Real-Life Death Videos Getting Harder to Ignore, Impossible to Unsee
In the 1999 thriller 8mm, Nicolas Cage plays a private detective who watches a graphic film of a girl’s murder. His character becomes obsessed with solving the crime. He watches the footage repeatedly, leaving him psychologically wrecked and prone to violence himself. As one character puts it: “There are some things you can’t unsee … the devil don’t change, the devil changes you.”
This week, millions of people — many unwittingly — saw the devil: A horrific video of 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk getting shot by an assassin’s bullet, his neck gushing with blood, while hosting a student event at Utah Valley University. The video instantly went viral across social media platforms, autoplaying for hours on X, in particular, to countless users casually scrolling their feeds until moderators eventually clamped down on its spread.
The footage came on the heels of another gruesome viral moment: The death of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed on a Charlotte light rail in a random attack straight out of a horror movie. While the stabbing itself was not widely seen, the moments just before and after her murder were difficult to avoid, including shots of Zarutska’s haunting, terror-filled reaction to her killer.
The widespread and quasi-nonconsensual viewing of such content is something that’s relatively new.
The Zapruder film documenting John F. Kennedy’s assassination was arguably the most famous video of a real-life event of all time. Yet for decades the footage was largely unavailable outside of the occasional TV news special. Oliver Stone’s 1991’s film JFK — released nearly three decades after the assassination— marked the first time many Americans watched the unedited recording of that day.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, the notorious straight-to-video film series Faces of Death featured scenes of real-life fatal calamities (along with some faked stunts). The film was an underground sensation; an endurance test for morbidly curious teens.
Then came the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. Journalist Daniel Pearl getting beheaded in 2002. The Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. The live-streamed Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019. George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Each produced a widely seen shock horror video.
This is doing something bad to us.
News editors have long exercised editorial discretion over content deemed unnecessarily disturbing — not printing, for instance, paparazzi photos of Princess Diana dead inside her car crash, or not airing recordings of people leaping from the Twin Towers on 9/11. Even last week, major news outlets avoided posting the clip of Kirk getting shot. On social media, however, the guardrails are practically nonexistent.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox has it exactly right when he declared that the spread of Kirk video’s “Is not good to consume … social media is a cancer on our society.” And while details about Kirk’s assassin are currently scarce, you can make one safe bet about him; a link shared by most modern-day ideologically driven killers: They tend to be chronically — if not outright radicalized — online.
Professor Roxane Cohen Silver has authored several studies on the effects of watching real-life violence. Silver has found that while the impact of viewing a single graphic video is small, it can measurably have a negative effect on mental health for literally years. Such images get permanently stored in your long-term memory and are linked to being more fearful and anxious (if you’ve seen JFK, you’ve likely never been able to forget the president’s head exploding to Kevin Costner intoning “back, and to the left…”).
This effect multiplies with additional viewing of similar content, which people tend to paradoxically seek out after their initial exposure — not despite finding the tape upsetting, but because they found it upsetting (it’s like how if you’re afraid of spiders, you tend to look for spiders, Stone notes).
“Years ago, we thought people would habituate to violent exposure,” Stone says. “Instead, any exposure is linked to being more sensitive and seeking out the next set of graphic images. It’s a very cyclical process. We see increased distress and anxiety over time, hyper-vigilance over time, and actually found cardiovascular problems.” This effect is also different than watching violent movies, TV shows or videogames — humans don’t have the same trauma response when they know footage isn’t real.
There is a counter argument to this: That images of monstrous acts needs to be seen for society to have the appropriate response. World War II concentration camp footage, for instance, has been instrumental in fighting Holocaust denialism. One might also point to Floyd’s death video, which spawned a movement for racial justice and a push towards more policing oversight. Outrage over the video, however, also was blamed for riots and the Defund the Police movement, which many now consider a mistake that might have precipitated a rise in violent crime in some cities (the statistics are often debated). Similarly, the traumatic footage of 3,000 deaths on 9/11 spurred the United States to rally the world against organized terror groups yet was also used to justify the Iraq War, which resulted in an estimated 200,000 civilian deaths.
And so: Watching graphic tragedies successful provokes human empathy and outrage, but our subsequent decisions — often made from anger and fear — can result in even deadlier deadly outcomes.
“This is an extraordinarily important point,” Silver says. “There can be both a positive for society and negative for the individual. For the individual, we have found there is no psychological benefit to exposure to graphic or gruesome images.”
Which brings us back to Kirk’s death. Dr. Sarah M. Coyne, a professor and media researcher, says throwing politics into any of these videos runs the risk of public response to traumatic footage spinning into dangerous directions. “It’s horrific and I worry that it will just begat more violence,” Cohen says. “I hope the people who saw that have empathy for the individual and for his family and have the message that violence is not okay.”
Political leaders might consider pushing social media companies to increase content moderation — a practice which declined in the wake of backlash over platforms censoring conservative stories and views during the pandemic and 2020 election. Targeting graphic imagery rather than political text could be a start, but even this idea comes with a cost. Several stories have documented how moderators of violent content also become traumatized, with one former Meta staffer telling Euronews, “This kind of content scars you for life.”
Using AI to aid moderation might be another solution. But the easiest and most practical idea might be to finally embrace and evangelize the irritating and unwelcome advice you’ve increasingly heard over the last decade: Quit social media and get off your damn phone.
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