Stop Spreading News About Terror Attacks
It’s absolutely tragic when people lose their lives in terror attacks. A world where anyone dies due to such attacks is an unjust world. But we all have a choice to make in how we respond to such vile acts.
The goal of these attacks isn’t just to extract the largest death toll possible, but just as much to sow fear and terror in the broader society — hence the name “terror attacks.”
Sharing pictures and videos and even news articles about terror attacks helps to spread this fear and rarely offers any actionable insight.
It’s not surprising, then, that research shows that more media coverage of terror attacks leads to more attacks in the future. Quoting the study: “more media attention predicts future attacks, everything else equal.” Terror groups partly judge the success of their attacks by how much attention the attack gets. A more successful attack is one that creates more fear, and more successful attacks lead to more attacks in the future.
There are real, serious mortal dangers in the world that we should all be concerned about — air pollution, unsafe water, malnutrition, preventable cancer, the effects of climate change, too much sugar in children’s & adult’s diets. Deaths from these causes are just as tragic, yet we don’t hear about them to the same extent.
These risks are under-covered, while terror attacks are over-covered. Nemil Dalal laid out the facts in an excellent article on how the media fuels fear of terrorism. He found that “terrorism deaths are the single most heavily covered type of death per capita in the first pages of the New York Times.”
To put things in perspective, in the UK there have been 3.8 deaths per year due to terrorism over the last 10 years. Compare that to outdoor air pollution, which a report by the Royal College of Physicians found led to 40,000 deaths per year.
Outdoor air pollution: 40,000 deaths. Terrorism: 3.8 deaths. But which gets more front page coverage?
For a U.S. focused example, over the last 10 years terrorist violence has taken 13 lives a year. Smoking is responsible for 480,000 deaths a year, or about 1,300 deaths every day. Secondhand smoke exposure alone kills 41,000 every year.
If you want to move the world forward and make it a safer place for all of us, share articles on one of these real dangers and how we can avoid them. Instead of using Facebook’s “mark yourself safe” feature, which gives more awareness to a terrorist attack, share an unrelated life update so friends know you’re safe. Or share an article about how to combat air pollution. In that social media moment it feels like you have to respond to the news of the attack, but you don’t.
Don’t reward the media over-coverage of terrorist attacks with more shares and more clicks. By doing so we help sow the very fear terrorist groups desire.
