Internet guidelines are no surprise to anyone, especially to those of us who grew up on the internet from a young age. No hate speech, no violence and no harassment. Though recently, it seems like the posts that go against these guidelines are flying under the radar. 

If you are familiar with Instagram Reels, or even at times TikTok, you know that the casual videos of people getting seriously injured or even killed are nothing new. On Instagram, the videos get put under the disguise of “memes” or just “dash-cam” videos, but the reality is a lot of the people in those car-crash videos and even the videos of them getting hit by cars are dead. 

The severity of the videos can’t be ignored, yet it is. Why is that?

I suspect it’s because we’ve grown desensitized to tragedy online since we don’t know these people, and don’t care enough to report a video of their death, it means absolutely nothing to us. It even goes as far as people commenting under these videos saying things like “This is the fifth person I’ve seen die today” or “How are these videos staying up?” 

But no one will report the video, or try to get accounts that strictly post shocking content like this taken down. So we continue with our days as if nothing happened, and just roll the dice on whether someone else is going to view the video. 

This could stem from a lot of things: some of us who grew up on the internet have seen things we weren’t supposed to from such a young age, including gore and pornographic content that has been readily available at the tip of our fingers. It’s no surprise that we’ve grown used to the content that is now being sent to us throughout timelines. 

It begins to raise the question of why it isn’t getting taken down or why we haven’t been protected from it in the first place. I remember growing up and casually coming across terrorist beheading videos on YouTube or getting sent gore as a joke on Discord just a few years ago. 

People’s deaths are getting laughed at and viewed as nothing but just another post on the internet. You can blame it on the people who posted it in the first place, but when there are thousands of people liking the videos, then we’re all no better than the original poster. 

The blame could also be put on the platforms for not catching the content before thousands of people see it, since it is their job to make sure that violence isn’t posted on the site. But if they’re not able to catch it, then it’s up to us to bring it to their attention through reporting. 

I don’t want future generations having to see the same things I came across as a child, and having to go through the same desensitization that so many of us are experiencing every day. If the platforms aren’t going to put in the effort to keep them safe then it’s up to us to try to protect them from graphic content.