There is a unique misery to being on social media during a breaking news event.

Autoplay video and trending hashtags can make anyone an unwilling witness to violent material. Free, simple tools allow anyone to upload it.

As we saw on Friday during the Christchurch mosque shootings, these same tools can also be exploited by an alleged terrorist to send propaganda around the world before police even made an arrest.

In the days since, companies like Facebook have been called to account by politicians for their role in spreading a live stream video showing the attack.

Yet untold numbers of people made their own choices: to seek out the footage, to download it, to share it in ways intended to circumvent Facebook and YouTube's censors.

According to Facebook, it removed 1.5 million videos of the attack globally during the first 24 hours.

The company's former chief information security officer Alex Stamos pointed out on Twitter that searches for the video spiked as "millions of people are being told online and on TV that there is a video and a document that are too dangerous for them to see".

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Clearly, there is a tension between what people want to view, the media that draws their attention to it and the social platforms' ability and willingness to stop them.

Where do our choices begin?

Think about the design choices that perpetuated the Christchurch video: On Twitter, the alleged perpetrator used even the banal feature of "pinned tweet" to send users straight to his material.

On message board sites like Reddit and 8chan, the Christchurch video was welcomed and amplified by communities where hate speech is normalised.

On YouTube, the spiritual home of rubbernecking, it was given the play-by-play analysis that the website's recommendation algorithms so often rewards.

Finally, Facebook's live streaming tool was primed to give an alleged terrorist the biggest platform in the world — with more than 2 billion users each month, there is none bigger.

That's not to say they didn't try and get rid of it: Social media companies often use a technical process known as hashing, so that videos similar to banned content are automatically detected and removed.

But human users actively tried to avoid these tools by recording their screens with a different device, or by cropping and distorting their copy.

Dr Roxane Cohen Silver of the University of California, Irvine has researched the psychological impact of viewing traumatic footage for many years, and her recent study examined the motivations behind people who watched beheading videos from the Islamic State group.

Men, Christians and those unemployed were more likely to seek out such content, as well as individuals who were most fearful of terrorism.

This created a vicious cycle, she suggested, as watching it left viewers traumatised.

"And in some ways, we can say we're doing the terrorists' job for them," Dr Cohen Silver said.

Are there any easy solutions?

During the September 11 attacks, television created indelible images that a generation could not forget.

In the decades since, Dr Cohen Silver suggested that online platforms have shaped our experience of news and violence in ways that outstrip our capacity to understand it, to gather evidence and to advocate for change.

Facebook has complex rules for moderating live streams, but would we consider a drastic but simple tactic, like banning live video from such platforms altogether?

As a reporter, I saw one of the key moments of the Black Lives Matter movement on Facebook Live: Philando Castile, shot by a policeman in his car in Minnesota in 2016.

I saw his partner, Diamond Reynolds, who was filming, speaking with a voice of impossible steadiness: "You shot four bullets into him, sir," she said. "He was just getting his license and registration, sir."

Using her smartphone, she witnessed the violence and made us witness it too.

The Christchurch attack was streamed on Facebook Live, and the company says 1.5 million videos of it were removed globally during the first 24 hours. ( Reuters, file photo )

Queensland University of Technology's Dr Nicolas Suzor, who studies internet regulation, agreed there was value in using social video to hold authorities to account.

That means other regulatory possibilities, like forcing social media companies to moderate and approve content prior to publication, would require a significant shift in how we conceive of our rights online.

"In any moderation, there's always a risk of censoring information that is important to the public," he said. "The Castile video and others show how important it is to provide access to live streaming."

Where does mainstream media come in?

Something about Facebook made its users try and spread the Christchurch video 1.5 million times in one day — the company must confront this reality.

But journalists must also contend with their own role in encouraging people to search for it.

Sarah Redmond, a researcher who co-authored the Islamic State video study, said the media generates interest by referencing the existence of videos too traumatic to show.

"If you're just showing parts of it but alluding to … more violence, more gruesomeness, then individuals might be motivated to seek that out for themselves," she said.

As well as social media's role in spreading the video, Dr Suzor said he was concerned that raw footage from the attack was played on mainstream news websites and broadcast television.

"What we see often is borderline hateful content — that is, racist, misogynist … Islamophobic content — that circulates around mainstream social media sites and even on mainstream broadcast or print media," he said.

"We see people drawn into more and more radicalising hateful content, from content that is in the mainstream."

The truth is, we are still negotiating what it means that an alleged terrorist can find the same platform as useful for his purposes as you do when sending party invitations.

For now, Dr Cohen Silver can only offer choices each person needs to make for themselves.

"I often say put away the computer, put away the smartphone, do not click," she said.

"There's no psychological benefit from exposure to graphic, gruesome content."