have made them inescapable as they’ve backed away from content moderation, sometimes in the name of free speech. That meant horrifying videos of Kirk’s assassination went viral in the immediate aftermath of the event, in a way that traumatized people en masse. The videos were viewed more than 11 million times from the moment Kirk was shot until he died two hours later, according to the New York Times. Sometimes people watched them accidentally, like on X, which autoplays videos when you scroll past them. Still, countless people were watching the clips, which signaled to the algorithm that more people wanted to see them.
He continues:
The same effect is amplifying angry rhetoric from all over the map about what comes next. Leaders on the left are condemning violence, while a handful of (largely unknown) users make jokes. Some on the far right are calling for civil war, while other conservatives are mourning a colleague or friend.
Given all that, what should you do? I’d argue something simple: Log off.
Logging off is actually always good advice. Listen to your gut. Literally. The queasy feeling in your stomach isn’t from that leftover burrito. Witnessing virtual violence can take a physical toll.
Per Psychology Today:
What is the impact of viewing violent images? Whether by intentional "doom scrolling" or by inadvertent exposure, there is a real risk of media-induced traumatic stress. Traumatic media may trigger some people to experience severe distress, anxiety, or worse. […] This widespread traumatic media may be harmful to our collective mental health.
I don’t think we need studies to show that this is true. Seems pretty clear that society’s collective mental health is not great. The body keeps the score and “Unsolicited Stabbing Videos on X” is off to a commanding lead.
It’s not just social media, either. This sort of content is inescapable in publications like The New York Post, which seems to run graphic coverage on every shooting, shark attack, and machete-wielding madman on the planet. They’ve published at least 5 different stories this year about people getting gored by bulls and bison. (You’d think at least one would have taken place in New York, and yet…)
Videos on The Post are often autoplaying, widescreen, and above the fold. They technically censor the most graphic parts of these videos at the last possible second… but it’s not exactly a consensual experience.
There’s this legal term that everybody has heard of: assault and battery. The words often are used in tandem, but traditionally they both have their own distinct meanings. The battery is the harmful or offensive physical contact and assault is the apprehension of that harmful or offensive contact. Both cause damage.
So, if witnessing graphic violence online can manifest as physical stress in the human body, my suspicion is that the apprehension of witnessing that graphic internet violence can do the same thing.
Social media warriors have spent years arguing about what counts as “trauma” and whether we need “safe spaces.” Yet social media itself may be the least safe space of all. And we may all carry the trauma to prove it.
So I’m going to take a break and let the only piece of social media I consume for the next little while be this poignant song from Jesse Welles.
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