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Shortly past noon on Sept. 12, millions of Americans opened their phones. They logged on to their preferred social media sites only to be slapped in the eyes by a graphic video of Charlie Kirk being assassinated.
“I went onto X and looked up Charlie Kirk just to see if there was anything, and the first thing that popped up was this close-up video of him just talking to this student, and out of nowhere, he just gets shot. It was so graphic,” said 19-year-old Kennesaw State University student, Milo Pisani. “No trigger warning, no blur, nothing. It just straight-up played the video.”
Although Kirk’s death is the most recent example of obscenely graphic content being shared throughout social media, it is far from the first and unlikely to be the last.
“Whenever I watch those videos, I only see it for a few minutes, and I think about it during that time, but those people, they’re going to remember that moment for the rest of their lives, 19-year-old Wake Forest student Sarah Zedd said. “I just think it’s hard to conceptualize that someone’s literal worst moment of their life is something you witness for a few seconds and then scroll past.”
With an ever-increasing stream of content flooding our screens and fewer and fewer restrictions, the amount of graphic content our generation has been exposed to from a young age seems to desensitize us to some of humanity’s most horrific moments.
Erin Masons Stephens, a licensed professional counselor who specializes in teens and tweens dealing with mental health struggles said, “I think what scares me the most is that it does do exactly that, it kind of desensitizes people to it, and so when they see it in the real world, or see it on social media, it just becomes another thing that maybe grabs their attention for a few seconds, and then they kind of move on.”
On March 15, 2019, people from all across the globe were appalled after hearing about a shooting that took place at a mosque in New Zealand, but more specifically, that the entire event had been livestreamed onto Facebook Live. The horrific video quickly spread to platforms like YouTube and Instagram, worsening an already terrible situation.
According to CNN, Facebook had to remove 1.5 million copies of the mosque video attack from its platform. In September, The New York Times reported about three women who were brutally tortured and murdered while on a live stream in Argentina.
These events and their rapid, uncensored spread are part of a larger problem among news organizations. Andrea Thomas, an Atlanta resident, graduated from the University of South Carolina with a journalism degree and recounted that one of her classes focused on how media organizations handle graphic content and the decision of whether to release the footage. She laughs at the thought of that now.
“Those days are way over now,” Thomas said. “I mean, the media still makes those decisions, but it doesn’t matter if they make the decisions or not because it’s already going to be recorded and shared and passed around and go viral.”
Most social media platforms have some form of regulations towards graphic content. Graphic content can be in the form of live or recorded videos, images, or detailed descriptions, all depicting verbal, physical, and/or sexual violence, destruction, bloodshed, or even death. While most platforms, like YouTube and Meta, have policies on what is not allowed, such as how a warning screen is shown before the content is displayed, how the policies are applied is not always clear.
X’s (formerly known as Twitter) policies are even murkier.
After surveying 50 young adults aged 16-22, the results revealed an evident lack of regulations against graphic content on social media sites, specifically X. When asked what social media site people saw the Kirk shooting video, the majority of people replied with X, and 31 people responded that they most often find graphic content on that platform.
“Twitter has the most graphic stuff,” Zedd said. “I don’t know how that stuff is allowed to get posted and allowed to be kept up.”
X, owned by Elon Musk, says in their “help center” that graphic media is allowed to be shared as long as it’s not “excessively gory” and notes that X does not screen content or remove potentially offensive content. According to a New York Times article, following the spread of the Kirk videos, X posted online that it “will continue to stand against violence and censorship, ensuring this
platform amplifies truth and open dialogue for everyone.”
As stated in the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), websites and online platforms are not permitted to collect personal information, such as names, emails, phone numbers, biometrics, IP addresses, photos, etc., from children under the age of 13. This is notable because, until users are 13, X cannot collect children’s data under COPPA. Although the age minimum for practically all the social media sites this generation uses is 13, it doesn’t seem to be out of concern for the explicit things children might be exposed to, but rather about money.
“They definitely could and should have things in place to prevent that kind of thing, but they just don’t do it because they don’t have to. Nobody makes them, and they just want to make all the money that they can,” says Andrea Thomas, who has two children of her own.
According to a study titled “Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence Exposure, Aggressive Cognitions, and Aggressive Behavior,” researchers found that continual exposure to graphic content can lead to less emotionally responsive humans towards violent stimuli and less sympathy for victims of violence in the real world.
Although many people have used this logic to say that video games could be a significant problem, gamers often disagree.
“Video games are normally an escape from all that,” Milo Pisani said. “People don’t treat it like it’s real life; they just think of it as a game, at least the people I know and play with. They can leave all the real-life problems out of the game.”
In the same survey mentioned earlier involving 50 young adults aged 16-22, 44% said they were between 10 and 12 when they first saw a gory video on the internet. It’s important to note that the oldest participant of this survey was born before Twitter was founded, and the youngest was born before Instagram. Now, with younger generations truly growing up in a world of social media, and, according to the Pew Research Center, nearly 95% of teens aged 13-19 have access to a phone, one can only assume the percentage of children witnessing graphic content online at a young age is increasing.
“Teens are very, very savvy,” Stephens said. “They grew up with phones, they grew up with social media, and parents really need more education about what that actually looks like, how to monitor it, what to look for, and how to set those boundaries so that it’s safe.”
