"But unlike that singular moment of collective trauma, today's violence is packaged in an endless stream - shootings, stabbings, bombings, suffering - pushed onto social feeds in real time. These violent shocks have become a routine feature of daily life online, with each new video layered onto an already polarized, anxious and overstimulated society. Zoom in: On Elon Musk's X, far more than any mainstream competitor, the guardrails are gone."
"The platform's retreat from content moderation has turned it into a frictionless delivery system for the most graphic material imaginable - fully integrated in the digital town square. What once was shocking is now ambient, rewiring how millions of people process violence and, in turn, how they experience the world. Even on platforms with stricter rules, enforcement is imperfect - and the gray zones of content moderation are most easily exploited in the chaos of breaking news."
"The big picture: Kirk's public assassination was a violent and tragic act - but not an isolated one. The 31-year-old conservative activist was gunned down in front of thousands of college students - and then millions more online - while answering a question about mass shootings. His killing came amid a surge of online outrage over the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train - a horrific act captured on surveillance video and shared millions of times online."
Violence now arrives as an endless stream—shootings, stabbings, bombings and suffering—pushed onto social feeds in real time. These violent shocks have become a routine feature of online life, layering each new video onto an already polarized, anxious and overstimulated society. The retreat from content moderation on some platforms, notably X, has removed guardrails and created frictionless delivery systems for graphic material integrated into the digital town square. Enforcement remains imperfect elsewhere, and gray zones are frequently exploited during breaking news. High-profile incidents and sustained images from conflict zones show uncensored violence saturating the internet, and psychologists warn that repeated exposure can cause vicarious trauma and PTSD-like symptoms.
Read at Axios
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