This, of course, is a distinctly American perspective. We tend to like our horrors delivered to us somewhat sanitized. Impactful, but still sanitized. Such discretion — or censorship, depending on your point of view — isn’t universal. Think of the footage of civilians killed in Gaza that Al Jazeera has shown uncensored for years. That would almost never fly on US television. I also remember seeing a news website in India featuring a slideshow of a school that had burned down. In one photo, a woman cried in sheer despair at the sight of small, burnt corpses stacked on top of each other by the door, left where they fell, children panicking in a futile attempt to escape the flames. Nothing like that would ever be shown to a mainstream US news audience. Never.

But now, thanks to the ubiquity of social media, it matter less what mainstream media chooses to do, as everyone online now has the capacity to view footage selectively, by their own accord. This was the basis of my editorial thinking for much of 2011 and 2012, during the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

As the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt spread elsewhere, so did footage created by members of the public, recorded on their camera phones and distributed across social platforms. Early on I made the difficult decision to share graphic footage, but with very specific rules of engagement. Every post would always include the word graphic in it — no one should ever be surprised when they open a link and see something horrible. I’d experienced it myself — people would often send me links of graphic footage, but most of the time they told me what to expect. When they didn’t, the shock of what I was looking at hit me hard, and I didn’t want to put my followers through the same experience. Those are often the photos that haunt me the longest.

Meanwhile, whenever possible, I added blunt details about what the footage would contain. If the footage showed the broken bodies of children killed in a mortar attack, my tweet would say so. If it showed a horrendous head wound, my followers would know about it before they ever clicked the link. This way they were aware of what the footage contained and could make an informed decision as to whether to look at it.

Even though I was deliberate in my approach, my methods weren’t without controversy. Some people felt the old way of doing things — that discretion should always be the default editorial position — was preferable, and criticized me for sharing footage. Some times, the criticism was selective — for example, it was okay to show footage of dead Arab civilians in Libya, but when the dead happened to be well-known photographers such as Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, suddenly it crossed a line. (This always struck me as hypocritical, and according to close friends of theirs that I’ve talked to about the matter, Chris and Tim would have probably felt the same way, too.) But editorial decisions are ethical decisions as well. There’s isn’t always a right or wrong — it’s a matter of making a tough call and being able to articulate your reasoning behind it. Achieving 100% consensus on the matter will always prove to be futile.

And so for most of 2011 and 2012, I stuck to my editorial standards. Share graphic footage, but with a warning and enough context for people to decide whether to view it. Share graphic footage not because it’s salacious, but because people should have the right to bear witness. Share graphic footage, because we can’t let the bastards get away with this.

Over time, though, I found myself posting fewer and fewer pieces of graphic footage. I sensed I was burning out, and feared my readers were, too. How many videos of war and suffering can a person handle in a day? A week? A year? When a conflict like Syria can literally produce hundreds of pieces of graphic footage every single day, is it more effective and/or ethical to become much more selective about what you share? And where do you draw the line? Documenting civilian deaths? Autopsies of tortured children? Rape footage? Executions? In a continuum of suffering, where do you draw the line — and how do you make a case for why you chose to draw that line?

After a while, I just stopped. Cold turkey. No more footage. My Twitter followers knew what Youtube channels I used, what sources I retweeted. It was easy enough for them to find new footage if they truly wanted to see it.

And then there were the flashbacks. For me, the trigger always seemed to be food. My kids giggling while eating a bowl of spaghetti. A smashed piece of cauliflower I saw outside a salad bar I used to frequent near my old office. Someone using a melon scoop to empty a cantaloupe. Everyday activities that caused me to remember very specific photos and videos — all of which I chose to share with my social networks. I wonder what triggers they experienced? Sounds? Voices? Colors? Even smells?

And then there was the numbness I’d see around me. Colleagues who spent their working hours vetting war footage for months on end. Twitter followers who’d pass along footage as if they were just sharing a recipe with me. I remember one exchange with a Twitter follower when I said I always made sure my back faced the wall while using a laptop so my kids would never be exposed to graphic footage accidentally. “What’s the big deal?” he asked me. It seemed self evident — my kids were five and three at the time. “I’ve been watching footage like this since I was in middle school, and look at me now,” he’d reply.

Exactly. I thought. Look at you now.