N.A.S.
by Acadia Otlowski
Last week, 147 people were killed by terrorists in Garissa, Kenya, at Garissa University College.
The terrorist organization, Al- Shabaab, took credit for the attack, which it says is in response to Kenya’s sending troops into Somalia, where the organization is based.
President Uhuru Kenyatta called the massacre “an attack on humanity,” and indeed that’s what it feels like.
Within days of the massacre, gruesome pictures from the attacks were being spread across the planet through social media. These pictures were not tasteful. Actually, they were anything but.
They were something that most editors would not even consider putting on the front pages of their newspapers, or even in black and white on the inner pages.
They are that gruesome. The pictures are showing dozens of young adults surrounded by pools of blood. They make the crime scene photos from the 1999 Columbine Massacre seem tame…and you have to seek those photos out.
These pop up in users’ news feeds, without warning or an option to opt out of the photos that show some exceptionally graphic content.
This was my first exposure to the story; not through a news outlet, but just a photo shared by a friend.
The issue with these photos is twofold:
The first is that these photos would not have been shared with the same vigor if the victims shown had been American students. Just because there are photos from directly after the massacre doesn’t mean that they should be spread across the internet.
The closest equivalent in level of gore that I can think of were the photos from the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. Those showed a lot of blood and gore, but lacked the sheer amount of death portrayed within the heavily shared photos.
Imagine if these were your children, your brothers and your sisters. Would you really want their dead bodies smeared across people’s social media feeds, crammed between what someone ate for breakfast and another person’s selfie?
It crosses a line into disrespectful.
What’s worse is that because of the massive amount of victims in this tragedy, there has been chaos in identifying the bodies of the dead.
Imagine being a family member of someone missing from this attack, scrolling through your social media accounts, only to see a photo of the victims appear on your display.
What would you do? Would you scroll past it in fear of seeing someone you knew? Or would you stop and look, hoping to not see anyone familiar, but knowing that it is very likely that you could?
The second reason is that photos like these do not inform, they are only gruesome and spread fear, which is exactly what terrorists want. The entire purpose of said massacres is to spread fear in order to change the state of the world in their favor.
In this case, it is to get Kenyan forces out of Somalia.
There are so many less gruesome ways to share sympathies with those in Kenya that don’t include reposting pictures of corpses.