Last week, I logged onto Facebook after a summer of neglect. I was greeted with a familiar but troubling sight: Someone had posted an article about a scorned boyfriend throwing acid in his girlfriend’s face. While that was the first I had heard of that particular story, I have seen similar stories posted on Facebook many times before. The Texas mother who drowned her children in a pool; the Massachusetts teacher who was murdered by a student; the Tennessee couple who were raped and beaten; all were equally tragic stories that had found their way into my life because of a shared Facebook post.
Let me be clear: I am not particularly sensitive to the news. I realize the media, like any other industry, caters to the tastes of its consumers. The phrase, "If it bleeds, it leads," exists for a reason. For whatever reason, the American public is fascinated by the often fatal misfortunes of people they don’t know. This means that there is ample news coverage of shocking tragedies like those listed above. What I find disturbing isn’t that these stories exist in the first place, but the fact that so many people feel the need to share them on Facebook.
Ostensibly, those who post them do so to express genuine outrage or sympathy. They caption their posts with things like, "This is disgusting," "People are evil," or some other expression of moral indignation. In reality, however, they are doing little more than helping to reduce the very real lives of very real people to something for us to gasp and gawk at.
This is not to say that these tragedy-posters are bad or insensitive. It is only human to revel in the terrible fates that befall those we don’t know. Like staring at the aftermath of a car accident, we are so consumed by the horror of what we are witnessing that we shamelessly rubberneck the misfortune of others. In doing so, we forget the people involved had families and friends, and we deny them the dignity and respect they deserve.
There are times when posting a tragic news story is appropriate. The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner were symptoms of a greater social problem in American life; therefore, posting their stories served to bring attention to a pervasive problem that has yet to be solved. The Sandy Hook Elementary School killings were part of a greater gun violence epidemic in the U.S.; therefore, posts about it were often used to support or oppose gun rights. These are both examples of a meaningful use of tragedy posts. They were used to voice opinions regarding issues within the nation as a whole. However, in most cases there is no purpose behind posting tragic stories other than to ogle at how awful they are.
This is why I urge you to think twice before you post a tragic story. Even if the feelings you wish to express about the story are real, the result is that those reading your post have a brief, "How horrible!" moment before they text their friends about the crazy thing they read on the Internet and move on to a funny cat video. While it’s true that the website or newspaper which published the story initially has already turned the tragedy into a spectacle, you don’t have to help.
Namwan Leavell is a UF economics senior. Her column appears on Fridays.
