America's digital morgue pumps collective trauma into daily life

Many Americans will remember exactly where they were when they first saw the gruesome video of Charlie Kirk's assassination, which flooded X within minutes — impossible to avoid, impossible to forget.Why it matters: On the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Americans once again were grappling with the psychological toll of violent images seared into public consciousness.But unlike that singular moment of collective trauma, today's violence is packaged in an endless stream — shootings, stabbings, bombings, suffering — pushed onto social feeds in real time.These violent shocks have become a routine feature of daily life online, with each new video layered onto an already polarized, anxious and overstimulated society.Zoom in: On Elon Musk's X, far more than any mainstream competitor, the guardrails are gone.The platform's retreat from content moderation has turned it into a frictionless delivery system for the most graphic material imaginable — fully integrated in the digital town square.What once was shocking is now ambient, rewiring how millions of people process violence and, in turn, how they experience the world. Even on platforms with stricter rules, enforcement is imperfect — and the gray zones of content moderation are most easily exploited in the chaos of breaking news.The big picture: Kirk's public assassination was a violent and tragic act — but not an isolated one.The 31-year-old conservative activist was gunned down in front of thousands of college students — and then millions more online — while answering a question about mass shootings.His killing came amid a surge of online outrage over the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train — a horrific act captured on surveillance video and shared millions of times online.For nearly two years, images of dead, starving and mutilated civilians in Gaza have saturated the internet and fueled the most toxic discourse imaginable.Between the lines: All of these tragedies reflect the uncensored reality of our world. But our brains aren't designed to ingest and cope with it every hour of every day.Psychologists have found that repeated exposure to graphic violence online can cause "vicarious trauma": PTSD-like symptoms in people who witness suffering secondhand, through their screens.A 2021 study found that simply viewing coverage of mass shootings on TV or social media increased the risk of PTSD symptoms in the broader population — even among those with no direct connection to the event.And with kids now carrying phones and scrolling social media from an early age, the risks are magnified.Researchers warn that adolescents are especially vulnerable to anxiety, depression and desensitization when exposed to relentless violence online.Roblox, an online gaming platform popular with young people, removed more than 100 in-game "experiences" Thursday after "seeing violative content around Charlie Kirk," a spokesperson told Axios.The bottom line: The U.S. has endured waves of political violence before, particularly in the 1960s, when assassinations, bombings and street clashes reshaped the nation.But those shocks arrived in newspapers or sanitized on the evening news — not in a constant loop on our phones. And the grainy Zapruder film of JFK's assassination is a far cry from today's 4K iPhone footage.Combined with today's extreme partisanship and rampant conspiracy theories — amplified by the same algorithms that promote violence — society is only growing more vulnerable to radicalization.

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