Why is it okay for videos of people being brutally killed allowed on the internet?
I would be really hesitant to ban gore. The Collateral Murder video probably counts as gore, as well as a lot of other videos of US warcrimes. Doing journalism inside a warzone will show the reality of what war is like.
Agreed. There are journalistic reasons to post videos that contain gore. There is also the matter of medical documentation/research being posted.
The worst of it is illegal already but, like porn, it's difficult to monitor and contain. Not that there shouldn't be an effort but the infrastructure to broadly curate and monitor internet uploads is not there yet.
I don't remember Collateral Murder having any visible gore, though it's very grainy. I struggle to remember any truly didactic video that has gore other than the killings of Osama and Gaddafi (for slightly different reasons, of course). Then again, I've only seen a handful of videos of warcrimes.
Perhaps photos of slavery and lynchings? I can only speak for myself, but being in 4rd grade and seeing black people being whipped and lynched while dozens of white people are just standing around smiling and chuckling like it’s a festival with friends started my hatred for this country.
Although I don’t deliberately seek it out, whenever I look stuff up about colonial periods in countries I’ll often come across some pictures of a British or French guy triumphantly standing over headless/limbless corpses/bodies because they disrespected their masters, and it reinforces my hatred for the west and sometimes sheds light on activities I never knew occurred in those areas.
An intact corpse (as in most lynchings) isn't gore. I suppose open wounds count as gore, but I was thinking on the level of disembowelment or "canoeing," tbh.
Fair enough on the dismemberment stuff.
do yall not think there is a healthy medium between treating all adults like children who cant watch nature and history documentaries and letting 12 year olds see decapitation videos. like this actually kinda an insane take. like imagine a world where no one understood the realities of anything, war, hate crimes, how your fucking food is made (wait till you find out how farm animals are bred especially pigs, since this site pretends to care about beastlality.) the impacts of war, genocide literally anything that goes on in the world. most americans live these ignorant sheltered lives, you're so separated from everything. do you know how many times i've hear irl, "slavery wasn't that bad" "waterboarding isn't torture" "animals are killed painlessly" "ill just have like two drinks before driving" Someone in this thread said that lynchings aren't ogre because theres no blood and gooey bits... buddy you haven't seen enough lynchings. every american NEEDS to see the action of their country, the guantanamo bay torch pics, eye popped out of corpses on trees, children dying in palestine. I don't believe simply describing these thing creates empathy or a tru understanding, people will do anything to ignore unpleasant truths. all the the most horrific gore ive ever seen was in classrooms in high school. we saw actual gore in class all the time, im sorry some of yall were sheltered, im not being an edgelord, some of yall are being so extreme in this comment section, I think you would have been better off being slowly alcimated to gore. we had to see a decapitated head in our driving class, the worst pictures of the holocaust ect. LIke i genuinely believe people need to see things to understand them, Ive seen so many minds change on things people thought they understood but didn't. imagine if the vietnam war wasn't being filmed everyday, there would have been no anti war movement, look at laos. And if you really cant function after seeing gore fine ignore it but making seeing any of the bad parts of life many of which we benefit from illegal is such a conservative mom take. sorry for the rant but yall done really ticked me off your ignorant bullshit. please learn to recognize a moral panic.
i wouldn't argue against that. im talking just about shit people live through that others turn a blind eye too. we must recognize the difference between educational/radicalizing content and exploitation. obviously the porn shit is sick. also ACQUAINTANCES???!!! AS IM MULTIPLE??? where did you find them, do they tell all people they meet about their snuff films? im so curious as to how that came up.
taken aback would be an understatement for me holy shit, i would have snitched to the boss so fast that's sexual harassment. although snitching at work tends to be high risk low reward. still that's wild friend sorry you met those weirdos.
could you expand on the latin american censorship stuff im curious.
I wasn't shown much in a classroom setting, but when I was younger, I did seek some out videos precisely because I knew I was sheltered from a lot of the darker aspects of the human experience and wanted to look behind the curtain in what was basically a safe, controlled environment.
Some of the first videos I saw of people dying, besides like 9/11 I guess, were protest videos of protesters getting shot.
Nowadays, I know I don't need to see that stuff anymore so I avoid it when I can, but what I watched left a strong enough impression to shape some of my politics and I believe help keep myself attuned to reality and realize the bubble I really live in.
war photography has had a far bigger impact on my politics than any writing could
yes I was agreeing! sorry for not indicating tone. i haven't slept in like 3 days comrade.
I agree with your post entirely. I'm from the Southside of Chicago and the first time I saw someone get killed in a driveby I was a fucking child. Being ignorant of what violence looks like is a privilege. Also please get some sleep? Edit: you can have one of my Ambien comrade
Ive been through something similar. i want to sleep but my anxiety is so bad. thanks for the ambien offer lol.
There’s a lot of nuance when it comes to gore and people have already mentioned some of it. My hot take is, some gore is necessary for rehabilitation. Hold on, before you leave, hear me out.
After WWII, American soldiers forced German soldiers and citizens to look at photographs and video of massacred prisoners in concentration camps. In addition, many were also forced to handle the bodies of the victims (e.g. transport, bury). This is technically a war crime because it falls under “collective punishment,” but the result is that Germany is deeply ashamed of their past, nominally. In reality a lot of Nazis are overlooked in the military and politics, but at the very least many people just hate their fascist ancestors and history. The German people became traumatized but at least now the next generation doesn’t want a repeat of that, nominally. So… good trade off?
Japan and Italy never got this treatment, and the consequences for this in Japan is dire. The war crimes denial, the worship of their emperors even the one in WWII, the praise of their soldiers and history in schools and politics. Their nation was traumatized into submission to the US, but not to hate their imperial past. Also, all the mass shootings in the US - people just hear about it from the news and watch body cam footage of epic cops saving the day. They don’t see the victims eyes, and so nothing is changed. Really, I think whenever a mass shooting happens the governor, president, and townsfolk should be forced to walk through the scene. Things might change when they can no longer sleep and haunted forever.
Gore videos on the internet are often grainy and the victims are faceless and no one ever cares to look up who they are. But when you see a face, possibly someone you once knew, it seems to become ingrained. Horrified rather than desensitization. Maybe the videos should be regulated in some way, but I think gore itself is a useful tool to making people reconsider their (in)actions
If there’s a better explanation, I’m all ears. It can’t just be solely the USSR right? It’s not like they controlled the entirety of Germany but Germany in general dislikes Nazis (proper). They had no presence in post war Japan and the US made no effort to do the same thing as Germany, so I can’t think of any other reason.
The war crimes denial, the worship of their emperors even the one in WWII, the praise of their soldiers and history in schools and politics. Their nation was traumatized into submission to the US, but not to hate their imperial past.
It was wild to me to learn just a few months ago that they let the emperor live out his life and he only died in like the 90s. I thought they executed that motherfucker after the war like all the other fascist leaders.
Especially given how much of a big deal they made out of not wanting to let the Japanese have one condition of their surrender
After WWII, American soldiers forced German soldiers and citizens to look at photographs and video of massacred prisoners in concentration camps. In addition, many were also forced to handle the bodies of the victims (e.g. transport, bury). This is technically a war crime because it falls under “collective punishment,” but the result is that Germany is deeply ashamed of their past, nominally
this is a deeply unscientific approach as it ignores the many other factors in play. For evidence of such a conclusion you would need a study of the effects of exposure to violent images on people convicted of serious violent crime
I would personally argue that the efforts of the soviets in East Germany and even the occupation of west germany were largely responsible for the public shame
this is what we need, to send more people to jail over arbitrary things
I'm glad I haven't accidentally scrolled across anything like that in a long time
The main rationale that comes to mind is the living can learn from it.
As hard/unlikely as enforcement would be, I'd accept it being illegal to post outside of dedicated spaces/forums. Definitely should always be clearly labeled before clicking/viewing.
Knowing about the dull blade beheading videos (never even seen one) has convinced me to never be taken alive
Mexican drug cartel videos
just cruelty for the sake of cruelty
The main rationale that comes to mind is the living can learn from it.
The living can also learn from a lot of things that are rightfully illegal (and things that are wrongfully illegal, etc)
I don't know about you guys but I upon reading in a book the violence of the belgian congo was able to conclude it was bad I didn't need a diagram
It should at least be much more heavily restricted than it currently is, probably including the killing of animals such that it's really recognizable to humans as "gore".
thats a horrible idea. "animal gore" made me vegetarian. frankly every person who eats meat should be forced to watch it.
I agree with a lot of the takes here that gore should not be banned- I just wanted to mention that it is weird you can go to a mainstream website like reddit and sometimes even on the front page (altho with a NSFW spoiler) you can see people being brutally blown-up or shot or SW. and even more bizarre is the amount of comments on those videos that is disturbing.
Like I'm not for banning it- it's influenced me to be way more of a pacifist and less of an edgy dork- which is probably a good thing. but a lot of people aren't finding that same track after viewing for some reason
but a lot of people aren't finding that same track after viewing for some reason
A major step of chan-culture indoctrination is competitive "numbing" contests with gore/snuff images/videos. That "numbing" makes them more compliant with nazi ideals because it's a culture of death.
It's a complicated subject but when the switch breaks and it becomes entertainment things go very, very wrong.
"For the hearts of these people are hardened, and their ears cannot hear, and they have closed their eyes— so their eyes cannot see, and their ears cannot hear, and their hearts cannot understand, and they cannot turn to me and let me heal them"
Yeah, its hard not to think about the American way of life, at large, as a "culture of death"- I'm constantly making this point w/ anti-abortion family members... like yeah it's a culture of death, just not in the way YOU think it is
idk, really what my opinion was, as a child someone tricked me into watching a video that suddenly cut to a beheading video and i felt sick for long afterwards but idk if it should actually be banned
To be honest, your post first made me think of some old confused man that assumes if something is made illegal, that it won't exist.
But I think I understand what you are trying to ask: "Why isn't depictions of violence more taboo?" This is more of a cultural question that likely has many influences and answers. But I would like to point out that violence isn't just part of human nature, we make spectacle out of it. We sell out arenas where men and women fist fight in a steel cage where they get cut and sliced open and bones break. People come clamoring for more.
What you consider as "too far" someone else is likely to look at and just see simple violence. Now, there certainly is a segment of population that perhaps has a deranged desire for it, but it is part of human intrigue. It also varies by country and my understanding is it is more taboo in Europe to show children acts of violence but they are more open about depicting sexuality. In America violence is fair game but boobs are still taboo for general audiences.
Never the less, children tend to be shielded from sex and violence during their developing years. But as for adults, it is kind of what ever they want to see.
I can understand a need for intricacy, but there needs to be some kind of regulation. There needs to be a set of rules that determines if its okay to show gore depending on the situation.
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is it historically/journalistically significant
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is it being shown for safety training
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is there a crime being committed and will the footage radicalize people
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is the footage purely for shock value
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is there any kind of consent for the dead
Do you really trust the fucking american justice system to set appropriate boundaries on what violates each one of those 5 points? Why does gore need to be regulated in the first place?
why does gore need to be regulated in the first place?
Because its gore? How would you feel if you or your loved one was killed in a horrible way on camera and it was posted online to be seen and made fun of by billions. People have rights even in death. Doing nothing is going to only make the problem worse in the future.
Frankly if the US government was willing to prosecute website owners who distribute gore, I wouldn't care. Like even you have to admit under a utopian government there should be rules around this stuff.
I think its a bit stupid to waste time and energy to protect the "rights" of a dead heap of flesh to this extent when the living need urgent care.
This part, especially, is alienating pop-nihilistic bullshit that would put off millions of potential comrades if it in any way became an official position of a leftist organization. "ACTUALLY your dead family members don't deserve to be grieved or avenged no matter what injustice killed them, because they are dead heaps of flesh! What about the concerns of the living, huh? Except you living that are concerned with grieving the dead! That's stupid and a waste of time and energy, you irrational widow, you irrational orphan! Get schwifty!"
The US government would just label evidence of its warcrimes "gore" and throw us all in jail. Furthermore since they are a bunch of puritanical dipshits they will ban depictions of violence in art too, eroding freedom of artistic expression and making me angry because my vidya is gone.
Legalizing absolutely everything under pretenses of "banning things doesn't work and besides the gubbmint bad therefore everything must be permitted at all times forever and ever" is a
take that would be less than useless in a viable socialist society.It would be wiser for a government to ban cars, increase expenditure to public and workplace safety, invest in good healthcare, improve vital infrastructure, etc. such that death has less opportunities to surprise the citizenry than it is to use these resources to punish people for viewing the outcome of the aforementioned failures. It is better to face the reality of death together and work to weaken it than it is to pretend it does not exist and ban the truth.
Whataboutism is exhausting and goes nowhere, especially because there simply isn't societal will to do what you're "whatabouting" while you're also condemning people for grieving what you call "dead heaps of flesh" that were once their loved ones.
Would you be euphoric enough to stand amid a BLM protest and say "Actually George Floyd is now a dead heap of flesh so you are all illogical! What about banning cars and increasing expenditures to public and workplace safety, investments and good healthcare, and improving vital infrastructure instead of this illogicalness? Must I do all the thinking around here?"
Taken as a whole, it all seems very defensive about what sounds like a source of entertainment for you, to the point that you are acting as if your entertainment is threatened by even analysis of its possible detrimental effects on a population exposed to it. You are not the only person in the world.
Also, pop nihilistic reductionistic arguments against grieving people (or the pre-death wishes of the dead to not be humiliated or used for the entertainment of others) are poison against solidarity.
Sir I think we are confusing a few things here:
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I do not dare condemn grief, it is not my intention nor my right. Rather, I think it unwise for any 21st century authority to use time and energy to ban videos of people dying on the internet as opposed to issues like food security or offering aid to those left behind. If the deceased or their relatives want the videos taken down then that would be their wish and the government can honor it, but it is not a decision for the government itself to take imo.
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I would never dare use such a demonic argument against ending the oppression of the citizenry by the police, my funko pop collection is not large enough for that level of mental gymnastics.
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I don't think that everything should be legalized, I agree that atrocities like murder and rape should be forbidden. My argument is that any capitalist government cannot be trusted as an authority responsible for the censorship of and punishment for hosting videos of people dying.
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You bring up societal will, which is a good point and is I think the real problem here. Most "gore" (violent death on camera) is due to workplace accidents, road accidents, fights (social alienation), suicides, and infrastructure failures, things that the government of a country is supposedly working to prevent. I would be very upset if the government decided to expand the list of reasons to bolster the warped criminal justice system with viewing the result of its failures on the internet.
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The opinions shared here by this account are insane and heavily engineered by the FBI, CIA, <insert glow in the dark organisation here>, etc. They should not under any circumstances be used as the party line for a leftist organisation.
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What are the detrimental effects of a small sample of sickos watching people die on the wider population? Is the problem that people watch violent death or the fact that people die violently in preventable ways?
"ACTUALLY your dead family members don't deserve to be grieved or avenged no matter what injustice killed them, because they are dead heaps of flesh! What about the concerns of the living, huh? Except you living that are concerned with grieving the dead! That's stupid and a waste of time and energy, you irrational widow, you irrational orphan! Get schwifty!"
My sides left the country imagining a redditor saying this at a funeral and getting beaten up.
Sir
I already don't like where this is going.
I do not dare condemn grief, it is not my intention nor my right
BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT
Rather, I think it unwise for any 21st century authority to use time and energy to ban videos of people dying on the internet as opposed to issues like food security or offering aid to those left behind
People aren't getting food security or aid to those left behind right now so why is your loaded advocacy for anything-goes snuff film legalization even on the same table?
EDIT: To clarify my position, the "what about more important things" argument is exactly the rhetorical tactic that "Effective Altruists" pushed in their claims that helping living actual people in need doesn't matter in the long run because billions of years in the future the immortal cyber-angels dancing on the head of a Singularity(tm) pin will thank us for making billionaires richer in the present instead. "We can't have small thing until vague and out of reach big thing happens" first is the death of momentum.
What are the detrimental effects of a small sample of sickos watching people die on the wider population? Is the problem that people watch violent death or the fact that people die violently in preventable ways?
I'm not even going to entertain the "a few bad apples" line of bullshit arguing there. Sometimes one is enough and a few is a crowd.
If someone I loved was killed and "a small sample of sickos" were getting off to footage of that killing, yes I would be more than upset and no amount of Rick and Morty binge watching would change that.
My sides left the country imagining a redditor saying this at a funeral and getting beaten up.
Good, because in a just universe, that's exactly what would happen in such a measurable and predictable way that clocks could run on it.
To your credit you answered well enough where I'm not quite as pissed off at your first post here with provided additional context. I still disagree with you strongly, but it's something.
Well I think that snuff films classify as murder (people killed for the sake of the camera) and therefore should be banned because of that, I don't think content like that should be legal or legalized. I am referring more to the common violent content shared on the internet which involves horrific deaths that happen to be recorded on camera spontaneously out of coincidence.
I agree that it makes sense for the government to give an option to people as to whether, in the event of their death being recorded on camera, they would want the videos taken down for privacy's sake. The decision should be in the hands of the citizen and their family, not the government.
To the in-effective altruists I will say that they are mad for considering the opinions of their fanfiction omnissiah 9000 gorillion years in a future that only exists in their imagination more important than... solving world hunger.
You already declared that all banning is futile and that all attempts to ban something automatically result in government abuse of said bans (yes, the government sucking sucks in Burgerland, but it's still a presumptive worldwide claim to make), so it's not like there'd be much to distinguish killed-to-entertain-hogs from killed-for-other-reasons-but-hogs-get-entertained.
By banning I mean hunt down the murderers who profit from their killings and shut down the site permanently. I do not agree that all government regulation is futile, for instance, the manufacture of nuclear weapons should be banned wholesale by any government (unless the BETA invade or something).
Furthermore, in my view, a video which coincidentally captures a violent death is a sincere snapshot of reality at the time and it in itself is neither good nor bad. However, I do acknowledge that there are sick fucks (e.g. les francais) who use free speech as an excuse to get a rise out of mocking and belittling the victims of a tragedy through such videos. The issue I see with banning the videos themselves is that the bullies will remain bullies and move on to something else. After all they are the products of a capitalist society where human life and death is cheap.
Rather I think it would be better to ban the behaviour, as in allow the archival of gore away from sites where people can be accidentally traumatized by stumbling upon it, presented with sobriety without a comment section. The best strategy would be to build a world such that human life is treasured and everyone is taken care of, reducing levels of sick fuckery.
The best strategy would be to build a world such that human life is treasured and everyone is taken care of, reducing levels of sick fuckery.
This one part is in steep contrast to the
reductionist description provided for dead people earlier in this comment chain. I prefer this side of the contrast, so works for me.
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also overt monetisation of images of graphic violence should be harder. Especially real violence
I'm now convinced. Sometimes grisly sights, for journalistic and historical reasons (and shaming reasons, such as against the nazis) are important and necessary.
That said, hog feeding knows no boundaries, and its shock value can become addictive to its consumers. See the common chanlord fixation upon "numbing" themselves for social approval by bragging about how many gore/snuff videos they have consumed. It certainly doesn't do them much good, but there's also a prevailing "let people enjoy things" thought terminating cliche that resonates across the internet that makes criticism of such dubious entertainment kind of hard to do without a defensive reaction.
There's also layers of excuses for it, like people that claim they just "want to contemplate the fragility of life" or whatever,
spoiler
sometimes even citing ancient Buddhist practices regarding (CW: death, grisly imagery) birds picking apart rotting corpses and the like,
to try to add some contemplative pretenses to watching gore/snuff videos.
EDIT: I'm convinced at the necessity of specific kinds of gore/death videos now as a matter of both record and emphasis of crimes now.
sometimes even citing ancient Buddhist practices regarding (CW: death, grisly imagery) birds picking apart rotting corpses and the like
are they talking about sky burials because that isn't what that is at all. It's primarily about returning the body to nature. That and the tradition originates in areas where digging a grave is difficult
It's a different practice where (CW: gore)
spoiler
buddhists used to deliberately sit and observe rotting corpses getting slowly picked apart by scavengers to contemplate the reality of life and death. It wasn't really a ceremonial sky burial; just people too poor to afford any different.
Surprised by these comments. I don't think users posting gore should be illegal, but I think sites should be legally mandated to have strict content policies on taking it down, and should actually have to enforce it. We shouldn't make gruesome videos with no political/educational/historical context (which OP obviously isn't talking about) readily available. No sane person wants to ban showing George Floyd's murder or Guantanamo Bay torture photos... but I really wish I hadn't seen a dog stabbed in the face on instagram when I was 12. Not to mention there's whole shock value snuff sites one google search away.
This isn't an impossible task, it's not any more difficult to enforce than say requiring sites to ban CP (although obviously that's much worse). It's usually pretty easy to differentiate between the intention of explicit content, for example, showing a naked child is generally only illegal if it's in a sexual context, which is why Nirvana's famous album cover wasn't censored, or the Mai Lai massacre "napalm girl" photo is fairly well known
This would be incredibly difficult to enforce, even within a single jurisdiction
thank you
