“The video is too graphic to show you,” said the voice-over on the BBC News website of the murder of Charlie Kirk, applying an editorial safeguard that was too late for many in the audience. Because the gruesome footage was already everywhere.
The moment when a shot rang out as the right-wing activist answered a student’s question, then slumped with blood pouring from his neck, was filmed on phones from multiple angles and uploaded online by Kirk’s audience.
The imagery was hosted on X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform. With no time to brace themselves, many social media users viewed it unsolicited on autoplay when scrolling their feeds.
Inside the technology platforms, such material is known as ‘Moment of Death’ (MOD) content and social media algorithms seem to embrace it. While tech companies say they remove content which violates their guidelines and age-restrict sensitive videos, it’s clear that more needs to be done.
For generations, news media have sought to shield audiences from the trauma of conflict, violent crime and natural disaster by withholding imagery of killings and corpses. In the wake of the Kirk assassination, serious outlets exercised the traditional caution, restricting coverage to the moments before and after the shooting.
Yet such self-censorship increasingly looks as effective as a child’s sandcastle in the face of an incoming tide. This summer, the social networks have been awash with MOD content, showing victims shot, stabbed and tortured to death.
Kirk, 31, a provocative figure on social media, was not the first influencer to have their MOD go viral. The Mexican TikTok star Valeria Márquez, 23, was shot by a hitman in May as she live-streamed to 113,000 followers from the beauty salon she owned in Zapopan, a town in the state of Jalisco.
In June, TikTok hosted a live stream of the murder of Jesus Sarmiento, a Venezuelan influencer who had denounced crime cartels.
Official bodies can be the source of MOD footage. On 5 September, the Charlotte Area Transit System in North Carolina created a horrific viral social media hit when it released security camera footage of the fatal stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, by her fellow passenger, Decarlos Brown Jnr.
Content creators see the appetite for violence and try to feed it. French streamer Jean Pormanove, whose real name was Raphael Graven, inhabited a social media sub-genre of “trash streaming” and had 500,000 followers who watched him play video games and undertake extreme challenges, often involving violence.
His death, recorded on a live stream last month, is being investigated by French police, and came after he underwent months of humiliation and mistreatment that was broadcast live on Kick, an Australian platform.
Young social media users are habitually absorbing MOD and other violent content. A recent study of 10,000 teenagers in England and Wales by the Youth Endowment Fund found that 70 per cent had encountered real-life violent online content in the previous year.
Only 6 per cent had actively searched for it. The rest were targeted by platforms in personalised feeds. Worse, 39 per cent of the teenagers said that viewing the videos made them more likely to carry a weapon.
Mass exposure to such content is fairly new. Only 20 years ago, the media gatekeepers who decreed that such imagery was not for public consumption were still in control.
Such was the concern for reader sensitivity in 2004 that British editors ordered the doctoring of a photo of the Madrid station bombing; a bloodied and severed limb was deemed too graphic and airbrushed out by four national newspapers. The Guardian preferred to colour the limb, from red to grey. But that same year, jihadi terrorists in Iraq filmed the beheading of British hostage Kenneth Bigley and put the video online.
The pattern continued. In 2019, a far-right extremist live-streamed on Facebook as he murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Today, MOD content proliferates. As we surrender our privacy to big tech and almost everyone carries a smartphone, there is an expectation that nothing is hidden.
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Arguably, it was only because MOD content showing the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd by a white police officer went viral in 2020 that justice was served and societal change resulted.
While old-school journalists might be scornful of social media’s editorial standards, open source investigative reporters value access to abundant real-time video that can challenge official narratives and hold power to account.A balance is needed. Social platforms began taking down videos of the Kirk shooting, but only after the money-spinning viral frenzy.
Looking forward, MOD material could be archived by platforms for researchers, but it should never be surfaced to those who did not request it. Most of all, we must never incentivise the publication of this content so that it becomes integral to daily media diets and future generations are desensitised to the horror and grief of violent death.
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