A photo of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by federal officers over the weekend, at the shooting scene on Monday, in Minneapolis.Adam Gray/The Associated Press
Moments after Alex Pretti was killed by U.S. federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning, bystander videos of the fatal shooting quickly spread on social media.
By the afternoon, footage from several angles had gone viral on Reddit, Instagram and TikTok, letting users dissect the sequence of events that led to his killing. Mr. Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse at the local Veteran Affairs hospital, was holding his phone in one hand when federal officers tackled and pinned him to the ground. Seconds later, an agent yelled that Mr. Pretti had a gun. Next, two officers fired at least 10 shots at Mr. Pretti within five seconds.
Two-and-a-half weeks before Mr. Pretti was killed, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a mother of three and a poet, was shot and killed by a federal officer while in her car. That confrontation and the aftermath were filmed and shared on social media too.
Taken by everyday citizens, this raw footage has been essential evidence that contradicts the narrative told by federal officials and the Trump administration, who have falsely characterized Mr. Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” who was out to “massacre law enforcement,” while Ms. Macklin Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
Smartphones have given bystanders the power to document and disseminate troubling scenes: federal agents shoving and pepper-spraying protesters, apprehending an elderly man wearing a robe in freezing temperatures, or chasing a teenager as he yells “I’m legal” in Spanish.
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The videos have sparked outrage and galvanized the American public, prompting continuous protests in Minneapolis, triggering condemnation from Trump allies and even appearing to shift the U.S. President’s handling of his immigration crackdowns.
But scrolling through this type of content in algorithmic-driven media ecosystems can also have grave impacts on our collective psyche. Acts of police brutality appear unexpectedly alongside Get-Ready-With-Me videos or fan edits of Heated Rivalry, producing a whiplash that some experts worry will also have a desensitizing effect.
Before the widespread use of social media, videos of traumatic events were filtered through cable news, newspapers and other forms of traditional media, where journalists would decide what content was too graphic to air or print. When violent content was posted online, such as Islamic State beheading videos, users needed to deliberately seek that material on underground web forums and the darknet.
Now, with the infinite scroll of social platforms, driven by algorithms that award engagement, users no longer need to search for this content. It will likely appear in their feeds. At the same time, content moderation on platforms has been scaled back and hasn’t been able to keep up with the deluge. For example, footage of the Charlie Kirk assassination in September was unavoidable on X even days after the shooting.
“We’ve seen time and again that visual evidence can spark outrage, protests and demands for accountability in ways that written reports often don’t,” says Allissa V. Richardson, an associate journalism professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles who studies the impacts of social media on protest movements. “In that sense, these videos can be catalysts for social change.”
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In the case of Mr. Pretti, the videos provided visual evidence that could be picked apart frame by frame by the general public to hold officials accountable and dispel disinformation. The videos directly contrasted the messaging from Trump officials, including his close advisor Stephen Miller, the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, the on-the-ground border patrol commander behind the immigration raids in Minneapolis. In the days after Mr. Pretti’s death, Mr. Bovino was ordered to leave the city.
While it’s impossible to know the full impact of these videos, in the past, viral footage of police brutality has swayed public opinion. A 2023 Pew survey of Americans found that nearly nine in 10 Americans had personally seen videos of police violence against Black people, with 63 per cent saying the videos made it somewhat easier to hold police offers accountable. The same survey found, however, that 54 per cent said it would make it harder for police officers’ to do their job, with the division falling along racial and political lines.
Research has also shown there is a physical and mental toll to viewing this material.
Alison Holman, a researcher and nursing professor at UC Irvine, has been studying the role of the media in spreading distress after large-scale traumatic events since the Sept. 11 attacks. She’s since studied the aftermath of other events that have gone viral online, such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the Orlando night club shooting.
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“With the advent of social media, we’re seeing a proliferation of access and what’s happening is that people engage with it and become more distressed,” says Dr. Holman. “We’ve seen this in every study we’ve done on a variety of collective traumas.”
Her research has also found that people who engage with more of this kind of media have a greater risk of experiencing early post-traumatic stress symptoms. Repeated exposure to this media, such as scrolling for hours on social media, also increases this likelihood.
There are physical consequences, too. In a study looking at the after-effects of Sept. 11, people whose only exposure to the attacks occurred through the media reported acute stress symptoms with an increased incidence of new onset cardiovascular ailments three years after.
Experts also worry that repeated exposure, especially when viewed on our phones out of context, could desensitize us to violence.
“Trauma is sandwiched between entertainment, which can make suffering feel trivialized or unreal. Over time, this context collapse can dull empathy and distort our emotional response,” says Dr. Richardson.
“It teaches us to consume tragedy the same way we consume content – quickly, passively and without space to fully reckon with its weight.”
