News, media and videos of death without warning

[AntonyF]

What a title! If you braved it in, you know you're in for a laugh! But seriously, I just want to get other people's opinions on this one.

Are we getting a bit blasé with videos of death?

I'll give you three examples just from the last week for me.


1) Scrolling Reddit without any warning and on auto-play it showed a video with a family of six in a car being killed by a truck.
2) On the news I turned on and the moment when a police officer shot a member of the public.
3) And also on the news, seeing people - you can see them directly - swept to their deaths in recent floods.

Is it me, or would this never have been a thing once? I'm not into snuff movies, I don't want to see it. But we're subjected it without warning often.

Thigs like the car crash really stick with me... knowing that was the point where they died. And then lending a car to a friend it sits in my mind further.

I just find it unnecessary and distasteful. It feels like it's feeding this need to know everything, that privacy isn't an option.

I find it also strange that we get warned about so many other things. A video of a snake bite, that got a warning. Flashing photography instant warning (I know that's somewhat different). I go to theatre and I swear I get more warnings about content. TV networks will warn you about swearing, but seeing people die well that's not warning worthy. That has no watershed, we can do that at any time...

It troubles me, basically.

 

[auntiehill]

As it should.

What about the friends and family who are subjected to these videos? How would you cope if a video of your child's death was played over and over on national TV?

There used to be some standards regarding what could and could not be shown but, like with everything else in this country, they have been bulldozed in favor of more clicks and more views .

 

[Captain_Nick]

Yeah man those videos of the floods were quite confronting.

 

[AntonyF]

There used to be some standards regarding what could and could not be shown but, like with everything else in this country, they have been bulldozed in favor of more clicks and more views .

You're in the UK too?

 

[Captain Brylcream]

What a title! If you braved it in, you know you're in for a laugh! But seriously, I just want to get other people's opinions on this one.

Are we getting a bit blasé with videos of death?

I'll give you three examples just from the last week for me.


1) Scrolling Reddit without any warning and on auto-play it showed a video with a family of six in a car being killed by a truck.
2) On the news I turned on and the moment when a police officer shot a member of the public.
3) And also on the news, seeing people - you can see them directly - swept to their deaths in recent floods.

Is it me, or would this never have been a thing once? I'm not into snuff movies, I don't want to see it. But we're subjected it without warning often.

Thigs like the car crash really stick with me... knowing that was the point where they died. And then lending a car to a friend it sits in my mind further.

I just find it unnecessary and distasteful. It feels like it's feeding this need to know everything, that privacy isn't an option.

Even only a few years ago, wherever I worked, there'd always be a group chat on Whatsapp that the banter lads had going, which would be just them sharing the worst videos they could find online, and I was always very happy to not join them, because honestly you could see them becoming utterly desensitised to the hideous videos they were sending each other and laughing about it, but now, stuff that totally would have been only confined to groups like that, are turning up in just normal scrolling, and I don't think it's an improvement.

The thing is I don't understand what's changed in moderation of the algorithms, the same rules apply now for videos on most of the major sites as they did back when video sharing started, and you see so much of the "unaliving" etc talk to not flag the AI that's reviewing videos, how is so much content like this becoming mainstream.

I'm against seeing it, not because I don't want to face reality or something, but, it just takes away people's dignity and we could actually just choose to give that to them, not share it round for the lols

 

[Owain Taggart]

The thing is I don't understand what's changed in moderation of the algorithms, the same rules apply now for videos on most of the major sites as they did back when video sharing started, and you see so much of the "unaliving" etc talk to not flag the AI that's reviewing videos, how is so much content like this becoming mainstream.

I think a large part of it might be that media long ago had figured out that shock drives clicks, which feeds into the effect that there are less happy stories out there as well. The problem is that it's gotten more and more prevalent, and the danger is that we become numb and desensitized to it.

So, for more than a decade I'd had a Republican friend, one that I met in a chatroom back in the late 90's. She was a military wife and had a husband that suffered PTSD from his tour. I on the other hand am a left-leaning Canadian, so you can imagine the culture gap can make things interesting.

Back when bin-Laden was killed, she posted pictures of that on FB. Very graphic stuff. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, Oh no, what has she done? This was back when before FB started censoring things and had to have people opt-in to see graphic stuff, so it was one of the first things that popped up on my feed that day, and I did not need to see that. I was quite upset about it and I railed into her with expletives, and in return she was upset with my language, but small beans. That was one of the last times I'd talked to her, and I quietly removed her from my friends list. Some people absolutely have no filter and no judgement, no idea how something like this could be felt by others.

TV shows in general, especially Prestige TV, have become more and more violent, as if being on a streaming service gives them an excuse to push boundaries to the extent that you can now see detailed torture scenes or other forms of cruelty. I think there's such a thing as too much information, too many details, as that only ends up feeding into the psych and anxiety.