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Future Tense

By TEDDY WAYNE

“The world has always been messy,” President Obama said in 2014 after a string of doom-and-gloom news events. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”

As a number of people similarly commented in the wake of recent videos of police violence against African-Americans, these episodes have been happening for a long time; it’s only lately that smartphones have facilitated their widespread visual documentation.

Social media, too, has begun to play a prominent role in broadcasting tragedy. The shooting of Philando Castile was streamed as it happened on Facebook Live, which figured in another violent video since then. The app Periscope has also live-streamed its share of grisly and objectionable content, including the rape of an Ohio teenager and a suicide in France.

The effect on audiences can be traumatic. Historically, traditional mass media has also shown graphic images and horrifying videos like terrorist attacks or the 1991 Rodney King beating while barraging audiences with related content. For some people, it may not matter through which medium they consume their news: A video is a video and an article an article, whether it’s on a TV screen, laptop or newspaper.

But there are several reasons to suspect that the emotional impact of such intimate social-media images or internet-derived news is different, and perhaps even longer-lasting in some cases, than that from old-media sources.

Contact with violence through any media can lead to what is called vicarious traumatization — and may, for some people, be more upsetting than an unmediated experience.

A 2013 study in the journal PNAS compared the acute stress symptoms of those with “direct exposure” to that year’s Boston Marathon bombing (being present at the site or in the Boston-area lockdown, or knowing someone in either of those circumstances) with those who had only media exposure. People who were exposed to six or more daily hours of bombing-related media exposure reported higher levels of acute stress than those with direct exposure.

“Unlike direct exposure to a collective trauma, which can end when the acute phase of the event is over, media exposure keeps the acute stressor active and alive in one’s mind,” the study concluded. “In so doing, repeated media exposure may contribute to the development of trauma-related disorders by prolonging or exacerbating acute trauma-related symptoms.”

But these findings didn’t distinguish between the types of media consumed. In a study presented at the 2015 Annual Conference of the British Psychology Society, Pam Ramsden, a lecturer in psychology from the University of Bradford, found that nearly a quarter of participants who viewed images and videos from disturbing news events over social media, including 9/11, school shootings and suicide bombings, reported symptoms clinically consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The main difference between traditional news and social media, Dr. Ramsden pointed out in her presentation, is that the latter “has enabled violent stories and graphic images to be watched by the public in unedited horrific detail.”

As younger generations eschew television and the print media, their only exposure to news may be on the internet, often through social media feeds. But whereas traditional news outlets are likely to issue a warning before broadcasting graphic images or decide to censor the most offensive content, such precautions are often ignored on the web, especially from individuals and less established outfits.

Facebook employs an army of content moderators, but they cannot prevent every single appalling image or video from slipping through. The site also has an ambiguous policy surrounding violent videos, permitting them — now with a warning label that stops them from automatically playing — so long as users seek to “condemn” rather than “celebrate” them (two highly subjective verbs).

Elsewhere on the internet, though, the unchecked invective that frequently accompanies disturbing content in the form of user comments can be offensive in its own right.

Justin Torres, 36, a novelist who wrote a personal essay in The Washington Post after the nightclub shooting in June in Orlando, Fla., avoids watching videos of violent acts.

“I’m traumatized by the violence that marginalized people suffer already,” he said. “I’ve lived through that. Posting videos is to shake people up, but I don’t need it for evidence. I’ve seen enough real-life violence.”

Mychal Denzel Smith, 29, the author of the book “Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education,” said that he has, in the past, vowed not to watch videos of police shootings, but often had second thoughts.

“I was exercising a level of privilege others don’t have access to,” he said. “This is a lived reality for people, and how dare I separate myself from it as if this doesn’t affect me as well, as if it couldn’t one day be me on that video.”

But when he saw news breaking of Alton Sterling’s shooting, he decided not to click on the video.

“I could not watch another lynching,” he said.

A key distinction between consuming news on the internet versus print or TV is the constant access and ability to sink into deep rabbit holes for the former, as the Boston Marathon study demonstrates.

Even 24-hour cable news networks are no match for the near-infinite sprawl of the web, where countless sources, either with or without credentials, give obsessives a never-ending supply of material to sift through and modern technology supplies terabytes of raw firsthand data. If J.F.K. were assassinated today, we wouldn’t be poring over a single, grainy Zapruder film; we’d have scores of high-definition smartphone videos taken from all angles and thousands of eyewitness tweets.

As for those rabbit holes, we have all been there after a traumatic public event: compulsively clicking through the internet for an additional journalistic report, one more personal account, yet another status update.

“There’s no shut-off valve on social media — it’s endless,” Mr. Torres said. “It can be incredibly overwhelming, and almost feel like a responsibility, like if you don’t read every think piece, you’re somehow a bad person and then you end up inflicting more hurt on yourself. You think, ‘I should honor the victim.’”

You have the possibility to relive a traumatic video or news story on the internet “over and over again, and you can fall deeper into that trauma,” Mr. Smith said. “The people you follow on social media share similar interests, and are all sharing the same videos, and some are auto-play, you can’t escape them. You have a higher level of exposure, and that can cause more despair and weariness.”

Yet Mr. Smith also noted a heartening side to the social media outpouring that typically attends a tragic event.

“There’s community being built, sharing in that pain, sharing in that trauma,” he said. “Particularly for folks who don’t live in large cities or in places that don’t match their politics, who feel alienated, that’s vital. They know there are other people out there that care as much as they do. It strengthens the resolve to keep talking about these issues.”

Nevertheless, in Dr. Ramsden’s study, extroverts and the “hypervigilant,” those predisposed to compulsively following a news story, experienced higher levels of stress.

“In a few weeks, the rest of us will go back to normal” after a traumatic event, Dr. Ramsden said in an interview. “The hypervigilant people don’t. They will continue to be very anxious and will consistently view” distressing footage on the internet, especially YouTube.

But the internet’s unpredictability can cause problems even for those who maintain regular levels of vigilance. If you tune into a news program or read the hard news sections of a newspaper, you are presumably steeling yourself for potentially negative information.

On social media, however, streams are relatively random in what they offer, as are links on sites that feed to media partners. (I have on more than one shameful occasion clicked on listicles that detail a varying number of celebrities who have killed people.) It’s easy to shut off news from the traditional media: Simply don’t turn on the TV to certain channels or open the newspaper. But there is no such filter on social media.

Moreover, the juxtaposition between standard social media fare and violent imagery is profoundly jarring. If you log on to Facebook looking for cat videos and baby pictures but encounter a disturbing image, not only are you emotionally unprepared for it, but its placement within fluffy, upbeat content can be unsettling, as if bleakly reminding us that the same species that routinely produces adorable toddlers is also responsible for ISIS.

Note that I previously mentioned that I clicked on those listicles about celebrities who have killed people. This may be the most subtle yet pernicious aspect of violent imagery or content on the internet: the viewer’s complicity.

While it’s true that some agency is required to turn on and watch a TV, and more so to open up and read a print news publication, to a certain extent your free will as a consumer was limited with the traditional media of previous eras. News was presented to you at specific times — morning and evening, or weekly or monthly — and at restricted length, enough to fill a newspaper, magazine or 30-minute broadcast and no more. Most likely you stuck with whatever publications you subscribed to and news programs you normally watched and received their images in a relatively passive manner.

On the internet, though, we actively follow intricate webs of links and often end up in lurid virtual precincts we have never previously visited. A front-page print newspaper photo of a dead civilian is unavoidable if you subscribe to that publication, and viewing it does not implicate you as somehow wanting to seek out an image of death.

But deliberately searching for or clicking on a link that you know will send you to the same picture does (particularly if there is a warning issued beforehand). On some level, we may be sickened as much by our own unsavory desires as by the inhumanity on display. As aphorism 146 from Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” says, “And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

There is, too, the question of whether one wants to reward a news outlet that posts a disturbing video for cynical, revenue-generating reasons.

“That’s the paradox we’re in now,” Mr. Smith said. “The documentation I find to be necessary. But the motive of news sites is not completely altruistic. They’re not posting it simply to help produce policy shifts. Everyone is competing for more and more clicks. But what other way are we going to spark this conversation?”

Graphic video, and all the additional trauma that comes with watching it, is the only tool, he said, that has produced any kind of results.

“Other things we’ve tried haven’t worked,” Mr. Smith said. “Just telling people about these experiences hasn’t worked. People don’t believe it.”