"It meant no dial-up tones, no waiting for pages to load; it was a fast track into places I wasn't ready to go. I'd already dabbled in Napster at a relative's house. File-sharing sites were catnip for a young music fan with little money and an endless appetite. When Napster was shut down, other sites followed. Kazaa looked like just another music library. Then I clicked deeper and realized it offered something else entirely: videos, vast and unfiltered."
"One night, on impulse, I typed two words I barely understood the weight of: Daniel Pearl. Pearl was a Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped in Pakistan in January 2002 while covering terrorism. His captors recorded his murder and released the video online. It was on Kazaa. And I watched it. I can't tell you exactly why I searched for him. Maybe it was curiosity, or boredom."
A teenager gained home broadband in 2001 and explored file-sharing networks that shifted from music to vast, unfiltered video libraries. The teenager searched for Daniel Pearl and watched his recorded murder on Kazaa, an exposure that later surfaced as enduring vicarious trauma. Years later, graphic videos of Charlie Kirk's assassination appeared on X and spread within minutes across Instagram, Threads, YouTube and other platforms. Rapid distribution of violent footage on social media exposes large audiences to unfiltered violence, can replay or amplify prior trauma, and shapes long-term emotional and psychological responses.
Read at Poynter
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