When the Chinese student Lin Jun was murdered in May 2012, in Canada, the killer chose to record the mutilation and dismemberment of the body, and later posted it online with the title 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick. Luka Magnotta, a failed porn actor, was arrested and charged with murder after he was identified in the video.

When a terrorist massacred 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques in March, the killer filmed the beginning of the attack and broadcast it live on Facebook. He was arrested, but the footage lived on; moderators at Facebook scrambled to remove the 1.5 million copies of the video posted the day after the attacks. On YouTube, too, uploaders deliberately edited new versions that tried to outsmart the site’s moderation algorithm, while Reddit banned a subreddit called r/watchpeopledie for hosting it.

One website that originally posted 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick — and continues to host the Christchurch shooting video — is BestGore.com, which publishes countless images and videos of extreme violence and graphic content, including cartel beheadings, abortions, and ISIS executions. The so-called shock site was started in April 2008 by former local government worker Mark Marek of Edmonton, Alberta, and has published more than 12,000 posts, most featuring graphically violent photos and videos. Marek has claimed he doesn’t trust Google and so removed the analytics tool that tracked visitor numbers, but in 2011 the site claimed one million unique users per month.

Marek argues that BestGore serves a public good by preserving accurate documentation of the real violence that happens in the world. “By not seeing things for yourself, you are opening the door to being lied to and persuaded in one direction or the other,” he writes on the site’s landing page. “No matter how brutal, hard, sad, offensive, immoral, obscene or [fill in the blank] something is to look at, only by seeing it with your own eyes can you make up your own opinion on the matter and see truth.”

What motivates users to watch and share graphically violent videos of death? Many people might feel it would be disrespectful to those who died, or even psychologically damaging to watch such gruesome footage. Yet, some humans have always been drawn to the macabre. Violence for entertainment, in varying shades, is nothing new, but the internet has globalized extreme violence and made it hyper-accessible.

Those in favor of free speech would argue for an adult’s right to be able to watch whatever they want. It could also be argued that these videos are important criminal evidence, and in Magnotta’s case, publication of the video led to his arrest, and help convict him at his trial. Images of violence can also have important political messages, such as those depicting police brutality; activists argue that those videos need to be seen firsthand, as difficult as they may be to watch.

Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says there’s value in documenting upsetting realities, whether it’s surgery or newsworthy violence — though drawing the line between gratuitous and newsworthy isn’t always easy.

“Who decides what’s newsworthy, anyway?” she says. “This is something that I’ve watched social media companies go back and forth on over the years. It’s always along the lines of ‘is there a sort of purpose to documentary content?’ Where the policies get trickier is when the violence is created for the sake of a video, and that’s a much clearer line for a lot of these companies.”

Many people would instinctively choose not to watch someone being killed. Glenn Sparks is a professor at the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University and author of Media Effects Research: A Basic Overview. He has found that about a third of participants seek out violent videos, a third actively avoid them, and a third fall somewhere in the middle — they may watch part of one if it comes across their feed, only to click away.

“Because many attackers explicitly admit that they want fame, it has become essentially indisputable that as a society, we have been helping them achieve their goals.”

Sparks says that those who seek out violent content might do so because they feel a sense of accomplishment if they have overcome seeing the upsetting violence. There’s also the fact that human beings seek novelty, things that they don’t see every day. “That has some survival value, over time, if we pay attention to things that are different, that are changing in our environment,” Sparks says. “It offers us some feeling of protection.”

But watching extremely violent videos — or even coverage of a violent event — can have a negative impact on viewers. A 2019 study in the journal Science Advances found that intense and repeated coverage of large-scale collective traumas, such as terror attacks, had significant downstream implications for public health, including triggering mental health problems, sleep problems, and stress-related issues including cardiovascular disease.

Giving too much coverage to mass shooters has can lead to larger societal issues as well, according to a 2017 paper published in the journal American Behavioral Scientist. The authors, associate professors Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama and Eric Madfis at the University of Washington, Tacoma, explain that media coverage affects killers in several ways: It gives them the attention they crave, makes them “competitive” in maximizing victim fatalities, and can lead to contagion and copycat attacks. “Because many attackers explicitly admit that they want fame and directly reach out to media organizations to get it, it has become essentially indisputable that as a society, we have been helping them achieve their goals,” the paper reads. In watching those videos, then, the viewer could be considered to be complicit in their crime.

Magnotta seems to be a case in point. His background showed someone who had a growing obsession with fame and recognition. He appears to have created dozens or even hundreds of social media accounts, and may have been behind rumors posted about the murder video before it was published on BestGore. His narcissistic impulse to show off the clip ultimately led to his identification and arrest. After Magnotta’s conviction in 2014, a forensic psychiatrist diagnosed him with “Histrionic Personality Disorder,” based, in part, on his “pervasive pattern of attention seeking behavior.” For his part, Magnotta told OneZero that this report was inaccurate, and claims that he rejects media attention.

Laws on violent content vary, but few agree with Marek’s claim that hosting images of extreme violence can be a public good. In New Zealand, footage of the mosque shooting was swiftly banned by the country’s film classification board and is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Six people have already been charged with illegally distributing it. “This clip is an illegal, harmful, and reprehensible record created to promote a terrorist cause,” said New Zealand’s chief censor David Shanks in a statement in March. “Possessing or distributing it only supports a criminal agenda.”

Canadians who post this type of content might also find themselves in legal trouble. Marek was found guilty in 2016 of “corrupting morals” for publishing the video of Lin Jun’s murder, and served a six-month conditional sentence. In the U.S., while laws vary state to state, section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) actually protects platforms from being sued over the contents of their site. Section 230 can be used to defend Facebook from liability if one of its users livestreams the murder of 51 people during Friday prayers, or any other horrific act.

Technology companies have created their own community guidelines around content moderation. Both Facebook and YouTube decided quickly to ban the Christchurch shooting video. Facebook rules state that it will “remove content that glorifies violence or celebrates the suffering or humiliation of others because it may create an environment that discourages participation. We allow graphic content (with some limitations) to help people raise awareness about issues.” YouTube bans graphic violence and terrorism posted “with the intent to shock or disgust.”

Facebook, YouTube, and other media companies also signed “The Christchurch Call,” a nonbinding agreement among tech companies and countries to moderate terroristic content, at a May summit in Paris. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern and France’s president Emmanuel Macron drafted the document, which outlines ways in which companies and countries can curtail the spread of terrorist content online. The call was a direct response to the spread of the New Zealand shooter’s video. Seventeen countries, including Canada, signed the document, but the U.S. did not, citing free speech concerns.

Lankford and Madfis proposed in American Behavioral Scientist that the media stop naming mass shooters, stop using their photos and those of past killers, and stop encouraging “our morbid curiosity.” They have a point — BestGore and its ilk exist only because there is a demand for videos of gore and murder.

The responsibility for policing extreme content is shared between government, tech and media companies — and ourselves. “Everybody does have a decision to make in terms of whether they want to expose themselves to this,” Sparks says. “But I think the larger issue is, what kind of a culture do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a culture that entertains itself with this kind of material, and becomes potentially desensitized to violence in real life because of that?”