Twitter Criticized for Allowing Texas Shooting Images to Spread

Claire Wardle, the co-founder of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University, said in an interview that tech companies must balance their desire to protect their users with the responsibility to preserve newsworthy or otherwise important images — even those that are uncomfortable to look at. She cited as precedent the decision to publish a Vietnam War image of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, who became known as “Napalm Girl” after a photo of her suffering following a napalm strike circulated around the world.

She added that she favored graphic images of noteworthy events remaining online, with some kind of overlay that requires users to choose to see the content.

“This is news,” she said. “Often, we see this kind of imagery in other countries and nobody bats an eyelid. But then it happens to Americans and people say, ‘Should we be seeing this?’”

For years, social media companies have had to grapple with the proliferation of bloody images and videos following terrible violence. Last year, Facebook was criticized for circulating ads next to a graphic video of a racist shooting rampage in Buffalo, N.Y., that was live-streamed on the video platform Twitch. The Buffalo gunman claimed to have drawn inspiration from a 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left at least 50 people dead and was broadcast live on Facebook. For years, Twitter has taken down versions of the Christchurch video, arguing that the footage glorifies the violent messages the gunman espoused.

Though the graphic images of the Texas mall shooting circulated widely on Twitter, they seemed to be less prominent on other online platforms on Sunday. Keyword searches for the Allen, Texas, shooting on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube yielded mostly news reports and less explicit eyewitness videos.

Sarah T. Roberts, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles who studies content moderation, drew a distinction between editors at traditional media companies and social media platforms, which are not bound by the ethics that traditional journalists adhere to — including minimizing harm to the viewer and the friends and family of the people who were killed.

“I understand where people on social media are coming from who want to circulate these images in the hopes that it will make a change,” Ms. Roberts said. “But unfortunately, social media as a business is not set up to support that. What it’s set up to do is to profit from the circulation of these images.”

Ryan Mac contributed reporting.