Viral violent videos on social media are skewing young people’s sense of the world

By Samuel Cornell, PhD Candidate in Public Health & Community Medicine, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney
T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

When news broke last week that US political influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event at Utah Valley University, millions of people around the world were first alerted to it by social media before journalists had written a word.

Rather than first seeing the news on a mainstream news website, footage of the bloody and public assassination was pushed directly onto audiences’ social media feeds. There weren’t any editors deciding whether the raw footage was too distressing, nor…

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