Tom Teves woke in the middle of the night to his wife shouting: “Oh my God.” That’s when he knew that someone must have been killed. It was Tuesday morning, October 2, just a few hours after a shooter opened fire on a country music festival in Las Vegas. Reports of the mass shooting had started trickling in, including the cell phone alert that had woken Teves’s wife, Caren. Neither of them could sleep. It was a reminder of their own personal tragedy. And Caren had work to do.

Alexis Fitts is Backchannel’s senior editor. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

She posted to Twitter, “beyond heartbroken for the families of the dead.” Then she waited for the news to get worse. When CNN wrapped its digital stories in a banner reading “deadliest mass shooting,” she wrote that the site should take it down. Caren tweeted about complaints from around the web that NPR and the Today Show had illustrated their coverage with multiple pictures of the shooter. It was a few days before Caren could post her own meme, the one she makes every time there’s another mass shooting. It’s a collage of the faces of the victims of Las Vegas under a banner that reads, “These names. These photos. These stories.” Like the other posts, it’s always tagged: #NoNotoriety.

The Teves’s son, Alex, was murdered, along with 11 others, in the 2012 mass shooting in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Since then, the Teveses have become central figures in a movement to dim the spotlight that the press shines on mass killers. Through their organization, No Notoriety, they advocate for members of the media to obey a set of rules that they think will help reverse the mass shooting trend line: Only use the killer’s name once; don’t publish aggrandizing photos of the shooter. Though journalists might push back on rules that limit the spread of information, a growing body of research suggests that mass shootings—like suicides—can have a contagion effect, with information about a single incident inspiring repeat performances. That research inspired the FBI, in 2014, to launch the Don’t Name Them campaign, and news organizations to sign onto No Notoriety’s pledge to limit sensational descriptions of mass shooters.

But there are limits to what a single campaign can accomplish. Though Tom and Caren Teves’s call to action is focused primarily on the national media, the internet has amplified the effect of the coverage of mass shootings. Each photo, story, and television clip exists in a virtual eternity, where it can be passed around the web to grow steadily more notorious. Backchannel spoke with Tom and Caren Teves about the ethics of writing about mass shootings, and whether the internet is really the problem.

Alexis Fitts: How did you first decide to start the No Notoriety project?