Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times,
Easy access to an endless stream of violence, combined with encouragement of violence on social media, is distorting people’s attitudes toward it, an issue that is difficult to solve through automation, according to experts.
Violence has always been a part of the human experience but has never been available in such quantities for entertainment, they said.
In contrast with movies and video games, which show fictional violence, social media provides anyone the ability to see real violence with effectively no restrictions on age. It’s often presented as entertainment, with flippant, crass, or cynical commentary and mixed with other random content described in online parlance as “brain rot,” according to Jeffrey Blevins, professor of media and journalism at the University of Cincinnati and an expert on social media content.
Also, political divisions have resulted in the casting of large segments of society as sub-human, leading to the suggestion that they deserve violence, according to Andrew Selepak, an associate professor of media and communications at the University of Florida who specializes in social media research.
Although most social media platforms restrict graphic or violent content, some such content slips past the filters, and other content that rides the edge of what platforms allow continues to make it through.
Some 70 percent of youth aged 13 to 17 see real-world violence on social media, according to a 2024 Youth Endowment Fund survey of teens in England and Wales. TikTok users reported the highest exposure at 44 percent of respondents in the preceding 12 months. X users followed at 43 percent, although less than a quarter of respondents reported using the platform. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram weren’t far behind, with exposure rates of 31 percent to 33 percent.
The recent assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was “sadly, an interesting case study,” Blevins said. The extremely graphic videos of the incident were seen by millions of people on social media despite platform restrictions.
Research literature has talked for years about the issue of “desensitization” by repeated exposure to violence in digital media.
In real life, Americans overall have been fortunate enough to only sporadically experience violence on a personal level, according to Selepak.
“We don’t experience violence every day, multiple times a day, in the real world; but on social media, especially because people are spending hours each day [on those platforms], you can be exposed to it for hours each day repeatedly,” he said.
A young woman uses a cell phone in New York City on June 10, 2024. Experts warn that the flood of violent imagery on social media is distorting people’s attitudes toward violence. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times
“Outside of people engaged in war, there’s never been an equivalent to this in human history.”
Even those with the most real-life exposure to violence, such as first responders, often see only its aftermath, which leads them to appreciate its destructive consequences.
Online, on the other hand, a person can easily get pulled into watching a near-endless stream of real-world violence detached from its consequences, Selepak said.
A major issue is the use of algorithms to personalize content for each user, the experts agreed. Once a person stumbles upon a few videos of a certain kind, the algorithm picks up on the apparent preference and supplies more. Even if the platform restricts graphic violence, there’s plenty of borderline content that makes it through yet is still brutal—and it’s exactly the borderline content that often goes viral.
“Content that does anger us, that does upset us, that is upsetting content, we'll spend more time consuming that, commenting on it, engaging with it, which leads to that content, based on the algorithm, then being more visible to more people, because it’s getting so much engagement,” Selepak said.
And restricting such content would hurt the platforms’ bottom line, he pointed out.
“The platforms make money by how much time we spend on there, seeing ads,” Selepak said.
Further complicating the issue is that violent content has real information value in some contexts.
However, algorithms lack the ability to make such distinctions because they lack human sensibility to begin with.
“Algorithms are really good with content, but certainly not context and ethics,” Blevins said. “They don’t necessarily come with that moral compass.”
Selepak concurred.
“The algorithm doesn’t necessarily care what we’re consuming. It just wants us to consume,” he said.
Social media doesn’t just expose people to violence; it also facilitates it.
In the UK survey, 16 percent of respondents admitted to engaging in violence in the preceding 12 months, and about two-thirds said social media played a role, “including online arguments leading to in-person violence, comments exacerbating conflicts and children saying things online that they wouldn’t say face-to-face.”
A 2021 paper based on dozens of interviews with mostly black young people found that “small” and “petty” arguments on social media can easily turn into serious real-life conflicts and physical altercations.
Women with their cell phones in New York City on June 10, 2024. Experts say social media serves as a forum for groups promoting violence, despite platform restrictions. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times
“Adolescents expressed keen awareness that social media as a context intensifies interpersonal peer conflict,” the paper reads.
“Adolescents often do not go online with the intention to fight. Rather, as they are acutely aware, social media is a unique environment that amplifies and changes experience of conflict.”
Beyond visual gore, social media provides a forum for violence advocacy. The experts refrained from singling out any particular political group but highlighted the significant volume of such content, despite various platform restrictions.
“If you’re interested in a particular ideology or a particular group or a particular phenomenon, start a fresh account ... feed in those keywords, and just watch what the algorithm feeds you,” Blevins said. “It could be eye-popping.”
With algorithms constantly recommending more similar content, people using those platforms can easily gain the impression that an extreme or fringe position is normal and commonplace, the experts warned.
There’s also a new phenomenon of “sycophantic” personal artificial intelligence chatbots that affirm the user’s beliefs to an unhealthy degree, Blevins said.
Then there’s content that doesn’t call for violence outright but provides indirect justification for it.
A man holds a phone displaying the TikTok app in a file photo on Aug. 11, 2024. A 2024 survey of teens in England and Wales found that 44 percent of TikTok users reported seeing violent content in the past year. Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times
“If you’re on Meta or YouTube, X as well as TikTok, there’s this constant drumbeat of one side is fascist and Nazis and what we would consider the absolute worst of the worst of humankind,” Selepak said.
“That kind of dehumanization, and the repeated presentation of that dehumanization, can make violence or accepting violence against that group much more possible.”
With a growing body of research showing the negative effects of social media, at least in its current form, public opinion toward it has been shifting as well.
Almost 80 percent of American high schoolers said they use social media multiple times per day, and nearly a third reported that they used it more than once per hour, according to a 2023 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But almost half of teenagers said in a Pew Research poll last year that they spend too much time on social media, up from only about a quarter in 2023.
Also, Americans overall seem to be moving closer to the position that children shouldn’t have cellphones, not just during class, but during the entire school day. In 2024, 36 percent supported all-day bans; earlier this year, support for all-day cellphone bans was at 44 percent, according to a Pew Research poll.
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