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Lorenzo Tugnoli

The first-person video released by the Israeli military shows navy fighters on a gunboat using assault rifles and grenades to blast away at people floating in the water. Military officials said the targets were Hamas terrorists who’d tried to storm the Israeli coast during the rampage that sparked the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/israel-hamas-war/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Israel-Gaza war</a>; all now are presumed dead.

Such graphic footage once was shared mainly in dark and morbid corners of the internet, hidden away from casual viewers. But the navy video bounced across social media feeds and discussion forums, including Reddit’s 1.6-million-follower subreddit r/CombatFootage, where it was one of dozens of violent scenes posted that day.

In a discussion of the video, one commenter said in a since-deleted post they were living in the “golden age of brutal voyeurism.”

The wars in Israel and Ukraine have fueled an explosion in videos online showcasing the horrors of modern war, bringing killings and cruelty to a global audience of viewers who are unprepared — or all too willing — to watch.

The supply of new graphic videos has boomed as fighters use cellphones and GoPro cameras to record or live-stream footage from a point-blank perspective, either for purposes of military strategy or propaganda. So, too, has demand, as internet users flock to loosely moderated video sites, message boards and private groups where they can see and share extreme footage to sate their curiosity or score political points.

Our “increasingly fragmented online media system means there are many more outlets for this kind of content and a wider variety of content moderation schemes to pick from,” said Colin Henry, a researcher at George Washington University who has studied political violence and the internet. “It’s like there are suddenly many more movie theaters in town, and some of them are much more friendly toward snuff films.”

Israel Defense Forces

In both wars, military leaders and digital-native soldiers eager to document the reality of their conflict or push for international support have released videos directly via group-messaging services such as Telegram or had them republished to social media platforms such as X, formerly Twitter.

On Telegram, Hamas’s military wing has posted training montages showing Hamas militants preparing for combat as well as uncensored videos of bloody skirmishes, drone-grenade attacks and killed Israeli soldiers. A Hamas military spokesman also pledged to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/12/hamas-hostage-video-threat/" target=_blank>broadcast hostage executions</a> online.

Basem Naim, the leader of Hamas’s international relations arm, told The Washington Post in an interview that the footage was shared on social media both to gain global attention and to embolden Hamas militants for the war ahead.

“Who is terrorizing whom? We are the victims … of this huge killing machine,” he said. The videos “show that we can do something. It is not only we who are beaten all the time. No, sometimes we can also hit back.”

For many people far from the battlefield, the risk of such videos suddenly appearing on auto-playing websites or social network feeds has become a persistent fear, leading some schools and education groups to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/11/tiktok-youtube-israel-hamas-content-moderation/" target=_blank>coach parents</a> to monitor or block their children’s use of social media. Psychiatrists have warned that the repeated viewing of such visceral imagery can lead to what’s known as “vicarious trauma,” damaging people’s mental health.

Others, however, actively seek it out — and are aided by the combatants themselves. Ukraine’s 110th Mechanized Brigade, an infantry unit specializing in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/04/fpv-drone-ukraine-russia/" target=_blank>drone-dropped explosives</a>, has posted more than 100 videos to its Telegram channel, many of which show Russian soldiers being blown to pieces alongside a heavy-metal soundtrack.

Wojciech Grzedzinski

The videos are often republished with English-language descriptions to subreddits like r/UkraineWarVideoReport, where they’ll often receive thousands of comments and views.

Some commenters there say the videos offer a grisly lesson. They have “basically taken all the ‘glory’ out of war,” one Redditor said in a thread discussing a video of an injured Russian soldier taking his own life. “I wish politicians would watch these vids as they had their morning coffee.”

Others there celebrate the violence or riff on the strange banality of seeing such carnage from home. “I’m eating coco puffs watching this,” one Redditor said on a video showing Russians soldiers killed with grenades.

Graphic footage has long played a role in shaping the public’s understanding of current events. Haunting images from battles and massacres broadcast on TV news helped mobilize Americans against the Vietnam War. The looping videos of jets smashing into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, marked a pivotal moment for mainstream viewership of atrocities; so, too, did the footage from journalists embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan during the years of war that followed.

But such videos have also been used to sow terror and provoke an emotional overreaction that could enrage onlookers, expand a conflict or play into the attackers’ hands, said Amanda E. Rogers, a research fellow at the Century Foundation think tank who has studied extremist propaganda. Nearly a decade ago, she said, the Islamic State’s video-recorded beheadings of aid workers, journalists and others helped mark a turning point for terrorists who saw the value in publishing footage so heinous many viewers felt they couldn’t ignore it.

“People don’t understand that you can be recruited into a conflict by propaganda unwittingly to help the side you think you’re opposing,” Rogers said. “Now these videos have spilled over into social media environment, where the lowest common denominator and the sound bite become consumable as a partisan team sport.”

Some of the grisly videos have proved valuable for investigators and journalists seeking to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/10/12/israel-hostage-count-videos/" target=_blank>find hostages</a> or <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/07/ukraine-pow-tymofiy-shadura/" target=_blank>document war crimes</a>. And moderators of the CombatFootage subreddit, which has seen its subscriber base more than double since the start of 2022, said they evaluate videos for their “combat footage to propaganda ratio.” Clips with too little focus on actual combat are removed.

But the lines between such videos and propaganda are not always clear-cut. White supremacists have for years spread videos showing violent acts committed by people of color to inflame racial animus in hopes of winning potential recruits, Henry said. In recent conflicts, such gruesome videos have been used to dehumanize the enemy and get international viewers feeling more invested in the fight.

“Violent content, especially war footage, can be really traumatizing to people, but it can also be a great mobilizer,” he said. “When any of the various Ukraine war influencers share videos of Russian soldiers dying from drone attacks, part of the strategy is to appeal to American or European audiences who see Russian soldiers as part of a wider hated out-group and Ukrainian soldiers as sort of like themselves.”

Major social media platforms generally block or restrict videos showing death or lurid violence. X’s <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy" target=_blank>rules</a> permit violent videos if they’re hidden behind a warning disclaimer, but the company bans “gratuitous gore” except in cases where the imagery is “associated with newsworthy events,” saying that “research has shown that repeated exposure to excessively graphic content online may negatively impact an individual’s well-being.”

Some violent videos from the Israel-Gaza war, however, remain viewable in an unrestricted way on X, including the gunboat footage and other clips from the Israeli military purporting to show Hamas militants gunned down by a tank on the Israeli border.

In some cases, the wars have also sparked a shifting of long-held rules when it comes to speech. Facebook last year <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/10/facebook-violence-russians/" target="_blank">said</a> it would temporarily allow violent messages related to the Ukraine war, such as “death to the Russian invaders,” because they represented protected political expressions. Credible calls for violence against Russian civilians remained banned, the company said.

The Ukrainian government last year began posting photos and videos of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/03/telegram-russian-war-dead-ukraine-pows/" target=_blank>captured and killed Russian soldiers</a> to Telegram, Twitter and YouTube in hopes of inflaming Russian protests over the war’s human costs. Military-justice experts told The Post that some of the images likely violated the Geneva Conventions, which demand governments shield prisoners of war from “insults and public curiosity.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has adopted a similar tactic to enrage Western audiences by running hundreds of haunting YouTube ads, including videos in which Israeli medical examiners describe what they saw in their autopsies of the bodies of children purportedly killed during the Hamas attack, according to YouTube’s <a href="https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR17204675884309544961/creative/CR04969966039866540033?region=anywhere" target=_blank>ad library</a>.

One <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh8t8sHnTng" target=_blank>YouTube ad </a>shows a colorful scene of smiling unicorns and rainbows that quickly pivots to a darker message: “We know that your child cannot read this … 40 infants were murdered in Israel by the Hamas terrorists (ISIS),” the ad reads. “Just as you would do everything to protect your child, we will do everything to protect ours.”

Babies Can’t Read The Text In This Video But Their Parents Can

A spokesman for YouTube, whose <a href="https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=en" target=_blank>ad rules</a> ban violence and “shocking content,” said the ads are not shown on children-focused content and do not warrant any enforcement action.

Officials with the Foreign Ministry, which did not respond to requests for comment, also posted a photo earlier this month showing a dead baby soaked with blood, its face blurred, onto its 1.4-million-follower X account, calling it “the most difficult image we’ve ever posted.”

On Monday, the Israeli military attempted to reach an audience of foreign correspondents, screening a graphic 40-minute video showing “scene after scene of appalling violence,” according to the British newspaper the Times. Some of the video was taken from Hamas fighters’ phones, cars and helmets,

Military officials also shared instructions they said were recovered from Hamas fighters detailing how they should “live broadcast” the killings: “Do not waste the camera battery and storage but use them as much as possible.”

Daniel Hagari, a military spokesman, told the crowd the videos would serve as “a collective memory for the future.” “We will not let the world forget about who we are fighting,” he said, according to the Times.

Finalist for the Livingston Award in 2022. Member of the "Pegasus Project" team that won a George Polk Award in 2021. 

University of Florida

Drew Harwell is a reporter for The Washington Post covering technology. He was a member of an international reporting team that won a George Polk Award in 2021.

Drew Harwell

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