And no this is not some political rant just for the sake of having my say. This is genuine concern for where we’re headed (or, may have already arrived.)

In the last four months, the internet has witnessed three people killed in public. Charlie Kirk, shot at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. Renée Good, fatally shot by ICE on January 7, 2026. Alex Pretti, again, by ICE, just three days ago.

Their deaths share something beyond the violence that took their lives. They share a second death, a digital dismemberment that strips them of humanity and transforms tragedy into content. Actual content.

Except, it appears as the kind of stuff you scroll past on your lunch break between a recipe video and someone's vacation photos.

I don't know when we collectively decided this was okay.

When we agreed that if someone dies, their death is just... available. For us to screenshot, remix, share, turn into a TikTok sound, slap their face onto whatever format is trending that week. But we did. And I’m scared it's breaking something in us that we might not be able to fix.

This is the meme economy of violence. It's a parasitic system where human suffering becomes currency, where viral potential supersedes moral weight, and where our collective capacity for genuine grief is slowly eroding beneath an avalanche of shares, likes, and algorithmically optimised outrage.

They're engagement machines, architecturally designed to amplify whatever provokes the strongest emotional response. And nothing gets quite a response like violence does.

Someone dies publicly, especially in politically charged circumstances, and boom. The content machine kicks into gear. Graphic footage appears, shock ripples through the network, users share to express horror or solidarity. Then algorithms detect engagement and push the content wider. News outlets pick up the viral story, memes begin to emerge, politicians frame the narrative, and the cycle accelerates.

Repurposed. Remixed. Turned into political arguments, into jokes, into shareable content that gets passed around like it's not someone's actual death.

What really gets me is how inevitable this feels now. Like we've built a system where tragedy has to be commodified to even be acknowledged. Where documentation is the same thing as exploitation because there's no space between the two anymore.

I've been thinking about what this does to us. Like, psychologically. What happens when you see violence packaged as content over and over and over again?

Repeated exposure to graphic content rewires our emotional processing. Psychologists have documented what they call compassion fatigue, a gradual numbing that occurs when we are perpetually confronted with suffering we cannot alleviate. But the meme economy creates something more corrosive than simple numbness.

Another thing in the feed between the dog video and the celebrity gossip.

We scroll past someone's death the same way we scroll past everything else. Three seconds of attention, maybe less, then swipe. Next post. Next tragedy. Next dopamine hit.

Even when people share this stuff with good intentions, to raise awareness, to demand justice, to honour the victim… it still feeds the same machine. The algorithm doesn't care why you're outraged. It just cares that you are.

Within hours of his death, images of Kirk were being superimposed onto memes. His face was edited into jokes. Songs were created mocking the circumstances of his killing. People who would never celebrate violence in person found themselves participating in what can only be described as digital desecration.

This wasn't isolated cruelty from internet trolls. It was widespread participation from ordinary people who had convinced themselves that because Kirk held certain political positions, his death was fair game for mockery. The logic was simple and chilling: he was a political opponent, therefore his humanity was forfeit.

The right, which expressed outrage at the treatment of Kirk's death, has adopted identical tactics. The hypocrisy is matched only by the horror.

What does it mean that we have normalised the memefication of murder? That we have accepted, as unremarkable, the transformation of real people's final moments into comedy material? That political affiliation now determines whether someone deserves basic dignity in death?

This isn't about free speech or dark humour.

This is about the systematic erosion of the boundary between person and symbol, between tragedy and entertainment, between death and content. Nobody, nobody, deserves to have their death reduced to a punchline, regardless of their politics, their actions, their beliefs.

On one hand, we need documentation of violence for accountability. Yet that same documentation feeds the desensitisation machine.

Cell phone footage of police violence has been crucial for exposing systemic abuse and demanding justice. Without viral documentation, many incidents would disappear into official denials.

The visual record has power that written accounts lack. It forces confrontation with reality that would otherwise be dismissed. But this necessary documentation comes at a cost. Every view is another moment of violence consumed. Every share spreads the trauma further. The victim's family must endure watching their loved one die repeatedly, infinitely, across millions of screens.

This “content” is then the ammunition for both sides of our fractured political landscape, who have learned to swoop in and claim the narrative the second something bad happens. The deaths themselves become secondary to the symbolic value they provide for predetermined narratives.

That we have created a media environment where tragedy can no longer exist without being commodified. Where death cannot simply be death. It must be content, narrative, political capital, engagement.

What happens to our moral capacity when we systematically train ourselves to encounter violence through the mechanisms of entertainment? What happens when the first question upon hearing of a tragedy is not "How can I help?" but "Which side does this support?" When our initial impulse is not grief but the urge to refresh our feed for more information to consume?

Not because it is uniquely evil, but because it makes evil feel ordinary. It normalises desensitisation. It rewards exploitation. It transforms our worst impulses into algorithmic incentives.

But we are not passive victims of this system.

Every time we choose not to share graphic content, every time we refuse to participate in mockery of the dead, every time we prioritise human dignity over political point-scoring, we chip away at the machine's power.

And our humanity just might depend on exactly that. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer