Trigger warning: This article contains descriptions of violence.
The Meta-owned app Instagram is a place to discover a friend’s new pet, learn who got married from high school and share the latest culinary creations. Yet, creeping beneath the facade of light-hearted dog videos and baking accounts, there lies an insidious underbelly of meme pages that post sensationalized, graphic violence to amass views and monetize them. Contributing to the already negative effect of internet gore, many of these viewers are minors.
Casual violence on the internet is not confined to the pixels of a phone screen. Its apathetic impact permeates into the psyche of a new generation, communal perception of human suffering and frequency of tangible violent acts. This is not to be taken lightly and must be addressed.
In lieu of unrestricted media access, parents must monitor their children’s online activity and media sites must double down on censorship for the protection of minors.
According to a recent survey from marketing form YPulse, 43% of 13 to 17-year-olds follow a meme account. While most Instagram meme pages do not post graphic material, those that do attract soaring engagement numbers and a reliable base of followers, including children.
However, children are not the only viewers. Bored teens have turned to the lucrative business of horrific meme pages for social and financial gain. Children as young as 13 are posting reels of pigs being fed through meat grinders, people getting run over by trains, teenagers being burned to death and horses being dismembered.
Minors are feeding into graphic violence, shaping a substantial subset of Generation Alpha and Generation Z that make a mockery out of human suffering and death. When parents are complicit in their children’s consumption of casual violence online, they conveniently turn a blind eye to the flashing warning signs that a threat to society might be living downstairs. The digital footprint of many teen school shooters could have been tracked, alerted and used to get the perpetrator mental health support before pulling the trigger.
Users who are negatively shocked by a video on Instagram spend 8% to 10% more screen time on the post, increasing engagement. This engagement, negative or not, turns into money. Instagram rewards high-performing pages with monthly bonuses. Advertisers post “buying ads from gore pages only” to leech onto the dependable money pot of online violence.
Young teens see the monetary benefits of graphic content, desensitize their developing brains to the brutality and post stabbings on their phones after soccer practice.
While the far corners of the dark web have always been an echo chamber for hyper-masculine militarism and gun fetishization, Instagram has not always been a home for celebrated violence.
During the summer of 2020, Instagram’s political landscape was starkly different to the accepted violence of 2024. The Black Lives Matter movement was at the forefront of political consciousness. Instagram was flooded with infographics, activism and allyship declarations. Videos of police brutality were shared with the intention of advocacy, not mockery. There were plenty of users with honest intentions to distribute and consume educational information about police brutality in the United States. However, the pendulum has swung in a fateful four years, grossly revealing that some who politically policed social media in 2020 were merely satisfying a twisted need to appear woke.
In 2024, the word woke is weaponized to belittle people for not conforming to an apathetic, macho-masculine line of thinking. To raise ethical concerns about sharing a video of someone being run over is, as a comment section would say, being a “weak snowflake.” Those most susceptible to toxic masculinity online are boys between 13 and 17. Middle and high school boys are comfortable and even entertained by human agony and crystal-clear videos of bloodshed.
When children are regularly exposed to violence on media sites, they exhibit stunted empathy for the suffering of others, higher levels of aggression and a greater likelihood to be involved in criminal activity later in life. Even if a child has a solid home life, the cruelty they see when doom scrolling on their phones can alter their psyche.
Fortunately, Meta has taken partial accountability and action for teen corruption on Instagram. With the newly implemented teen account feature, there are now proactive measures to monitor teen usage of the app. These new teen accounts are parentally controlled Instagrams for children under the age of 16. They are set to private by default, have strict messaging settings, sleep modes enabled and most importantly, sensitive content controls.
The catch is, teens can lie about their age. And teens love to lie. New features are being tested to verify age if a user tries to change their birthday from under 18 to over 18 on an existing account, but there’s no restrictive verification process upon initial account creation. The loopholes and deceit that characterize teenage adolescence are certainly not exempt from social media use. Such deception has dire implications, especially when considering school shooter statistics.
A study by Statista found that the average age of K-12 school shooters from 1970 to 2020 was 17 years old. Educators and parents should not give children the benefit of the doubt due to their adolescence. If a child is exhibiting violent fixations, history has taught us time and time again that tangible pain can be inflicted.
While Instagram is earnestly attempting to sensitize teens, the advertising vultures lurking on the app are leeching off of young creators to fund their graphic content. A child’s support system of parents and school administrators need to monitor social media use, encourage emotional intelligence, stay alert for warning signs and not facilitate easy access to assault weapons.
Violent children must be perceived as legitimate threats and not infantilized by their oblivious parents. Human compassion needs to be prioritized over clicks.
Isabella Ehring is an Opinion Intern for the fall 2024 quarter. She can be reached at iehring@uci.edu.
Edited by Zahira Vasquez.