Viral videos
Bystanders’ recordings spread rapidly in wake of tragedy, spark outrage
The way we experience mass shootings online now is with everything at once. Rumors and facts go viral alongside each other before anything is confirmed. And raw, often violent video increasingly is posted minutes after news breaks, followed by questions about what the dissemination of these videos accomplishes — and why people share them in the first place.
One video posted Saturday, with more than 250,000 views on Facebook, appears to begin outside a Walmart in El Paso, the area where an attacker killed 20 people and wounded dozens more. A man, whose Facebook name matches that of a witness to the shooting quoted by media outlets, walks inside the store while filming on his phone. He approaches a body, face down in the entrance, in a pool of blood. Another bystander is already there, phone also pointed toward the body. The two nearly collide, both watching their phones. The camera lingers on the body for minutes, even as a handful of women attempt to exit the store, shielding the eyes of their children to protect them from the carnage.
More than 4,000 people have shared this video, which was streamed live and now carries a graphic-content warning from Facebook. But others, in the video’s comments, pushed back. “Stop filming,” one Facebook user wrote as the live video was broadcast. “Take that off bro,” another wrote. “His family is going to see this.” And another: “This is so disrespectful to the deceased.”
As the public becomes more experienced at watching massacres unfold live online, a few informal rules have emerged: Don’t sensationalize the gunman. Don’t help misinformation spread, even to condemn it. Focus on the stories of the victims and “helpers.” The public is even getting better at recognizing that mass shooters want — and know how — to go viral, sometimes with live videos of their massacres and manifestos posted to extremist message boards. But videos from bystanders, posted in the moment of tragedy and spread rapidly, often outpace questions about why people share them and what the mass broadcast of violence does to those who suddenly can’t avoid seeing it.
As social media continues to shape how the public experiences breaking news, the central question of how to be a responsible, informed citizen has shifted from what makes up a media “diet” to what people choose to share.
“There is a deep human need to say, ‘Hey, I was part of this,’ to document and to share. I don’t think there’s anything sinister with that need to share a horrible, terrible experience,” said Kelly McBride, chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, a journalism research organization. But once posted, “you can’t control what happens to that video.”
Viral content of any kind has a way of outpacing its context, driven by a need to share that prompts people to ask why later. Violent videos emerging from breaking news events are no different. Sometimes, the news cycle pre-empts soul searching: Hours after 20 died in El Paso, a gunman in Dayton, Ohio, killed nine more people.