The Current - Should we protect kids from violent content online?

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

When Charlie Kirk was killed, graphic videos of his death went viral. Many kids opened up their social media and saw the gruesome footage. Experts estimate that by the time children reach middle school they've watched as many as 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of virtual violence online. What impact does this have on kids? And what does the exposure to these violent acts mean for their worldview? We're joined by New Yorker staff writer, and father, Jay Kang, who wrote an article titled "What the Video of Charlie Kirk’s Murder Might Do?"

All right. It is October. It is officially spooky season, which is great timing because there is a new Canadian thriller series out. It's called Wayward, and I think we should be talking about it. My name is Alameen Abdu Mahmoud and I love pop culture. And this week on my podcast, Commotion, I called up some of my favorite critics to get into the show about a school for troubled teens and then things start to go wrong. It is just wonderful. And it's bringing something new and interesting to the thriller genre. For that episode and a whole lot more, you can find and follow Commotion with Alameen Abduhne. on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. When the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed last month, graphic videos of his murder swept through social media feeds within minutes. Yeah, I did see Charlie Kirk's video online. It was a very graphic video.

Yeah, I did see a couple of those videos around. It's pretty harsh to see. I'm not on social media. but it was sent to my younger brother, and he showed it to me. So that's how I saw it. It was really crazy. I've never seen, like, someone die that graphically before and so up close. Our producer, Anne Penman, spoke with these young people on the streets of Vancouver.

They told her that the footage of Charlie Kirk's death, while awful, was similar to content they see online all the time. I see, like, tons of, like, violent deaths on, like, Instagram reels. You know, I'll be scrolling, and then a video of, like, someone dying in a car crash or getting hit by a train. and they're usually, like, very graphic. Like, now there's tons of Instagram accounts that I just made for showing people, like, passing away. Like, often I open these social media apps, like, Reddit or X or Instagram reels. Every hour, I see, like, a couple of those videos.

Something I realized over time is that I'm not comfortable seeing those videos, but they definitely have less of an impact on me. I remember, like, the first time I saw those videos, I was, like, in elementary school on Instagram. The first time I saw when I felt, like, a bit nauseous and sick, and I thought, like, how does that happen? and how do people post that online? That's a terrible thing. And now it's like, oh, there's just another video of someone passing away.

Kids and teens see more violent images online than ever. And for those young people in Vancouver, there's no easy fix to that. I mean, there are age restrictions on social media. Like, I don't think they're really enforced properly. Companies have to do more to, like, work on their censorship, and at least having warnings on their videos. It's basically just like a thing that pops up saying, do you wish to proceed to view this video?

And I feel like the younger age groups that interest them to see what is behind this blurred screen that they don't want me to see. I feel like if anything, they should just like completely just not have those videos, like have a better like internalized system where they can decipher through what videos are being posted. On one hand, I do think it's important to see it because if we're censoring videos like that, like they are happening. And to pretend, I don't know, to live in a bubble where you don't experience things like that is wrong. I mean, I don't think there would be violence on social media if violence wasn't happening in real life. So I'd rather to see changes at that level made.

Jay Kang is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He recently published an article about kids' exposure to online violence. The article had the headline, What the video of Charlie Kirk's murder might do. Jay, good morning. Good morning. What do you make of what you just heard? There's a lot that's there,

but I want to start with the video of Charlie Kirk being killed. I mean, those young people said that they found it, they saw it, they'd never seen anything like it, but it in some ways didn't stand out in terms of the horror that they see online. Yeah, I was pretty struck by the clarity with which they could talk about some of the, I don't know, I think the things that people like myself and other people have spent years and years thinking about in terms of online access and social media regulation and what is the power of an image like that. a video like that and I think that uh I don't know I found myself getting strangely emotional in the middle of it for a reason that I don't quite understand but um you know not not not just out of deep concern for kids who are watching videos of people dying I think that's happened for a long time but just sort of the way in which they don't have much control over whether they see this or not um you know it it almost feels like like they are like this is being voiced it upon them and

for reasons that I don't think any of us can really explain, you know, outside of profit motive for some of these social media companies. What were you getting emotional about? I want to talk more about this, but what were you getting emotional about, do you think? I think it was more, I think it was just like, you know, sometimes when you witness young people being cogent about their lives, I think, at least for me, you know, I have an eight-year-old who I don't think quite as of the age where that will happen, but you're trying to think about what will happen when they start to process the world.

and you realize that it happens at much younger age than I think we as parents think it does, right? Because I don't know. I can't remember that far back in my life. I don't remember when I started thinking about things like this, except in the most, like, nostalgic and perhaps, you know, narcissistic ways. In the piece that you wrote for the New Yorker, you said that most children, we're talking about the Charlie Kirk video, most children with phones have seen at least one unedited version of. of that video. What is your sense as to how much violence kids and teens

are seeing online? Oh, I think they see it nonstop. And I think that at different ages, they process it very differently. I think for the younger ones, it's harder for them to see what is real and what is not, because they might be seeing a scene from a movie on their TikTok reels, and then the next scene,

it's somebody in a bar fight, and the next scene, it's like a police shooting, and the next scene, it's the Charlie Kirk assassination, right? They see that all in a row. And when you're just flipping through and you don't really have the context of what's real and what's not, then it might blur together in a way.

Well, one of the scenes might be from like a video game or something like that, right? And then as they grow older, I think, and the violence they see becomes more ubiquitous, then I think that they start to develop political opinions based upon it, probably. They start to think about whether they want to see this or not. And some of them,

I think we'll get desensitized in the way that one of the young men, I believe, was describing, right? He said that he had kept seeing this, and it doesn't bother him as much anymore, but it seemed like it did bother him that it wasn't bothering him anymore, if that makes any sense. And then some of them, I think, will, it'll shape their lives in ways that images from the 1960s from out of Vietnam or images out of the civil rights movement of people being mowed down by fire hose or attacked by dog, you know, change people's lives, seeing those images. And I guess the question that I had in the column that I wrote is, well, what does it mean when you see thousands and thousands of those images instead of like 20 of them, right?

In the 1960s, 1970s, media controlled what images got out. And, you know, an incident like Kent State, for example, you see one image that we remember from Kent State, right? And I think that everyone who knows about Kent State can bring the image up to memory, which is a young woman kneeling over the body of somebody, right, and obvious despair. After the National Guard killed four students. What happens when everybody sees so many of these images from different angles and everything like that? Like, what happens to society at that point?

That was a question that I had in the column. How different is what young people are seeing now online? And again, a lot of this is unprompted, as we heard. You don't even need to say that you want to watch the video. The video just appears as the next video on your feed. How does that compare to the things that you saw when you were younger, the things that you consumed, the violent images that you might have seen when you were younger? Well, I'm 45 years old.

I grew up in the United States. And so the first real war that I can remember is Desert Storm. And Desert Storm was a completely sanitized. war in terms of the media output that came out. Very different from Vietnam. We saw the tracers of Patriot missiles going up in the sky at night and kind of looked like fireworks, right? It was celebratory. We're going to liberate Kuwait. Here are these cool missiles that we developed. And it was also a show, almost like a car show for American military technology. The one of the things that I remember is just like basically, I think there was a happy meal for Norman Schwarzkopf, right? Norma

there were posters that were put out about him and he became a celebrity in his own right in this sort of not not so much in terms of the news but almost in a Hollywood celebrity making machine and the thing that we never saw in Desert Storm is what happens when missiles hit targets right we didn't see casualties of any type I don't think we even really saw footage inside of Iraq or Kuwait or anything what we saw was just missiles going up in the air and and cool new machines that the American military had created. That, I think, is the alternative, or that is the other side of all of this, which is just what happens when a generation grows up, completely sanitized from violence, and does not see these images of war, and then it does not see images of political violence, and then, you know, all of it is shaken out in one moment, obviously for us in America, I think, perhaps also in Canada, that moment was 9-11, and that was when I think the generation of people who were around my age were shaken out of this war-sanitized stupor. And I think that that's also

harmful too. You know, I think it's harmful for people to grow up with no understanding of what the violence that is going on in their country and their name is doing. And I don't think that young people today have that problem, right? They have other problems, but they don't have have that problem like they're very aware of what happens in a war you're a parent as you mentioned you have how many kids two two do you do you think that parents have much or any control over what their kids are seeing oh absolutely not absolutely not in the piece i spoke to the director of policy from common sense media they provide ratings for content right video games they started in video games and it was like this concern over violent video games and um you know she was telling me that

One of her children doesn't have a phone, right? And obviously this is a household that is very concerned with social media and what the kids see. The mother is the director of policy for this watchdog group. And her daughter stopped because the kid next to her in school was watching it on his phone. Saw the Charlie Kirk murder over someone's shoulder. How do you regulate that? You know, how do you stop that?

You have done everything you can. Your kid doesn't have a phone. I'm sure you've had many talks with them about the danger of online content, and you've had many thoughts yourself. You've dedicated your career to thinking about what happens to young minds and they're exposed to this type of violence. And I'm not just talking about political violence. I'm talking about just like snuff films and discussing stuff that people post online for clicks.

And like, what could she have done, not send the kid to school that day? I mean, like, there's nothing you can do. What kind of person takes on the law? Can they ever really know what they're getting into? A really tough-looking guy came up to us and said, are you part of this gay case? My family started getting death threats. I wasn't able to go outside alone anymore.

I'm Phelan Johnson, host of See You in Court, a new podcast about the cases that changed Canada and the ordinary people who made history. This is David and Goliath we have here. Find and follow C.U. in court wherever you get your podcasts. You talk about... desensitization. And in this piece, what's really interesting is you ask a series of questions that I don't know if you have the answers to, but one of them is if exposure to images of

violence changes a generation of children. How are boomers different from my generation and how will my own children who will be exposed to far more evidence of political violence than I have been be different from me? How are you thinking about your answer to that question? Oh, man. I think that the boomers, I think, in many ways, were more political than my generation, and I think that it continues to this day. And I think part of the reason they're more political was the obvious reason was that many of them were going to have to go get drafted into a war. But I think that for those who were born maybe a little bit after that, I think their political engagement came from having to see these images, right? They saw my lie. They saw the famous image of the young

girl running from napalm they had a very good understanding through those images that there is a brutality to war and i think that they grew up with a resistance to war um i think that they saw assassination of jfk they saw the assassination of rfk they saw the assassination of martin luther king malcolm um they saw you know they saw images of fred hampton in chicago the the apartment building they saw all this stuff right um now they didn't see it in real time they saw it later like The Zepruder film, for example, but I don't think was shown until maybe 10 years after. But they saw, they were very aware, I think, of violence. And it wasn't because there was much, much more violence in America than there was in the 1990s, right?

The 1990s is famously one of the most violent decades in modern American history. I think that my generation grew up with such a sanitized vision of all of this, and it was done because the media machine was able to do it, because I think there's perhaps more buy-in into government ambitions by the media. And I think that that led to a certain desensitization of young people towards the harms of war, specifically. And I think that that was what made it easier for people, for the government to just, for example, charge into Iraq, right? And I think that that has real consequences, both in the real world, but also psychologically for people. people. I think that when you're an adult and you start to realize these things, it's far more

powerful and disruptive to a certain person's life. And I think that for my kids' generation and certainly the kids a little bit older than her, they have spent the last two years seeing images out of Gaza, Ukraine. They've seen political assassinations. They have seen Donald Trump's you're pleading, right? They have seen all this violence and they've seen it all the time. And I think that that will have a profound effect on how they grow up. And I think that the question is, right? And I think that it will be probably one that is almost impossible to sort out right now. And I think anyone who has an answer to it is probably trying to sell you something. Is that going to lead to a more conscious and thoughtful generation of people? Is it going to

lead to people who might be more resistance to violence because they have seen it? Or is it going to lead to people who are more careful about armed conflict abroad? Or is it going to lead to people who are, you know, decry violence in America, political or otherwise? Like, is it going to lead to a lot of people who are much more conscious about that type of thing, more sensitive? Or is it going to lead to mass desensitization? And I don't know the answer to that question, but it's certainly something that that I thought

about a lot in the wake of the Charlie Kirk's assassination. And how are we going to think about history? I mean, you mentioned Kent State. That image of Kent State of the young woman kneeling over after the National Guard killed four students in 1970, if that was, the question that you ask is if we agree that history is formed through these images, what does history look like when there are thousands of different choices? How would we understand the massacre at Kent State if it happened today?

What would it look like? What does that mean for how young people experience history? compared to your generation or my generation? When you have four or five images that define the violence of the 60s, and right, if you ask most people, what are those images? I think that a lot of people will come up with the same images. And then today, what you have is you have something that happens, and each of those is distinct in their way.

And they steer themselves into your memory. I'm sure that in 40 years I will still be thinking about the images of the girl running from Napalm. in Vietnam. And I didn't even live through that period, right? It's something that I experienced in a history book. Now, today, what we have is that we have one, anytime one of these events happen,

we have hundreds of cell phone videos from different angles covering it all at the same time. And people witness these events in real time through those images, but there is not one singular image that comes out of any of this, right? There's not one thing that everybody shares because everybody has seen so many angles of it. They've seen so many interpretations of it.

And then when they go on social media, they find people who are influencers or people who are commentators just talking about it. And then they see the image again with the commentary attached with the person's face in the corner, right? And so, like, they're getting seven or eight different versions of this within hours of the event happening. And I think that that is probably going to have a bit of a chaotic effect in the way that we remember history. Because, A, just because it's harder to grasp around a singular image. And B, I also think that there's a sameness to all this footage at some point, and everything will start to look the same. Now, it's horrible to say, but, like, when there is a shooting and there's video of people running out of the shooting and, you know, somebody has decided to hold their phone and video record it and they're just running and everything's shaking and people are screaming, like those scenes start to look the same after a while. And so, I don't know. I am not sure if it's going to mean that that we have more.

more choices and that one will emerge in the way that, I guess, one image emerged from the Trump assassination attempt, right? Like, there is one image there. Or does it mean that all these things will become more fluid and mush together and that, like, we won't remember them as clearly because we won't have the singular image from it? I mean, what do we do about this? We heard from some of those young people who were talking about how there's no real easy way to fix this. That if we don't know the implications of this, and to your point, we don't know whether this is going to make young people more desensitized over time to violence or perhaps more politically engaged because they see the impacts of violence.

But there are concerns about, and you talk to, you know, common sense media, media matters, about age verification for social media platforms, for example, which is something that the platforms say no to. But how do you go about addressing this? If we understand that this is an issue, that kids are seeing extraordinary amounts of violence on their phones, perhaps when they don't even want to see it, what are do about that? I think that some people's solution would be to put a verification on social media, right, to make sure that you have to show an ID that proves that you're over 16 or 18 to get

on a social media platform. I don't think that will work, especially here in the United States, because there are a lot of free speech concerns that get drawn up around that, right? Because it's like if you believe that social media is the public sphere and the public square where people are engaging in the most speech acts and you require an ID to do that, then that cuts off a large percentage of people, not the majority of people, but some significant portion of the country from participating in the public square, which is a First Amendment concern. And I know that the ACLU and EFF both are concerned about that, right? The sort of civil liberties online expression groups. And that makes it hard. I don't think it would survive

of a Supreme Court challenge in that way. Maybe it would, but you never know with the court, but I think that there would be a lot of concerns about that. Also, I think functionally it would be so hard to implement that it would effectively be pointless anyway. I don't think we're going to be able to stop our kids from seeing these images. I don't think we're going to be able to stop our kids

from seeing the types of, not just political violence, but like, you know, faces of death type of just gore that people post online because I see it myself, and I try and not see it, but it just keeps popping up and feeds over and over again, because once you see one, then the algorithms decide that that's what you like to see, and then they just feed you more and more of it, and stuff gets high engagement, which incentivize it, so I don't know, I guess some person who posts it can make a small amount of money. I don't think we can stop that, and so really there's a question of how do you organize

society, how do you organize parenting, how do you organize school, around this inevitability. And I think that things that we can do is we can do stuff like ban phones from school, which, you know, also has some First Amendment questions, but I also think is kind of necessary, especially here in the States where it's just teachers spend all their time trying to take phones out of kids' hands. As a former teacher myself, like, it just makes me mad to think about, I guess, you know, this teacher has come in, they have a job, they're supposed to educate your children,

children just sit on their phones the whole time, the teacher spends all their time, taking phones out of kids' hands. That way, the type of scene that happened from where a child is just watching it over the shoulder or the person next to them, that doesn't happen, at least in school. But I think that we're just going to have to, you know, all of that is just going to be a small solution and probably an effective solution that can protect some people who will not protect everybody. And so we just have to think about what is going to happen going forward.

and start to answer questions like, okay, well, you know, like what's the political effect of all this? I think from Gaza, for example, that we've started to see the political effect, which is that if you look at polling of young people here in the States, their opinions about the war are heavily, heavily in favor of stopping the conflict, right? They're heavily in favor of ending U.S. military aid to Israel, And I think that that is a product of seeing these images that I'm sure that all of us have seen from Gaza over and over and over again in their feeds. And so there are already effects that are happening from all this politically. And so I think it is just a question of, well, how do you build a society where the young people are seeing everything? And they're seeing, you know, you saw the effect of it also during summer of 2020 when everyone watched George Floyd.

die that had a profound political effect amongst young people they all saw it same way so um yeah i think that it's just a question of how do you organize a society where children will be inevitably be more political than they were in the past do you worry about what your kids are going to see or what they're already seeing oh for sure i mean um we are not i we are not the most uh we're not the best household i will say about regulating our kids i've had use and they're many many any households I know that do much better than we do. And it is connected to the internet. They're very loose parental controls.

And my eight-year-old daughter, probably go see whatever she wants on the internet. And I guess that one of the things that I was thinking about in terms of writing this piece, which is that, you know, in some ways I think that young people should see these images. I think that they should understand what the world is, right? They should, and one of the things that I was struck by

by some of the young people that are interviewed and by your producer was that they seem to be thinking about that too, right? They seem to be thinking about, well, this is kind of how the world is, right? It's like maybe it's good to see it. And I share in their belief of that. Now, obviously, I think there's an age range, right,

where it's inappropriate. I don't think an eight-year-old should be watching Charlie Kirk getting shot. At the same time, there's a nimbia aspect to it too, if I'm being totally honest. And I was just like, well, I don't want my kid to see it, right? And I think that's the conflict. That was the conflict that sort of inspired me to write this piece.

I love the piece because it asks some really big questions, and it's hard to kind of land on the answers to those questions. Jay, thank you very much for this. Thank you. Jay Kang, as a staff writer at The New Yorker, he wrote an article, what the video of Charlie Kirk's murder might do. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway.

Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.