On the taking down--and leaving up--of gruesome contet on social media

 

Social media algorithms today are weird in many ways. One way is the overpolicing of content that relates to people's lives coming to an end. I watch a lot of medical videos, because one of the things I study is the sociology of medicine, and it is really quite bizarre to see doctors who are explaining medical cases have to resort to all sorts of euphemisms when the case involves someone who didn't make it. "Despite this treatment, the patient had an outcome incompatible with life."

That's just silly. It doesn't help anyone. And it is hurtful that algorithms take down posts where people are mourning the passing of a loved one whose end by their own hand, because the posts used the standard term for such an act.

When it comes to actually viewing people's passing or their disturbing remains in media and social media, that's been treated as forbidden ever since the aftermath of 9/11. Many Americans were traumatized by watching scores of people leaping off the twin towers when they were in flames, in videos that were replayed over and over on the news at the time.

It's understandable why that decision was made. There are, however, many people who have pushed back on the bloodless way that wars and mass casualties are now shown to Americans. There is a long tradition of documenting atrocities in order to shock the conscience and prompt people to act. Consider the photography exhibits of the 1800s that showed the distressing remains of Civil War soldiers on battlefields. The image I’ve used here is not one of these, but they are still considered part of our sacred national history, and there are hundreds of them uncensored online. Or consider how the mother of Emmitt Till--a 14-year-old Black boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched after having been accused of acting flirtatious toward a white woman in 1955--insisted that he be displayed in an open casket at his funeral, for the world to see what had been done to her boy. Some parents of children who were victims of school shootings have begged media to allow their posthumous images to be shown, to try to prompt action toward gun control.

Those are valid reasons to display disturbing mortal images, but media and social media companies have stuck with their rules against showing contemporary videos and photos of this kind.

Except, suddenly, there have been two exceptions to this rule. One relates to the stabbing murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a mentally ill homeless man on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina. And the other is the case of the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Instead of videos of these gruesome events being taken down in seconds, they remained easily accessible online for days. Just looking at YouTube now, I found a video of Kirk's bloody end posted by the NY Post as the top result when searching, 5 days after the event. It and others like it are marked "WARNING: Graphic Content," but they are still up.

That's not an accident. Social media companies have to have overridden their algorithmic content filters to permit it. And this override has been very limited. There is no such video of the victims of the school shooting that took place the same day as Kirk's end. Images of the bodies of the Democratic politicians assassinated in Minnesota this summer were not given some kind of exception to be displayed as evidence of fatal political violence being directed at the left.

I believe that as a society, we really should have a thoughtful conversation about whether sanitizing violent ends is always wise. Personally, I don't support a blanket ban on all such images, but you may not agree.

But the two recent exceptions to the ban have not been random. And what would truly be a terrible idea would be to permit only those gruesome ends that enflame one particular political party to be displayed persistently on social media, especially with that policy never being explicitly mentioned or acknowledged.