Are Meme Pages Becoming Too Graphic?

An overview of "Instagram users are being served gory videos of killing and torture" by Taylor Lorenz on The Washington Post.

With the development of the popular social media app TikTok, other apps and features of existing ones have emerged to mirror it, including Instagram Reels. Instagram Reels allows Instagram users to scroll through endless videos, similar to TikTok, and watch videos catered to them. However, this is not always the case, and many have reported encountering extremely violent videos, with one user describing “gory stuff, torture videos, stuff you just don’t want to see.” With this phenomenon, the role of large tech companies such as Meta in content censorship and user safety is called into question.

The growing capitalistic environment on social media apps plays a huge part in this as likes and views have become to be a source of revenue for users. Meme pages, the majority run by teenagers aged 13-17, were once seen as harmless fun; now, they have transcended into pages to make a profit, generating views in any way possible. Thus, the emergence of gore videos has become increasingly prevalent, whether they are a part of one’s algorithm or not. However, it is not purely random postings of gore videos by individual creators, as “the administrators for large meme accounts traded explicit material and coordinated with advertisers seeking to run ads on the pages posting graphic content”. Creators are collaborating with other accounts and advertisers to distribute the content everywhere, gaining hundreds of thousands of views at a time. An influencer marketing consultant described that “‘these agencies are buying so many meme account promos they’re not doing due diligence on all the accounts.’”

No matter how much people are liking or hating the content, views are still being generated nonetheless. Meta has issued statements of effort on the app’s backend and “has rolled out a suite of controls and safety features for sensitive content”, but user mindsets are still being ultimately affected. With the app being created for the sole purpose of information dispersion, there is no question that this phenomenon is global, affecting the minds of users - mainly teens - everywhere. A professor from UCLA puts this into perspective, describing that “it seems like we’re raising a generation of adolescent grifters who will grow up having a totally skewed relationship of how to be ethical and make a living at the same time”. As meme accounts and the existence of violent videos are not going away anytime soon, responsibility must then go to large companies allowing the profiteering of these obscene videos to occur. Will stricter content controls be enough or are the minds of our youth already corrupted?

Cover image by Kasia Bajanowska on Dribbble.