What are all these violent images doing to us?

Early this morning, I got up, made some coffee, sat down at my desk, and opened Twitter to read the news and pass some time before I had to leave for a conference. One of the first things I saw in my timeline was a still from a video of what was described in the tweet as an ISIS fighter executing a group of Syrian soldiers. The soldiers lay on their stomachs in the dirt, mostly undressed, hands on their heads. They were arranged in a tightly packed row, arms and legs sometimes overlapping. The apparent killer stood midway down the row, his gun pointed down, smoke coming from its barrel.

That experience led me to this pair of tweets:

If you don’t use Twitter, you probably don’t know that, starting in 2013, Twitter tweaked its software so that photos and other images embedded in tweets would automatically appear in users’ timelines. Before that change, you had to click on a link to open an embedded image. Now, if you follow someone who appends an image to his or her tweet, you instantly see the image when the tweet appears in your timeline. The system also includes a filter of sorts that’s supposed to inform you before showing media that may be sensitive, but it doesn’t seem to be very reliable at screening for violence, and it can be turned off.

As I said this morning, I think the automatic display of embedded images is great for sharing certain kinds of information, like data visualizations. Now, tweets can become charticles.

I am increasingly convinced, though, that this feature becomes deeply problematic when people choose to share disturbing images. After I tweeted my complaint, Werner de Pooter pointed out a recent study on the effects of frequent exposure to graphic depictions of violence on the psychological health of journalists. The study’s authors found that daily exposure to violent images was associated with higher scores on several indices of psychological distress and depression. The authors conclude:

Given that good journalism depends on healthy journalists, news organisations will need to look anew at what can be done to offset the risks inherent in viewing User Generated Content material [which includes graphic violence]. Our findings, in need of replication, suggest that reducing the frequency of exposure may be one way to go.

I mostly use Twitter to discover stories and ideas I don’t see in regular news outlets, to connect with colleagues, and to promote my own work. Because I study political violence and atrocities, a fair share of my feed deals with potentially disturbing material. Where that material used to arrive only as text, it increasingly includes photos and video clips of violent or brutal acts as well. I am starting to wonder how routine exposure to those images may be affecting my mental health. The study de Pooter pointed out has only strengthened that concern.

I also wonder if the emotional power of those images is distorting our collective sense of the state of the world. Psychologists talk about the availability heuristic, a cognitive shortcut in which the ease of recalling examples of certain things drives our expectations about the likelihood or risk of those things. As Daniel Kahneman describes on p. 138 of Thinking, Fast and Slow,

Unusual events (such as botulism) attract disproportionate attention and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

When those images of brutal violence pop into our view, they grab our attention, pack a lot of emotional intensity, and are often to hard to shake. The availability heuristic implies that frequent exposure to those images leads us to overestimate the threat or risk of things associated with them.

This process could even be playing some marginal role in a recent uptick in stories about how the world is coming undone. According to Twitter, its platform now has more than 270 million monthly active users. Many journalists and researchers covering world affairs probably fall in that 270 million. I suspect that those journalists and researchers spend more time watching their timelines than the average user, and they are probably more likely to turn off that “sensitive content” warning, too.

Meanwhile, smartphones and easier Internet access make it increasingly likely that acts of violence will be recorded and then shared through those media, and Twitter’s default settings now make it more likely that we see them when they are. Presumably, some of the organizations perpetrating this violence—and, sometimes, ones trying to mobilize action to stop it—are aware of the effects these images can have and deliberately push them to us to try to elicit that response.

As a result, many writers and analysts are now seeing much more of this material than they used to, even just a year or two ago. Whatever the actual state of the world, this sudden increase in exposure to disturbing material could be convincing many of us that the world is scarier and therefore more dangerous than ever before.

This process could have larger consequences. For example, lately I’ve had trouble getting thoughts of James Foley’s killing out of my mind, even though I never watched the video of it. What about the journalists and policymakers and others who did see those images? How did that exposure affect them, and how much is that emotional response shaping the public conversation about the threat the Islamic State poses and how our governments should respond to it?

I’m not sure what to do about this problem. As an individual, I can choose to unfollow people who share these images or spend less time on Twitter, but both of those actions carry some professional costs as well. The thought of avoiding these images also makes me feel guilty, as if I am failing the people whose suffering they depict and the ones who could be next. By hiding from those images, do I become complicit in the wider violence and injustice they represent?

As an organization, Twitter could decide to revert to the old no-show default, but that almost certainly won’t happen. I suspect this isn’t an issue for the vast majority of users, and it’s hard to imagine any social-media platform retreating from visual content as sites like Instagram and Snapchat grow quickly. Twitter could also try to remove embedded images that contain potentially disturbing material. As a fan of unfettered speech, though, I don’t find that approach appealing, either, and the unreliability of the current warning system suggests it probably wouldn’t work so well anyway.

In light of all that uncertainty, I’ll conclude with an observation instead of a solution: this is one hell of a huge psychological experiment we’re running right now, and its consequences for our own mental health and how we perceive the world around us may be more substantial than we realize.

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on August 29, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/what-are-all-these-violent-images-doing-to-us/