When traumatic content needs to be shared

At Eyewitness Media Hub we’ve researched, written and thought a lot about graphic imagery and its use in social media. We’re concerned about the trauma it can cause, about the impact a video or a photograph captured, published and shared in the social media age can have. This has often been about content from conflict, captured by accidental witnesses on their phones and shared widely.

We’ve thought about auto-play, about the responsibilities of the social media networks to control or put a tap on the flow of upsetting images. As my colleague Pete Brown, Eyewitness Media Hub’s research director, entitled his post about the use of Periscope and the Bangkok bombing, “OMG, I can’t ever unsee that”. That’s why we recently started a research study into the impact of looking at this content on people working in newsrooms. These journalists scour the web for content that frequently isn’t published — it’s too disturbing, too traumatic — but they still look at it, acting as gatekeeper to control what the public sees through news outlets (it’s still out there, of course, for the public to find if they want).

But what happens when we share a picture that is truly traumatic — but continues being shared regardless?

I first saw the picture of the boy whose name we later discovered was Aylan Kurdi on the morning of September 2nd. The three-year-old boy was found drowned on a beach in Bodrum by the Turkish gendarme. The boat he was on was attempting to make the short trip to the island of Kos and sank. It wasn’t at first clear that this picture was captured by a reporter — it was taken by Nilufer Demir of Doğan Haber Ajansı. I initially thought it a piece of eyewitness media as it was doing the rounds on Turkish social media with the hashtag in Turkish #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik — “humanity washed to the shore”. My social media feeds reflect the fact that I am based in Istanbul. I frequently see such images my feeds. I carried out some simple verification — it’s not unusual for similar images to be recirculated — and quickly found its provenance.

The picture had an impact on me. For personal reasons, mostly. I had just returned from holiday sailing in the same sea in which Aylan perished. A holiday on which my own swimming-pool-trained son (five-years-old) lost his fear of plunging into the waves. It was my wedding anniversary — we got married in Bodrum.

I didn’t share the pictures myself. It felt like an invasion of privacy to me. For Aylan, yes. For the viewers of my social media feeds too. I moved on with my working day, with picking my child up from school, with celebrating my wedding anniversary.

This morning I awoke to find the image everywhere. Published by newspapers. All across my Facebook and Twitter feeds. The traumatic image that we at Eyewitness Media Hub have frequently counselled against publishing because “I can’t ever unsee that” is being shared globally. The image of little Aylan has had an impact beyond possibly anything we could imagine. It’s the picture that, to steal the words of Barack Obama in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, leads us “to hug our children a little tighter”. Yet, within this there are those who are saying “it’s too traumatic, it shouldn’t be shared”. There are those who have abandoned their social media accounts because of it.

Images are powerful. It’s no remarkable point to say that they influence our beliefs. Our actions. Sometimes it needs a traumatic image to be shared to push the world to action, to push us to action. To change our behaviours, even our beliefs.

Yes, we all have to exercise caution when sharing traumatic content. Individuals do. News organisations do. We also have to understand the responsibility we choose to bear when we decide to share or publish — for a retweet or a share on Facebook is a decision — however quickly we take it. But sometimes, sometimes we have a duty to show the reality of the world to push ourselves to action. There are some images which should lead everyone to say “I can’t ever unsee that”. The image of the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi lying face down on a beach in a Turkish holiday resort is one of those.

Rest in Peace Aylan Kurdi.