In the 1999 thriller 8 mmNicolas Cage plays a private detective watching a graphic film of the murder of a girl. His character becomes obsessed with the resolution of the crime. He looks at the images several times, leaving him psychologically destroyed and subject to violence itself. As a character says: “There are things that you cannot not see … The devil does not change, the devil changes You. “”
This week, millions of people – very involuntarily – saw the devil: a horrible video of the 31 -year -old conservative militant Charlie Kirk being shot by an assassin bullet, her neck gushing with blood, while organizing a student event at Utah Valley University. Video has instantly gone viral on social media platforms, in automatic reading for hours on X, in particular, for countless users to scroll through their flows until the moderators finally hugged its spread.
The images occurred on the heels of another horrible viral moment: the death of the 23 -year -old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed on a Light Charlotte trail in a random attack straight out of a horror film. Although the stab wounds are not widely seen, the moments just before and after his murder were difficult to avoid, including the photos of the haunting reaction and filled with Zarutska terror to his killer.
The widespread and quasi-no-consensitive visualization of such content is something relatively new.
The film Zapruder documenting the assassination of John F. Kennedy was undoubtedly the most famous video of a real event of all time. However, for decades, the images were largely unavailable outside the special new occasional television. Film by Oliver Stone in 1991 Jfk – Released nearly three decades after the assassination – marked the first time that many Americans watched the unpublished recording of this day.
In the 80s and 90s, the famous film series directly to video Faces of Death Features of real fatal calamities (as well as some rigged waterfalls). The film was an underground feeling; A endurance test for curious morbid adolescents.
Then came the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. Journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded in 2002. Boston marathon bombings in 2013. The shooting of the Mosque of Christchurch live in 2019. The murder of George Floyd in 2020. Everyone produced a widely viewed shock video.
It hurts us.
Editor -in -chief have long exerted an editorial discretion on the content deemed unnecessarily disturbing – and not the impression, for example, paparazzi photos of Princess Diana who died in her car accident, or not recordings of people jumping twin tricks on September 11. Even last week, the main media avoided publishing the Kirk clip being shot. On social networks, however, railings are practically non-existent.
UTAH governor Spencer Cox is right when he said that Kirk’s spread of video is not good to consume … Social media is cancer of our society. ” And although the details on the Kirk assassin are currently rare, you can make a safe bet about it; A link shared by most modern killers with ideology: they tend to be chronic – if not radicalized – online.
Professor Roxane Cohen Silver has written several studies on the effects of surveillance of real violence. The money noted that if the impact of the visualization of a single graphic video is low, it can have a negative effect of a measure on mental health for years. Such images are permanently stored in your long -term memory and are linked to be more frightening and anxious (if you have seen JfkYou have probably never been able to forget that the head of the president exploding to Kevin Costner intoning “back, and on the left …”).
This effect multiplies with an additional visualization of similar content, which people tend to seek paradoxically after their initial exposure – not despite the discovery of the band, but because They found it overwhelming (it’s like how if you are afraid of spiders, you tend to look for spiders, stone notes).
“Years ago, we thought that people were getting used to a violent exhibition,” said Stone. “Instead, any exhibition is linked to being more sensitive and looking for the next set of graphic images. It is a very cyclical process. We see increased distress and anxiety over time, hyper-vigilance over time and we have really found cardiovascular problems.” This effect is also different from watching violent films, television shows or video games – humans do not have the same trauma response when they know that the images are not real.
There is a counter argument on this subject: that images of monstrous acts must be seen for the company to have the appropriate response. Images of the Second World War concentration camp, for example, played a decisive role in the fight against the denial of the holocaust. We could also indicate the video of the death of Floyd, which caused a movement for racial justice and a push towards greater monitoring of the police. The indignation of the video, however, was also blamed for the riots and the financing of the police movement, that many now consider an error which could have precipitated an increase in violent crimes in certain cities (statistics are often debated). Likewise, the traumatic images of 3,000 deaths on September 11 prompted the United States to rally the world against organized terrorist groups but were also used to justify the war in Iraq, which resulted in around 200,000 civil deaths.
And therefore: looking at successful graphic tragedies causes human empathy and indignation, but our subsequent decisions – often made of anger and fear – can lead to even more deadly fatal results.
“This is an extraordinarily important point,” says Silver. “There can be both a positive for society and negative for the individual. For the individual, we found that there was No Psychological advantage at the exposure to graphic or horrible images. »»
Which brings us back to the death of Kirk. Dr. Sarah Mr. Coyne, professor and media researcher, says that launching politics in one of these videos, the risk of public response to traumatic images was running in dangerous directions. “It’s horrible and I fear that it no longer engages in violence,” explains Cohen. “I hope that people who saw this have empathy for the individual and his family and having the message that violence is not correct.”
Political leaders could consider pushing social media companies to increase the moderation of content – a practice that has decreased following reactions on platforms censoring conservative stories and opinions during pandemic elections and 2020. Targeting graphic imagery rather than political text could be a start, but even this idea has a cost. Several stories have documented how the moderators of the violent content are also traumatized, a former member of Meta staff saying to Euronews: “This type of content cicits you for life.”
The use of AI to facilitate moderation could be another solution. But the simplest and most practical idea could finally be kissing and evangelizing the irritating and unwanted advice that you have heard more and more in the last decade: leave social media and remove your fucking phone.
