Elon Musk is finding out what happens when you take down the guardrails of content moderation on Twitter.
See here: Within hours of the mass shooting on Saturday at a Texas outlet mall, some Twitter users shared gruesome pictures of bloodied bodies, purportedly from the crime scene. At least one image appeared to be of a child, my colleague Catherine Thorbecke reports.
It's not the first time graphic images have made their way onto Twitter. But the new way that content is ranked in the algorithm elevated accounts that paid to be verified.
"Graphic material often found its way onto Twitter in the past but it was more likely to be downranked and hard to find," Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, said in a tweet. "The new screwed up system seems to prioritize these vile accounts and presents material at the top of the feed. Awful."
Twitter, which fired much of its public relations team, did not respond to a request for comment.
This is, unfortunately, not the first time we're having a conversation as a nation about how to handle the images from mass shootings on social media, where they tend to spread quickly.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms have policies that restrict sharing graphic content, with certain exceptions.
But media companies and activists are also grappling with the ethics of not sharing the reality of photos that can have the power to shape public discourse.
There have been 202 mass shootings in the US within the first five months of this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit and CNN define mass shootings as those in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter.
On Saturday, eight people were killed and at least seven others wounded when a gunman opened fire at the outlet mall in Allen, Texas.
In an interview with CNN affiliate KTVT on Sunday, Steven Spainhouer, an Army veteran and former police officer who helped administer first aid at the scene, described the horror he encountered.
Later, in a tweet, he criticized people who shared a photo from the scene: "I do not want to see the photo floating around on social media, taken while I was calling 911 and trying to render aid at the Allen Outlets," he wrote. "The least you could have done is help, not take photos of people at death's doorstep."
Others have cited the example of Emmett Till, whose mutilated body on the cover of Jet Magazine (at the urging of Till's mother), giving Americans who had been protected from the racist violence of the era an unflinching look at its reality.
"It's time, with the permission of a surviving parent, to show what a slaughtered 7-year-old looks like," David Boardman, the dean of the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, tweeted in the aftermath of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde that left 19 children and two adults dead.
Boardmen added in his tweet at the time that he "couldn't have imagined saying this years ago," but argued that by showing the public these images, "Maybe only then will we find the courage for more than thoughts and prayers."
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