The Nir Oz kibbutz in Israel is about a mile from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The 400 Jews who live there have often been the target of cross-border gunshots, but on Oct. 7, in a surprise attack, Hamas terrorists besieged the commune, killing about 100 and taking 50 hostages back across the border.
It was part of the largest attack on Israel in 50 years, but the marauders also left a trail of video and images that will be impossible to pack away, a part of the new cyberterrorism we now face with social media as a devastating weapon.
Blacha Levenson was a grandmother living in the tightknit, hardworking kibbutz when the terrorists seized her, shot her point-blank with a rifle and filmed the entire event, including the elderly woman lying on the ground in her own blood while the killers stood around her. They then uploaded the video to her cellphone and posted it on the woman’s Facebook page.
Levenson’s sister received a call from one of the killers, telling her to look at Blacha’s Facebook page. Not knowing what to expect, she could not bear it. She called Levenson’s granddaughter, who was just coming out of a bomb shelter. "The moment we left the shelter, my aunt called, screaming, 'Open Facebook, open Facebook,'" said Mor Bayde.
She saw “the greatest imaginable disaster — my grandmother on the ground, in her own home, murdered, in a video," she said. "The floor was all bloody. My grandmother, laying there. My grandmother, my flower, the light of my life, my whole world. This is how we found out.”
Social media serves many purposes — some good, some awful — but add to the list that it is now a weapon of terror, paralyzing, humiliating, weaponizing. And, in essence, we are powerless to stop it. Technology has taken over. There are glimmers of possibilities, but they are likely to get caught up in political polarization and, of course, the limitations posed — sometimes rightly — by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
And, like mass murders that recur with assault weapons, we will go round on what to do. Little will get done. We have faced this problem of video as a weapon for two decades, although dangerous new technologies have actually beguiled us for more than a century. The telegraph and typewriter changed the nature of mass communication; photographs brought our first glimpse of sensationalism; and radio and TV were so powerful we carefully regulated both.
Israel-Hamas war images spread trauma.On social media, we face hard choices.
My first recollection in the Internet Era was the death of Daniel Pearl, a premier Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent. In 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan, he met with a source he thought was a prominent figure in the country’s Islamic movement. Pearl was one of the few journalists providing the viewpoint of Islamic radicals. But instead he was kidnapped.
Eventually, after various demands for ransom, Pearl was beheaded by his captors, part on an unknown terrorist group that later released a video of his murder on the internet. Posting “snuff” videos became a new form of terrorism. Ten video beheadings were posted in 2004 alone.
Now a complicated mix of murder and suicide videos has emerged. The Hamas murder video was political, as was the April video of the decapitation of a Ukrainian prisoner by the Russians. But in Bosnia in August a man killed his ex-wife and two others and took his own life on Instagram. In California a man killed a woman and filmed her final moments for a broadcast. No politics, just mayhem.
And we are faced with ever-growing questions about the cesspool that is often the internet and social media: Can it be regulated and cleaned up? Does it violate the First Amendment to force social media giants to take draconian steps to halt the livestream carnage?
Or, some would ask, does it even matter? Does allowing a live product that shows murders and suicides prompt more people to use social media as a weapon and a way to get a bizarre thrill, a moment of fame and infamy?
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Social scientists who study media effects have long been mixed on the answer to that question. Many things in people’s lives prompt them to commit violent acts — including media, from video games to movies to social media — but when we can, we try to intervene. If the law permits.
“The societal acceptance of murder videos as entertainment and the emergence of copycat perpetrators pose risks that outweigh any benefits viewing murder videos could possibly have,” Musa K. Farmand Jr. asserts in a law journal article entitled “Who Watches This Stuff?”
He believes a federal law might help, writing, “Certainly it is not outrageous to think we should draw a line at obscene video productions that culminate in actual cold-blooded murder.”
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Partial solutions seem available:
Facebook could be forced to eliminate all live content, but no court would approve such a sweeping law. Still, Farmand argues, a federal law could make clear: “Society will not afford our citizens the opportunity to infinitely and repeatedly view the actual, intentional murder of one human being by another on the internet.”
When radio (1920s) and television (1940s) came along, the government allowed them to act as private companies (with licenses) but also carefully regulated their behavior. They were considered public property, unlike newspapers and magazines, which were private.
And now the overarching question in all this is whether the internet needs similar regulation. Ironically, radio was regulated early on because of the fear that it had tremendous propaganda power and needed careful control. Sounds familiar.
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deciding a case on social media that might hold the key to many issues confronting us. The First Amendment is about to get a big test. Does “no law” mean that this powerful, dangerous, marvelous international network of connected computers needs to be more rigidly controlled? Hold your horses.
Rob Miraldi’s First Amendment writing has won numerous awards. He taught journalism at the State University of New York for many years. X, formerly known as Twitter: @miral98; email: rob.miraldi@gmail.com
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