After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday, footage of his death was almost immediately available on social media platforms. Kirk was killed while speaking at an event at a college campus in Utah. Footage of him being shot while answering questions about mass shootings circulated on platforms such as X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook in the following hours.
How was such graphic footage allowed to make the rounds on these platforms? According to Laura Edelson, an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, every platform has its own policy, but many have decided to allow more videos like this to initially remain up due to their newsworthiness. “Many platforms have specific newsworthiness exemptions that mean a video that might otherwise not comply with the platform’s policies might remain on the platform if they are deemed newsworthy,” said Edelson, who studies the spread of harmful content through large online networks. “These policies have a tremendous amount of interpretability and they usually come down to the people who run the platform. If it’s being actively recommended to you, that’s because someone at the platform made the decision that they are OK with not only hosting this content, but actively recommending it to users.”
John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology and director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab at Northeastern University, says the conversation around showing graphic content is an ongoing one in media world, including the social media.
