FIRST it was the nightmarish stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, as she sat on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, minding her own business. Then it was the horrifying shooting of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative activist, as he addressed a group of students at Utah Valley University. Both struck terror in countless Americans fearful for their own safety and for the safety of their public spaces and democracy.
The tragedies had something else in common, though: They both generated extremely graphic videos of the victims’ last moments, detailed enough to show the second that metal struck flesh and wrought its awful damage. Since then, shared by many and further amplified by digital algorithms that favour intense emotions, these videos have been endlessly replayed across social media. Countless users have commented on them, zoomed in on them, slowed them to a crawl, theorised about them or marked them up with arrows and diagrams and published the results. Ad nauseam.
