But I agree fullheartedly. Seeing such things really made me 'feel' how precious life is and how terrible the world can be. It helped me navigate moving to Europe a few times, even.
Or shutting down subs that might make the site advertiser unfriendly.
My work is entirely grant funded and to my knowledge, none of it comes from the government— at least not directly. I'm positive that some of those private non-profits receive government assistance to some extent for operating expenses and whatnot, but the funds themselves are not tax-sourced.
Beyond that, governments fund libraries and archives at every level and they deliberately have all sorts of collections, from completely benign to completely odious. Funding a deliberately sensationalist aggregator and monger of violence would be plainly obnoxious, but appropriately managed archives are in the public's best interest. Probably even more so for controversial content. I'm not sure how this would be any different.
The latter made me really wonder if those commenters had ever experienced loss or hardship in their lives.
As terrible as folks are who would laugh at someone getting sucked into an industrial grinder, they’d be untroubled by anxiety or worry and associated mental issues in a Mad Max type post apocalyptic wasteland and hence more able to survive.
At least that’s what I tell myself to help sleep at night.
Nowadays I always pay particular attention when I see a video with someone wearing flipflops if it's real life camera footage. I'm always "waiting for the other shoe to drop," so-to-speak.
While incredibly violent things do happen in the world regularly— and we should not be ignoring them— the world is safer than it has ever been, and that should also be front-and-center in people's minds when considering this. People predominantly concerned with the scariness and violence in the world will be more likely to promote overly violent responses to relatively innocuous situations through war, policy, policing, etc.
I wish there was a publicly accessible, nonprofit archive a la Wikileaks that focused on similar content including oversight for things like privacy issues. It would be nice to see citizen pundits paying attention to it for issues that matter to them and putting things in context as they're shared instead just blasting streams of violence at people.
But wish in one hand and successfully monetize in the other and see which one fills up first...