Sometimes we have to witness man’s evil deeds.
HOW SHOULD VIDEO OR PHOTOS OF SUCH ATROCITIES BE TREATED?
‘Don’t watch the video,” a friend texted me on Thursday night. “Just don’t.”
I was baffled. At that moment, I was sitting comfortably in my inlaws’ basement, watching hockey highlights. Maybe that was why my mind jumped automatically to assuming she was talking about sports. Had there been a gruesome injury to a player? A broken leg on the ice or basketball court? I opened Twitter to check for news and found it. It wasn’t a sports injury. It was a series of confused and scattered reports of a shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. A mosque had been attacked. At that early moment, no one knew how bad the attack was.
And then I saw the video. There’s no need to describe the contents here. Suffice it to say it was clear evidence that the attack was catastrophic. It was very low resolution — most of the graphic details were mercifully obscured. But dozens of people were clearly dead or injured.
By the next morning, the death toll stood at 49, with almost as many injured (one additional person has died since). Two targets, both mosques, had been hit. The suspect’s internet history and his so-called manifesto were being pored over. New Zealand officials were pledging an overhaul of the country’s gun control laws.
But there was something else happening. A fascinating side debate. How should video or photos of such atrocities be treated? Not just by the news media, but by the public? And, especially, by the social media companies whose platforms so effectively disseminated the video. Each of those three categories occupies a very different part of this debate.
For members of the public, viewing the New Zealand video, or others like it, is a personal choice. I offer no advice. The video is horrific. But there is room in education and public debate for the horrible — sometimes there is necessity. Certain kinds of evil need to be seen to be believed. How many of us couldn’t stop watching the footage of the World Trade Center being hit on Sept. 11? How many of us have been left shaken to our cores by exhibits at a Holocaust museum — we knew what happened, but seeing the evidence is still different from reading it in a book. What person with even a passing interest in the Kennedy assassination hasn’t seen the Zapruder film? Yes, there is the argument that watching the attack video is exactly what the shooter wanted, or that it’s an additional level of victimization for the dead. These are valid concerns. But an informed public sometimes needs to be informed of horrific things. Seeing is believing, especially when the event is too awful to describe. Some things should be witnessed.
For the news media, there’s no real debate about viewing such videos. It’s a part of the job, though unpleasant and sometimes traumatizing. Amid all the confused early reports, watching the video answered some critical questions: were there casualties? (yes), how many? (numerous), how many shooters? (only one present in any of the videos), and what do we know about the shooter? (not a lot, but the video gave us some information).
That’s not to say that the news media mustn’t behave responsibly. Such material can be fairly viewed as part of reporting, but should not be carelessly disseminated ( just because I watched the video didn’t mean I retweeted the damn thing). This ought to be self-evident, especially to journalists, but an Australian television news channel, Sky News Australia, was taken off the air in New Zealand after airing graphic footage of the attack. News organizations have a duty to report, but also to filter. Failure in that regard should rightly be criticized.
The most interesting angle here is the responsibility of the social media companies to prevent such videos from being shared. On Thursday, Facebook and Twitter were both instantly awash with footage of the attack. It was almost a full day before they seemed to be able to make progress in removing the footage, by which point it had no doubt been copied and shared on other channels. (I’m sure it’s still there if you really want to find it.) The footage will never be gone. The companies were slammed for their tardiness. Is that criticism fair?
In one way, no. Humanity is generating astonishing amounts of new photographic and video content every day. To choose one small example, literally hours of video is added to YouTube every single second of every day. It is simply impossible for any company to vet that kind of content in real-time, at least using human staff. Many of our tech giants, including Google and Microsoft, have attempted to use automated systems to filter out one particularly evil form of “content” — child pornography. The systems aren’t perfect, but they are the only real way to fight back in real time, and are a huge improvement on waiting for members of the public to stumble upon the content and report it to authorities.
But child pornography is illegal, virtually everywhere. There’s are no significant public interest or free speech issues there. The companies are required by law to combat its spread. Something like the New Zealand attack isn’t nearly so clear-cut — watching or distributing the shooting video isn’t a crime in Canada and many other countries, and I’m not convinced it should be. The obligation on the social media companies is therefore not legal, but moral — or perhaps financial, if their reputations become tarnished.
It’s a question they need to ruminate on, and fast. As high-quality cameras and real-time broadcasting capabilities get ever better, easier and cheaper, live streaming these sorts of attacks will eventually probably become routine. (I confess that I’m amazed it isn’t already — how is New Zealand still a bleak outlier in this regard?) There will never be enough staff to rely on human moderators in the midst of an unfolding attack, but filtering algorithms could help with blocking terrorism videos in the same way they’re already fighting sexual exploitation content.
In this way, we may eventually find ourselves to a workable balance — where the videos are accessible to the media who need to watch it, and to those members of the public who feel compelled to, without being easily found. I’m not sure such videos should vanish entirely. But that doesn’t mean copies should be ubiquitous, either.