The pandemic of popular horrific content

In today’s age where almost everyone has access to the internet, we often hear about how there is explicit content circulating among social media apps and we tend to shy away from it. Although the problem seems small, we might have to start thinking about how such disturbing videos/photos may effect the minds of those who are regularly exposed to media of such gut-wrenching nature.

A study was conducted in 2016 by the Namibian University of Science and Technology (NUST) which looked into Namibian children’s use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) between the ages of 13 and 17 and online safety risks. It was found out that over 60% of the children have seen sexually explicit content that they did not wish to see and over 20% of the children have seen videos which contained child abuse. And within the same group of children, over 60% of children have seen violent/graphic content. The research was conducted under the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare and the Ministry of Education, Sport, and Youth. The first part of the research included a survey in which 735 children participated.

And ever since COVID-19 has taken over, this numbers may have had a huge increase due to lockdown.

It is worth considering that not every child has a strong mind which isn’t really effected by these things. Disturbing/graphic content can range from something as small as a person cursing for fun, to something as twisted as a video of a live person being murdered. In fact, there are other studies which found out that there are fully grown adults who have worked in companies such as Google and Microsoft that claimed to have develop Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from working as the content moderators.

Content of extreme nature has a number of devastating effects on the brain of children such as a desensitisation to violence and may even cause a child to feel motivated to inflict harm onto others should they find it entertaining (whether it be physical or emotional), it is a matter worth talking about and finding solutions to.

At the end of the day, the only perplexing question is “How do we reduce the exposure of extreme content to the kids when there is mature content practically everywhere?”