Good morning. Jessica Mathews here, filling in for Andrew Nusca.
I’ve been trying to stay off social media these past few days—as much as I can as a journalist. On Thursday, a video popped up on my X feed, displaying the very moment that political activist Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck as he sat on a stool onstage at a college campus, talking with students and observers. There was no warning, no prompt before the video started playing—only an instant replay of the exact moment of gory violence that would immediately make waves around the country and the world. The video was entirely unexpected, and it momentarily paralyzed me, leaving me unsettled and struggling to focus on the rest of the workday.
I wasn’t alone. During class or in the school hallways, teens watched various versions of the videos of Kirk’s killing that circulated online, sometimes in slow motion. Andrew Apsley, an English teacher in Utah, said a video was sent to his 19-year-old child, who has autism and has difficulty processing emotions. It was “pretty traumatic,” he told the Associated Press.
Over the last few weeks—as we have witnessed the tragic killing of Kirk, in close succession to the horrific videos and images of the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte that also went viral—it has felt like I’ve been forced to repeatedly bear witness to graphic and violent content in the exact moments when I am least emotionally prepared to do so. And it’s sobering to realize that this phenomenon is related, in part, to the business decisions of big social-media companies. In a chilling piece in Wired last Thursday, Lauren Goode pointed out that, as these platforms have scaled back their moderation efforts, researchers say they’re “falling short in enforcing their own content moderation rules, at a moment when political tensions and violence are flaring.”
Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, told Goode that “this is all psychologically damaging to our society in ways we don’t understand yet.” I would agree. These videos have been replaying in my head since I first saw them and have made it difficult at times for me to get through the day. For me, the only absolute solution has been to stay completely offline. Perhaps I am too sensitive in that I can’t handle sudden, unexpected graphic content on my social media feeds without it shaking me to my core. But I doubt I’m alone in that.
Today’s news below.
—Jessica Mathews
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