Haley Willis, a relatively new member of the Visual Investigations Team at the New York Times, was charged with reviewing all of the available videos of George Floyd’s murder to see if the team could tell a fuller story than what the public already knew of what had happened in Floyd’s final minutes. She watched footage from security cameras, time stamped incorrectly; a shaky video taken by a bystander who was told to step away; and the now-infamous video of the moments before, during, and after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers, captured by teenager Darnela Frazier.
Although just twenty-two years old at the time, Willis was already a seasoned viewer of often horrific videos. Years before, she had joined the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab as a nineteen-year-old Sociology and Media Studies major from outside of Austin, Texas. During her three years in the Lab, which we had co-founded on the UC Berkeley campus in 2016, she was at the vanguard of a burgeoning field of online open-source investigations, which use social media and other information on the Internet to investigate human rights violations and international crimes. Faculty, staff, and more experienced students in the Human Rights Center’s Lab trained incoming students to conduct this work for organizations doing research, journalism, and law. A leader on the team, Willis, often analyzed videos for Amnesty International and the Syrian Archive. She had pored over distressing footage of police beating protesters and blasting communities with tear gas, brutal detentions, and murders perpetrated in broad daylight—events that spanned the globe from Mozambique to Myanmar.
Now she was taking in every detail of a man’s last minutes in Minneapolis: the eerie quiet of this violence, punctuated by the intermittent and increasingly panicked cries of bystanders, which would erupt in nationwide fury over ongoing racial violence and prejudicial police treatment. “My colleague Christiaan and I viewed it multiple times—maybe a dozen times—just to count how many times George Floyd says, ‘I can’t breathe,’” said Willis, explaining a step in the painstaking process she used to analyze the videos of his death.
Floyd cried out, Willis and Triebert found, at least 16 sixteen times in less than five minutes before falling silent. The amateur video captured Floyd’s eyes closing, a male bystander shouting, “Bro, he’s not fucking moving,” and Chauvin shoving his knee deeper into Floyd’s neck.
“When the officer says he can’t find a pulse, it’s like a stab to the heart. They knew they were killing somebody,” said Willis, her voice rising as she scrolled through the images again in her mind.
The resulting New York Times video—”8 Minutes and 46 Seconds: How George Floyd was Killed in Police Custody”—along with the underlying videos filmed and uploaded by people who were present, was viewed by 87 percent of Black Americans and 79 percent of all people in the United States, according to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll. With screen time up nationwide due to COVID quarantining and nearly doubling among adolescents, as reported by a Los Angeles copyright monitoring firm, a captive global audience would view George Floyd’s murder and related Black Lives Matter videos an estimated 1.4 billion times in the 10 ten days after his killing.
George Floyd’s murder—mostly recorded by ordinary citizens and posted online as user-generated content—was far from the first horrific, graphic incident to be captured on camera and shared for public viewing via mainstream media, however. There was, for example, the image of Emmett Till’s mutilated and bloated body in his casket: “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby,” said Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, about her son who was beaten, shot, and drowned in the Mississippi Delta in 1955; the shooting of President John F. Kennedy, taken by amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder, with the president’s head blown open beside his wife in a motorcade convertible in 1963; footage of Rodney King being pulled from a car to be beaten and kicked by Los Angeles police officers, recorded by George Holliday on a Sony Handycam video camera in 1991; and videos of children unable to breathe after a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, captured and uploaded by aid workers in 2018.
None of us are strangers to this content. In today’s information age, we can watch graphic events daily, like the livestream of a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, or a video of a Burmese soldier shooting a man in broad daylight. We can watch live pornography, even of children, even if illegal. And it’s not just overt human-on-human violence: We might stumble upon the video of a Florida apartment complex swallowing up 98 ninety-eight people in a matter of seconds; stampeding fires, tsunamis, and earthquakes—all images that can be as disturbing as any captured in a war zone. What was once a rare glimpse into the world’s horrors—if you weren’t living one of them yourself— is now commonplace on our handheld screens.
Since the dawn of Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, the iPhone in 2007, and the global proliferation of smartphones and social media platforms that followed, the creation and spread of what’s called user-generated content or open- source information has skyrocketed, for good and bad. Videos of mass killings and other horrific events now come to us, sometimes in real time, via live streaming and other digital processes that are vivid and immediate, dissipating the difference between witnessing such horrible events in person and witnessing them on a screen.
This open-source content is intimate by nature: a video shot in the midst of a human rights violation may not only show us blood and death but may expose us to expressions of a person’s terror in the moment, their breathy commentary, and anguished cries. Some of these raw videos can bring us into the experience in a direct and painful way—more so than an edited and packaged newscast. We are put in the shoes of an often-relatable viewer who is recording the violence in real-time, while expressing fear or grief or anger. This content is often shared not only for the narrative it advances (as with professional footage) but also for shock value in order to inspire action (i.e., clicks) and thus may be especially provocative or graphic, unlike the carefully curated images of the past. When atrocities are witnessed by dozens or even hundreds of people, the quantity of videos and photos generated by bystanders can be far greater than the lone professional photo that accompanies a news story.
And more change is coming: Even as we chronicle this moment in our information environment, artificial intelligence is further shifting the sands, creating new relationships between us and our exposure to online depictions of violence—both by enabling new ways to create images of violence and affecting how and when we’re exposed to it.
What effect does the proliferation of online graphic content have on us individually and as a society? How does our identity—racially or as survivors of violence, for example—impact how this material affects us? Should we develop strategies for taking in this traumatic material or is it better to look away? When should we prioritize one strategy over the other? When do graphic accounts of assaults, such as that on George Floyd, serve as catalysts to protest injustice? When does the volume of violence and trauma become so overwhelming that it dampens our ability to feel the world’s pain and hinder our ability to act?