Nor has she viewed the gunmanвЂ™s footage from Christchurch, or read the 74-page manifesto that has been linked to him. Silver, for her part, has not watched the videos. Such elaborate planning isnвЂ™t required in the modern age, when social media has made every act potentially public. Terrorists have long understood their own psychological effect, staging public executions to instill fear. When we subject ourselves to images, sounds and videos created and distributed by terrorists, said Silver, who is the paperвЂ™s senior author, вЂњWeвЂ™re doing terroristsвЂ™ job for them.вЂќ The content has its desired effect, the paper concludes, increasing distress and fear of future negative events. Most likely to engage with graphic content, Silver has found, are those who are already afraid of what they think they might encounter. Yet, contrary to the widespread belief that young people are more prone to perusing the dark corners of the Internet, Silver noted, the tendency to watch the videos actually increased with age. Prior mental health conditions were not significant factors, but a lifetime exposure to violence was.ДЄge mattered only slightly. So, too, was fear of future terrorism associated with greater likelihood of watching.

Those who reported watching television more often were also more likely to view the videos.

Survey participants were more likely to say they had watched the beheading videos if they also said they were male, Christian or unemployed. residents that began in 2013 and lasted for three years, Silver and her colleagues at UCI found that 20 percent had watched at least part of a beheading video, while 5 percent said they had watched an entire one. But the paper is the first to quantify how many people actually watched this graphic content, who these people were and what their motivations were for doing so. They shocked the world, enlisting modern methods to achieve barbaric ends. The videos, each several minutes in length, appeared on the Internet about three weeks apart in 2014. The study, вЂњWho Watches an ISIS Beheading вЂ“ and Why,вЂќ examines engagement with videos depicting the decapitation of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Her results, published late last month, hold clues about what sort of people are drawn to these images of destruction, as well as the psychological toll the gruesome material may take. The grisly events in New Zealand, which reignited debate about the ethics of viewing terrorist propaganda and the responsibilities of technology companies to curtail its circulation, occurred soon after SilverвЂ™s newest paper appeared in the American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association. Who watches ISIS beheading videos in the U.S.? Men, Christians and the fearful, study says Close Menu

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