How easily accessible hate crime videos on social media change the way we experience violence.

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I don’t think we should be so comfortable seeing violence.

Think about how often we open TikTok, Instagram, X, or another social media app just because we’re bored. We’re scrolling through funny videos that we can’t even remember five minutes later, people’s vacations, makeup tutorials, relationship dramas and other random things. Then suddenly there is a video of a person being attacked, beaten, injured or killed and then what do we do? 

We continue scrolling. That’s the part that really bothers me. 

Violence has always existed, obviously. Hate crimes, police brutality, wars and other violent acts are not new. What has changed is that we can see them so easily now. Things can happen on the other side of the world and in minutes there will be a video of it on our phone.

 Someone records it, posts it, someone else reposts it and then there are millions of people posting on TikTok or Instagram.

There are situations where seeing things with our own eyes makes it harder to ignore. The headline that someone was assaulted isn’t always as powerful as seeing what it was. Videos can be evidence. They can help shine a light on something that might be otherwise forgotten. They can open up conversation on racism, hate crimes, police violence, war and injustice.

 But sometimes it seems people are posting these videos just to get attention.

 I’ve seen people rush to share horrible videos, all at once like there is some sort of competition to see who can put it out first. Who has the original video? Who has the most views? Who gets to say they “caught it on camera”? 

And somewhere in all of that, the real person in the video can be forgotten. 

The violence in Palestine is one of the best examples. When everything started circulating online, I remember seeing videos and images of the killing and suffering of civilians and even children. Social media gave people thousands of miles away the opportunity to see what was happening in real time. And there was something odd about the mix of those videos in the common social media feed. 

Another example that stayed with me was an Instagram Reel of a white police officer beating and aggressively pulling a Black man out of the back of a car. Videos like this are shared because people want to know what police violence is (and not just read about it on the news) and how progressively worse it has gotten. 

I get that. 

I know why someone would want to see what’s happened. But I also think that we are all really in trouble when we see such things happen over and over again. You may be shocked when you see something disturbing happen: You may think about what happened. You may be upset.

 But after watching hundreds of videos of violence, do we stop thinking them? I think that’s where problems start. There’s a difference between getting educated about violence and getting comfortable watching it. 

Sometimes documenting violence is a necessity. Or a video can be the one thing that makes people believe a victim or make people pay attention. I think we ought to be much more deliberate about what we share and why we’re sharing it. Are we sharing it because people want to know? Or are we sharing it because we know shocking videos get views? I do not know the answer to that.

And I think that’s part of why I’m writing about it.

 And I think social media has changed what we think about violence, but why we have not really stopped to think about it that much; I’m really not sure. 

Maybe the problem is not just that we see violence online. Maybe the problem is that we’ve seen so much of it that we’re starting to forget that the person on our screen is a real person.