Mixed feelings from me. I remember the Hussein video. I never believed in the vision, but they hosted important events I simply could not see from other sites.
Reddit users rely on it and I knew what I was getting into if I clicked on a LiveLeak link.
Separately, being a content moderator for LL must be absolute hell. While you must filter for illegal things, you're actually expected to watch through the death and gore. That can not be healthy.
I'm not aware of any studies, but there are several articles on the content moderators. Some effects mentioned were:
- people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave
- conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views
- Fired employees regularly threatened to return to work and harm their old colleagues
- they coped with the stress of the job with sex, drugs, and offensive jokes, all in the workplace
- self-harm were also common
- turned people intensely paranoid
There's a lot of first hand accounts of people explaining the logic behind seeking and watching such content. The WatchPeopleDie subreddit had a lot of that and you had many people detailing their experience, but iirc it turned into a neo-nazi hangout before it got banned.
I do wonder/hope if there's a bio-technological way around it, with drugs or application of a magnetic field to the brain, that would interfere with memory making thus mitigating some or all of the effects.
Obviously, it would need to be safe to do. I still shudder inside at one video I saw (on Twitter that took forever to be taken down (>.<)) so I can't imagine what it's like to endure so many.
Reddit users rely on it and I knew what I was getting into if I clicked on a LiveLeak link.
Separately, being a content moderator for LL must be absolute hell. While you must filter for illegal things, you're actually expected to watch through the death and gore. That can not be healthy.