NewZealandShooting: Why you shouldn't watch the video, and what to do if you did | Opinion
Horrific videos like the ones posted by the Christchurch mosque shooting suspect Brenton Tarrant are geared to appeal to the morbidly curious, and appeal it did. Dozens of copies of what appears to be footage from a helmet-mounted camera are circulating on the darker corners of the internet and are being persistently posted on more mainstream platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, which don't always manage to catch the video before it goes up.
You don’t need to be an 8chan denizen to be tempted by first-hand footage of an event dominating the news cycle, just as most people probably wouldn’t look away if they came by the scene of an attack—or even a particularly bad accident—in real life.
Secondly, it is difficult to imagine a more intimate moment in any person’s life than dying. Tarrant not only brutally brought this moment forward for dozens of innocent people, who had so many more years to live and so much more than him to give to their families, communities and to the country they made their home. He was determined to humiliate them, to make them look like targets in a video game. If you want to know more about the victims, wait for their life stories to emerge.
There is growing recognition that the same is true for those of us not engaging directly with victims and survivors: Storytelling in all forms is built precisely on not needing to meet someone in the flesh to empathise with them, to experience their suffering, fear and sorrow as yours. Don’t watch unless you have to; if you have to watch it, don’t watch more times than you have to; if you must watch the footage over and over again, watch it on a small screen—and I, personally, found it useful to watch with the sound off.
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