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CW: Death, Racism, Transphobia

Despite its name, people on r/watchpeopledie do not simply die: they are crushed, maimed, beheaded, mauled, burnt alive, run over. Though the Reddit forum was banned back in 2019 after a user disseminated links to the Christchurch mosque shootings, today, a copycat website lives on. Nearly three million registered users peruse a catalog list of deaths—a suicide bombing committed by a Balochistan Liberation Army militant, an elderly man run over by a bus, a man stung to death by bees.

What draws people to violent death? Perhaps it is some combination of human nature and morbid curiosity. After all, death as a spectacle has long since tarnished history, through gladiatorial fights, public executions during the French Revolution, or lynchings in the American South. All these examples share something in common, though: dehumanization. The dead are not people, but pit fighters, royalty, Negroes. It follows that society and the spectacle of death are intertwined. Some cheer on the death penalty against particularly egregious offenders. Most of us have probably seen the vigilante gun down his enemies on the movie screen and have probably enjoyed it as well. It doesn’t even have to be death nor malicious—Muhammad Ali knocks down an opponent, and the crowd goes wild. There are rules about violence and death both written and unspoken but the principle remains the same. These are not people you talk with, and they’re certainly not your friends. These are entertainers.

The internet has only made death more accessible, and the safety of online anonymity has empowered those seeking death as well. Like the above examples, the internet erases the human; deaths are reduced to pixels that were once in the shape of a person, then reduced to spikes of dopamine and, ultimately, statistics. The subject of the online death video becomes both a stranger and entertainer—from both the literal, spatial and temporal distance between the dead and the living, as well as the psychic distance between the viewer and consumer, an automatic dehumanization takes root. Like in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the observer becomes a voyeur, witnessing the deadly spectacle at his or her leisure.

But our consciences are our killers too. The once-human (or the number in the shape of the human) persists in the conscience of the viewer of violent death with the same or relative brute force with which he or she was killed—the worse things we see, the worse we feel. Subsequently, arguments in defense of such websites are insincere at best and malicious at worst. Some argue that r/watchpeopledie is meant to be educational, to remind us of the ever-presence of death and the need for safety. Others argue that violence is made light of on popular TV, and that such a subreddit serves as a reminder of the grave realities of death. All of these deflections feel, and are, hollow. Comment sections, though occasionally sympathetic, also openly deride the dead—in a video of the execution of a female transgender prostitute, multiple comments deliberately mock and misgender the woman postmortem. Other comments mock overseas conflicts, such as the Russo-Ukrainian war or Israel’s occupation of Gaza, which are referred to as “Slavshit” and “Sandshit” respectively. The mere existence of comments, which allow users to cast partisan judgement, disqualifies any argument in favor of WatchPeopleDie’s supposed “non-partisan educational benefit.” For some, their views of the world have warped such that they see no wrong in the violent deaths of innocents who have probably led lives not so different from them. For others, and what I figure is the majority, they swallow their consciences and keep on watching—just another screen among three million.

Violence is a social thing. For an action to be considered violent, it needs a victim or a group of victims. The interpersonal nature of violence demands explanations or understandings that also are interpersonal. When soldiers commit atrocities during times of conflict, we instinctively shy away from the reality that all parties involved are human—in the face of grave injustice the soul flinches. Yet we must accept that, yes, we are capable of violence, and that no, these people are not psychopaths or people unaware of the gravity of their actions. State-led propaganda, for one, has historically served to encourage soldiers in wartime and dehumanize the enemy. The internet also pushes people toward extremism, which might in turn encourage and desensitize viewers to view and enjoy violent content. Websites like WatchPeopleDie regularly glorify violent extremists who are usually white, like Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), violent “incel” Elliot Rodger, white supremacist mass shooter Dylann Roof, and so forth. It follows that the website produces extremists, particularly incels and white supremacists, who are in turn encouraged to not only consume more content, but to commit acts of violence themselves.

The internet and social media’s general framing of societal struggles—such as those for gender equality, racial justice, or sexual acceptance—as zero-sum games where progress for one group is perceived as a loss for another doesn’t help either. This is the crisis we are faced with. Unlike the glamorization of death in Ancient Rome, but more similar to the violent revolutions against royalty in France and the reactionary backlash to the liberation of slaves in the American South, violence and its consumption are being posed as inevitable, if not necessary, reactions to perceived threats and losses. Combined with morbid curiosity, violence starts to make sense, and eventually, might seem more reasonable than allowing continual perceived losses to pile up—as Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver might put it, “Here is a man who would not take it anymore.”

What is to be done? On a policy level, it’s difficult to police violent content in all of its forms. Strike down the hydra’s head of WatchPeopleDie and two more copycat websites will spring forth. And what constitutes violent content? What differentiates, say, vital journalism on the battleground from a war snuff video? At what point does the censorship of violent content veer into violations of free expression and the right to its consumption? Still, banning these websites seems necessary. The existence of platforms like WatchPeopleDie is not a question of free expression but of political harm: by normalizing dehumanization and glorifying extremist violence, such sites corrode democratic values and make dangerous ideologies more palatable. In addition, such sites promote and profit off of what is essentially democratized propaganda—extremist groups can post and exploit online death content to turn human suffering into a recruitment tool, all while turning a profit from web traffic. This subsequent privatization of morality turns over consciences to a market incentive while exploiting the lives of the innocent. In a nationalistic sense, such websites are both a threat to our nation’s security, and endanger both the livelihoods of our citizens as well as trust in our country’s institutions.

But let’s talk human to human. This is immoral—it erodes our capacity for compassion, for empathy, for seeing another and understanding that, above all else, they deserve dignity, the right to happiness, the ability to find love, all things that are ultimately cut tragically short with death. Treating websites like this as a source of free expression or a natural consequence of society is not unlike treating bigotry as an opinion, or a cancerous tumor a genetic inevitability—bigotry and hatred must be dealt with, the tumor excised. Of course, we will still see violence motivated by hate, and the blunt truth is that the sort of violence we consume on screens, even purely accidental, is just a snapshot of the real lives of people across the world. But we must not accept a world that thrives on cruelty. We must not watch people die.