SOCIAL MEDIA HAS DESENSITIZED US TO DEATH AND VIOLENCE

On Sept. 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and founder of the nonprofit organization Turning Point USA, was fatally shot in the neck while holding a public event on the campus of Utah Valley University (UVU) in Orem, Utah. The assassination quickly went viral as cellphone videos captured the precise moment in which the bullet penetrated Kirk’s carotid artery, causing liters of blood to spurt out as he fell to the floor and died. 

At the same time as this horrific incident was unfolding, a revolution was taking place 8,000 miles away in Nepal, where tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the streets of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, to protest decades of government corruption. Footage showing protesters lying dead in a pool of their own blood on the streets, as a result of the military crackdown that ensued, began to surface, proving just how intense the turmoil had become. 

In Gaza, the humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding over the last two years in the wake of the October 7th attacks–which the United Nations recently declared to officially be a genocide–has captured the attention of millions worldwide. Every day, images emerge online showing buildings collapsing into rubble; of charred and mangled corpses spread out on the streets; of protruding stomachs and the outlines of ribs from starving children. Videos of men and women sobbing uncontrollably at the sight of their entire family wrapped underneath a white tarp and placed into rows beside other dead Palestinians have garnered millions of views, likes, and comments across social media. 

A pervasive numbness has been setting in. This constant loop of death and despair being posted online is systematically paralyzing our collective psyche to react to these horrors appropriately. Rather than being consumed by shock, we continue to compulsively scroll, apathetic to the chilling array of chaos on our screens. Worse still, our age-old ability to mindlessly murder our fellow man has tragically become yet another commodity, reduced to being mere content that is cycled to compete within the perpetual rat race for our finite attention spans. 

To some extent, this should be expected. As a user base is exposed to increasingly violent and graphic content, our brains naturally become less sensitive to that particular stimuli. In many ways, it’s quite difficult to take seriously the graphic nature of these atrocities on our screens when they’re methodically sandwiched in between funny memes and personalized ads.  

This issue isn’t entirely new, though. Social media–and the internet more broadly–has always been home to a slew of horrific content. Take the notorious video sharing website LiveLeak, for example. The site came to prominence in the mid-2000’s due to its willingness to platform gore and extreme violence. In 2007, it captured international attention after a pair of Ukrainian serial killers decided to upload a series of videos where they bludgeoned dozens of people to death by striking them repeatedly with a hammer. (Some might remember these videos from their sadistic title, “Two Guys, One Hammer.”)

It didn’t take long for this violence to digitally evolve, either. By the early-2010’s, groups like the Islamic State (or ISIS, as they were more commonly known) dominated YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter with their highly-produced and infamous beheading videos, which often incorporated the style of the popular Call of Duty franchise.

Meanwhile, in some of the more obscure corners of the internet, 8chan–the depraved offspring of the anonymous messaging board, 4chan–became embroiled in controversy in 2019 after it was revealed that one of its users, 28-year old Brenton Tarrant, had posted a lengthy manifesto on the site minutes before he livestreamed two mass-shootings on Facebook, killing 51 Muslim worshippers during Friday prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand. 

As horrific and appalling as all of this content was, it mostly sat on the margins of the internet and was only seen by a very limited demographic.  

However, as the internet continued to drift away from its Libertarian roots and into the consolidated confines of a tightly restricted monopoly, governed by an elite class of Silicon Valley tech executives, the catastrophic horrors that used to live on the margins had nowhere else to go but to migrate to more mainstream platforms, such as X, Meta, and TikTok. 

Would this explain our collective apathy? And have we always been this callous? 

I’m reminded of the atmosphere of May 2020. The U.S. was two months into a global pandemic, and the world as we knew it had come to a complete standstill. During Memorial Day weekend of that year, a 10-minute video surfaced across social media that captured the image of a police officer with his knee placed on the neck of an unarmed civilian, 46-year old George Floyd, killing him after 8 minutes and 46 seconds. 

The video sparked intense outrage across the nation, leading to dozens of demonstrations and protests, eventually escalating to violence and looting. This anger and outrage spread to virtually every corner of the United States, drawing an estimated 15 to 26 million people to participate in some form of protest, according to four polls tracked by The New York Times in July 2020. 

His name might not hold as much salience today as it did at that time, but it was virtually impossible to meet someone who felt nothing by it. The untimely and violent death of George Floyd was recorded on a cellphone and posted online, resulting in tens of millions of people feeling compelled to participate in some form of political protest.

Fast forward to the summer of 2025:

The final post that Charlie Kirk put up on his Instagram page, just hours before he was assassinated, was a CCTV still of a woman named Iryna Zarutska, a 22-year old Ukrainian refugee, who, on the evening of August 22, 2025, was commuting home from work before she was fatally stabbed in the neck on a commuter train, completely unprovoked, by 34-year old Decarlos Brown Jr., in Charlotte, North Carolina. In the Instagram post, Kirk writes, “America will never be the same.” 

When death becomes commodified and sold back to us as content, as is often what happens in cases like this, the victim of the crime dies and is reincarnated as an avatar for a political movement. 

Iryna Zarutska, therefore, ceased to be a person who was brutally murdered at the hands of a crazed lunatic and instead became appropriated as a symbol to propagate a political agenda. To the Conservative-Right, such as Charlie Kirk, Zarutska’s story highlighted their perception of the media’s hypocritical double-standards, provided evidence for the failures of soft-on-crime legislation, and served as a personal mourning for America’s general decline. 

For me, though, Zarutska’s death was more symbolic of the collective apathy that has hijacked our hearts and minds in recent years. 

In the minutes following the gruesome stabbing that took place on that Charlotte commuter train, CCTV footage shows that not a single person was compelled to help Zarutska in any way. No one offered to call 911; no one made any attempt to stop the bleeding; no one even asked to see if she was OK, despite puddles of blood visibly dripping from Brown’s hands and Zarutska’s body violently slumping to the floor. In fact, to the extent that anybody did react in any way, it was to get out of their seats and abandon the scene altogether.

Nobody helped Iryna Zarutska. She was condemned to live out her final moments on this Earth, confused and distraught, and die alone from a completely random act of violence that happened 5,000 miles away from her homeland. 

If we can’t even be bothered to act when someone is clearly dying before our very eyes, what can we be bothered to do? If we are so desensitized to death, how can we ever be trusted to preserve life?