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(Trends Wide) — Within hours of Saturday’s mass shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas, some Twitter users shared gruesome images of bloody bodies, purportedly from the crime scene. At least one image appeared to be of a child.
These images were harder to avoid on the platform, according to some users, in part because they were being shared from accounts that had paid to be verified, an option introduced by owner Elon Musk that can increase the visibility of a user’s tweets.
“Artwork often made it to Twitter in the past, but it was more likely to be degraded and hard to find,” he said in a post. Tweet Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “The new system seems to prioritize these vile accounts and features material at the top of the feed. Awful”.
Jennifer Mascia, a Trends Wide contributor and senior news writer at The Trace, a nonprofit journalism outlet dedicated to gun-related news, said the images “were inevitable.”
“I was shocked that that video and those images stayed on Twitter for so long… In a different era of Twitter, they wouldn’t have been circulating, they would have been taken down immediately,” Mascia added.
Twitter, which has cut much of its public relations team, did not respond to a request for comment.
The apparent spread of these images has reignited scrutiny over how graphic content from mass shootings is handled by social media platforms. Social media platforms often have policies that restrict the sharing of graphic content, with certain exceptions. On Twitter, for example, users are technically prohibited from sharing content displaying “gratuitous gore,” a category that includes “dismembered or mutilated human beings.” Other forms of graphic media may be allowed, as long as the user marks their account as confidential.
But it also revived a broader debate about the potential value of sharing graphic images in shaping public discourse at a time when mass shootings are regularly occurring in the United States.
So far in 2023, there have been 202 mass shootings in the United States (in the first five months of this year), according to the Gun Violence Archive, compared to 647 mass shootings in all of 2022. The nonprofit organization and Trends Wide defines mass shootings as those in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter.
This Saturday’s attack was the second deadliest mass shooting of the year in the United States so far. Eight people were killed and at least seven others injured when a gunman opened fire at the mall in Allen, Texas, according to local officials.
Steven Spainhouer, whose son worked at the mall, said the carnage defied his imagination. (Credit: KTVT)
In an interview with Trends Wide affiliate KTVT this Sunday, Steven Spainhouer, an Army veteran and former police officer who helped administer first aid at the scene, described the horror he encountered. “The first girl I went up to…I felt her pulse, I pulled her head to the side of her and she had no face,” he said.
But in a tweet late Saturday, Spainhouer criticized a photo of the mall that was shared on social media. “I don’t want to see the photo floating around on social media, taken while I was calling 911 and trying to help out at the Allen outlets,” she wrote. “The least they could have done is help, not take pictures of people on the brink of death.”
Mascia, meanwhile, said she was “shocked at how many people” were debating the merits of posting such images. Some, she said, may not have wanted to post the images, but also felt “maybe it’s time we had to talk about this.”
The calculus over whether to show gruesome images of violent acts to the public goes back decades in the United States. In 1955, at the behest of his mother, an image of a murdered black teenager was published in Jet Magazine.
This haunting image of Emmett Till’s mutilated body stuck in the minds of many as an enduring image of the racist violence of the time, with many linking the image’s release to helping galvanize Americans to join the rights movement. civilians.
More recently, the debate resurfaced when Americans reacted with shock and horror to the deadly school shooting that took place less than a year ago in Uvalde, Texas.
“It’s time, with the permission of a surviving parent, to show what a euthanized 7-year-old looks like.” tweeted David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s Klein School of Media and Communication, after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde that left 19 children and two adults dead.
Boardmen added in his tweet at the time that he “couldn’t have imagined saying this years ago,” but argued that by showing the public these images, “maybe only then will we find the courage for more than thoughts and prayers.
