Social media reduced 2 horrific killings to snuff films

First, it was the nightmarish stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, as she sat on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, minding her own business.

- Zeynep Tufekci

Then it was the horrifying shooting of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative activist, as he addressed a group of students at Utah Valley University. Both struck terror in countless Americans fearful for their own safety and for the safety of our public spaces and our democracy.

The tragedies had something else in common, though: They both generated extremely graphic videos of the victims’ last moments, detailed enough to show the second that metal struck flesh and wrought its awful damage. Since then, shared by many and further amplified by digital algorithms that favour intense emotions, these videos have been endlessly replayed across social media. Countless users have commented on them, zoomed in on them, slowed them to a crawl, theorised about them or marked them up with arrows and diagrams and published the results. Ad nauseam.

In the nascent stages of social media, I was an optimist about unfiltered imagery. I thought, as did others, that unfiltered images from news events might make people more empathetic toward victims of natural disasters, repression or systemic violence. I also hoped raw reality from conflict zones would challenge the sanitised, cinematic version of war that too many people held or might force them to care about conflicts they were otherwise happy to ignore.

That's not what happened. Today, there are more cameras than ever, and we're drowning in videos documenting the last breaths of victim after victim. But instead of making us all more sensitive to the horrors that our fellow humans experience, instead of functioning as tools of understanding, graphic images like the videos of Zarutska and Kirk turn into something closer to viral snuff films when they are endlessly replayed. Reducing tragedy to voyeuristic content, they dehumanise not just the victim but all of us.