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How Harmful Is Social Media?

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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Exposure to Media Violence and Emotional Desensitization

What are the long-term consequences to children and adolescents.

Posted May 6, 2019 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

Are we—especially our children, adolescents, and young adults—becoming desensitized to hatred, intolerance, and violence depicted on social media ? The question posed is rhetorical since my personal and professional assumptions confidently suggest that most would agree that it does, at least to some extent. This is not necessarily surprising or “new news,” but it is disheartening nonetheless and therefore worthy of a healthy dialogue. I have expressed my own thoughts as to why we are witnessing so many mass school shootings and other acts of irreprehensible violence, which I explained in an earlier 2018 publication, " Mass Shooters: A Unique Criminological Explanation. "

However, today's focus is more about raising awareness in the hopes of generating a national dialogue leading to positive change. Nearly every single day, we, as a global society, are exposed to what seems like to a constant barrage of violence, negativity, intolerance, and hatred in one form or another on the major news networks, and especially on social media.

Remember when social media was first introduced to the world? Social media began as a way for all of us to reconnect with old friends, and we looked forward to sharing pictures of our families and friends, our travels, and our personal and professional accomplishments. Good times, for sure. That still occurs, but it seems to be occurring with far less frequency. Social media, especially in recent years, can appear as if it's largely become a central hub for spewing hate, intolerance, and in many cases, depicting "real-life" acts of graphic violence and aggression indicative of a total disregard for human life.

A 2016 New York Times article summed it up best. A killer seeks out a nightclub, a church, an airport, a courthouse, a school, a college campus. The number of possible targeted locations is endless. Someone is shot on video, sometimes by the police, and protesters fill the streets. The accused are immediately deemed guilty by the court of social media even though accurate information is scarce at best. A terrorist attack is carried out in France, America, Turkey, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Tunisia, Nigeria, and then claimed and celebrated by another radical, extremist terror group of domestic or foreign origin. Our phones constantly vibrate with breaking news alerts. The cable news captions read “breaking news” in red as the powerful words scroll across the bottom of our TV screens and rapidly infiltrate social media. In response, rumors and misinformation abound. The comments erupt on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. It is a choreographed pattern that has become commonplace while some of us, but not all, try to discern what is real and what is fake news .

How did we get here and why have we become so vocal in openly sharing our political, social, religious, and personal beliefs without regard for its potential impact on the feelings and emotions of others? What happened to that thing we once called empathy? Why do we judge the actions of a few and project those thoughts on the many? Why do we stereotype an entire group of people based on the actions of a few crazed, rogue, or extremist radicals?

Lately, largely in response to the above, I find myself constantly reminiscing about my own childhood . Of course, there were acts of violence. Of course, there were child abductions, murders, global conflicts, etc., but they did not seem to consume every waking hour of our daily lives. We rode our bikes to visit our friends, we played outside, and we spent hours together in our bedrooms or at a local park listening to music. We took long drives in our cars blasting the music with our windows down, and for the most part, life seemed to be more relaxing, less stressful , and less complicated.

Was life truly better back then or am I simply being naïve and gullible? Maybe I am missing something or for some reason; maybe I blocked out negative experiences from my childhood, but as I remember it, we had some good times.

Last week, I received an email from my children’s high school principal announcing a mandatory ALICE training. ALICE is an acronym for “ Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate, ” in reference to mandatory mass school shooting drills, which occur quite frequently. School shootings do occur and preventative measures to combat a potential incident are absolutely necessary because that is the reality of the world we live in. I am not ignorant of that fact. And yes, I do realize that children who were raised in the early age of nuclear weapons had to participate in “duck and cover” drills; however, my position is that today’s children, adolescents, and young adults are being exposed to too much violence and negativity to the point where another school shooting simply becomes another school shooting without evoking the emotions we would expect in a kid raised in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s.

Tackling this issue would require a multifaceted approach, but what I am most concerned about is how our emotions to acts of violence have become normalized and far from shocking and surreal. What happened to empathy, tolerance, and respecting our differences?

A few weeks ago, one of my young relatives, 17-year-old Jillian, a high school junior from New Jersey, published a poem for her language arts class that was intended to be “reflective” of her hopes and desires of living in a world where happiness , peace, and harmony are abundant. The poem depicts her deep desire in wanting to help others, something that many of us, especially those of us in the so-called “helping professions,” like myself, can easily relate to since it is that very passion that often sets us on the path to our respective careers. She acknowledged that “hoping” without action will not create change in the world, which is something that we can all agree on. We need to stop responding with the all-too-familiar “ prayers and positive thoughts to those impacted ” types of comments to tragedies that have resulted in little to no action, even though our leaders on both sides of the political spectrum have repeatedly “promised” to create change.

Jillian’s words spoke to me and made me think about how it must feel growing up in a world in which you are exposed to endless stories, pictures, and videos depicting violence, intolerance, and hatred towards others who we perceive to be different and therefore, less worthy because they do not share our personal beliefs and values. Jillian granted me permission to repost her poem which she aptly titled, “ I Hope ,” which is an emotional plea for change in the world.

I am just an optimistic girl who hopes, I wonder if I could make a change, I hear about wars in other countries, I see animals that do not have a place to call home, I want to make things better but, I am just an optimistic girl who hopes I pretend everything is okay, I feel sad when I cannot fix problems that hurt others, I touch people’s hurts and try to make them forget, I worry when it does not work, I cry when I cannot help but, I am just an optimistic girl who hopes I understand that the world is not perfect, I say we can change that, I dream, one day we will all be happy, I try to help in any small way I can, I hope we can change the world for good, but I am just an optimistic girl who hopes

The American Academy of Pediatrics and other reputable organizations have consistently found that exposure to violence at high levels and across multiple contexts has been linked with emotional desensitization, indicated by low levels of internalizing symptoms; the long-term consequences of such desensitization are unknown, but I believe that we can surmise where this is going.

For example, last week, I mentioned to my university students that there had been another campus shooting, which occurred in North Carolina, hoping to start a healthy, productive dialogue about such acts of violence, but the news did not seem to spark any interest, which only confirmed my thoughts that we are becoming desensitized and that is troubling. I thought to myself, "Wow, another shooting—and it is not worthy of an intellectual discussion or debate?"

The short-term consequences are readily apparent, at least in my experience as a university professor and father of two teen boys. Depression , anxiety , and other emotional disorders, including suicide , are increasing among adolescents, school lockdowns occur with greater frequency, and the fear of what might happen when we go to church, a restaurant, school, a concert, or any event or venue for that matter can be emotionally destabilizing, leading to a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness that leads us to actively search for all the entry and exit points and remain hypervigilant in the event that something should occur.

We need to delve deeper into the potential ramifications of exposure to too much "real-life" hatred, intolerance, and violence. While there have been numerous studies over the decades focusing on violence on TV, in the movies, and in video games and their potential influence on aggression and violence in children, those are not real-life. I am not discounting that such violence could influence or contribute to real-life violence, but I am most concerned about children and adolescents witnessing horrific incidents in real-time with mostly little to no censorship of the horrific and quite graphic fatalities, severe injuries, or the traumatic reactions to those who witnessed the events firsthand. I am not in favor of censorship because I believe that could it lead down a slippery slope to too much governmental oversight, but on the other hand, I feel strongly that our children are witnessing the worst of what humankind is capable of doing. That should concern all of us.

Dr. Michael Pittaro is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at American Military University and an adjunct professor with several colleges/universities.

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Mediatization, effects of distorted news attention, about the authors.

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Do News Media Kill? How a Biased News Reality can Overshadow Real Societal Risks, The Case of Aviation and Road Traffic Accidents

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Toni G L A van der Meer, Anne C Kroon, Rens Vliegenthart, Do News Media Kill? How a Biased News Reality can Overshadow Real Societal Risks, The Case of Aviation and Road Traffic Accidents, Social Forces , Volume 101, Issue 1, September 2022, Pages 506–530, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab114

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Is irrational risk-avoiding behavior related to news media’s heightened attention for the negative and exceptional? Based on the theoretical approaches of mediatization and cultivation, it is hypothesized how news media can present an overly negative and biased reality that can have a severe impact on society. Focusing on the case of travel accidents, we argue that a disproportional increase in news attention for low-probability high-consequence aviation accidents can distort audiences’ risk perceptions such that driving is inaccurately perceived as a safer transportation alternative to flying, with potentially harmful consequences. This study accordingly documents results from time-series analyses (1996–2017) on US media attention for aviation and road accidents related to real-world data on travel behavior and fatal accidents. The over-time patterns expose how news media follow their own mediatized logic and reality: Negative incidents—i.e., both aviation and road accidents—become more prominent in the news over time, rather than accurately reflecting real-world trends. Next, since air travel is statistically the safest transportation mode, disproportionate attention for aviation accidents is argued to especially create a problematic distorted worldview among audiences. Accordingly, findings show how more media attention for aviation accidents is related to relatively more road traffic and more fatal road accidents in the subsequent months. We conclude that the media’s systematic overrepresentation of rare aviation accidents can overshadow the more substantial risk of (long-distance) driving. This paper illustrates how a distorted media reality can potentially result in severe consequences in light of audiences’ ill-informed fear perceptions and irrational risk-avoiding behavior.

This paper is concerned with people’s irrational fear perceptions in our contemporary world. Despite that objective long-term global trends on many facets show that we live in the safest period in human history, we simultaneously seem to live in an age driven by fear ( Rosling 2018 ). News media, as the main antecedent of our perceptions of what happens in the world, may play a central role in this discrepancy between how the world progresses and how people perceive it ( Romer, Jamieson, and Aday 2003 ; van der Meer et al. 2019 ). Since negativity and fear dominate most news reports, citizens might inaccurately perceive their lives as very dangerous ( Altheide 2003 ). Especially the high frequency with which mass media report on isolated, negative events might amplify audiences’ risk perceptions to irrational levels. Overemphasizing the rare and negative can potentially create a distorted media reality for audiences were real risks and problems are overshadowed.

To further zoom in on the consequences of biased risk perceptions as a result of news exposure, this study questions whether such risk perceptions can complicate people’s rational decision making. So far, previous studies lack in their examination of how media’s disproportional attention for rare, negative events can overshadow other, bigger risks. Empirical research has indeed suggested how biased media coverage relates to higher fear perceptions despite that real-world trends show that there is no need to feel at risk ( Romer, Jamieson, and Aday 2003 ; Li et al. 2015 ; van der Meer et al. 2019 ). Yet, we know little about whether such media-induced fear perceptions lead to irrational decisions with potentially harmful consequences. Therefore, this study is set out to explore if more media attention for incidents in one risk domain causes an increase in the number of fatalities in another risk domain due to irrational risk-avoiding behavior.

Inspired by the findings that the tragic events of 9/11 temporarily led to fewer passengers boarding planes and an increase in road traffic ( Gigerenzer 2006 ), people’s irrational risk-avoiding travel behavior is considered a suitable case to study the consequences of irrational fear perceptions. This particular case allows us to study whether exemplars news coverage of rare aviation accidents leads to irrational risk-avoiding behavior. As a result of disproportionate attention for exceptional, yet vivid, aviation accidents, audiences might choose (long-distance) driving as an alternative to flying. In doing so, individuals engage in more risk-taking behavior as the fatality risk associated with car travel is substantially higher than that of air travel ( Li et al. 2015 ). Therefore, this study asks whether increases in fatal road-traffic accidents can be related to news attention for aviation accidents.

Gigerenzer (2006) already documented that in the months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, road travel and accidents increased. Here, news attention might have worked as a catalyst for a substantial decline in air travel in the wake of such a high-profile accident. As a key contribution, the current study connects key theories from the field of communication science and psychology (i.e., cultivation theory, mediatization, negativity and distortion bias, and risk assessment) to understand the role of news media in inducing such irrational risk-avoiding behavior. In addition, we rely on a longer time period to understand if this phenomenon, where real risks are overshadowed, is strictly related to extraordinary crisis times, like terrorist attacks, or whether it also occurs under normal circumstances where the news might actually play a substantial role. In other words, this study explores whether such irrational risk-avoiding behavior is simply associated with the occurrence of high-profile accidents or whether media’s disproportionate attention for accidents in general can bias audiences’ risk-related decisions. Accordingly, this study significantly adds to media-bias literature by offering robust evidence for the over-time distortion of media portrayals and its effects on actual behavior.

This paper is built up as follows. It is first argued how a biased reflection of reality, shown by the news media, can have severe cultivating consequences for public perception. Next, we propose that media’s attention for negative incidents—i.e., aviation and road accidents—grows over time as a result of mediatization processes caused by decreasing resources for media and increasing commercialization of journalistic processes. Based on US media coverage from 1996 to 2017 related to data on actual accidents ( N  = 80,685), we aim to show how the number of articles per accident fluctuates over time and relates to the frequency of occurrence of actual crashes. Next, as air travel is the safest among all transportation modes, it is argued that disproportionate attention for aviation accidents is especially problematic. With the use of rigid time-series analyses, we test whether more media attention for such incidents can result in irrational risk-avoiding behavior—i.e., does more attention for aviation accidents result in more relative road traffic and more fatal road accidents in the subsequent months? In doing so, this paper contributes by providing insights into whether media systematically overrepresent low-frequency high-consequence incidents and if this can stimulate irrational and dangerous fear-avoiding behavior within society.

Cultivation theory ( Gerbner 1969 ), as a widely used theory in mass communication research, provides insights into how people’s social reality can be shaped by news exposure. Increased media consumption can cause audiences’ worldview to mirror patterns depicted in the media rather than what happens in the real world. In general, cultivation theory is concerned with the long-term effect of television viewing and the main proposition holds that more exposure to television (but also, for example, newspapers; Arendt 2010 ) increases the likelihood that people believe their social reality aligns with the reality portrayed on television. The theory has mainly been applied to understand how news cultivates audiences’ perception of reality in terms of crime and violence. A connection is posited between worries and fear about a world filled with violence and exposure to (local) television news on crime. Gerbner, as the founder of the cultivation theory, already showed how violence was portrayed more frequently in prime-time television compared with actual statistics on crime. This cultivation can cause audiences, especially “heavy viewers,” to judge their world to be more violent than it is in reality ( Romer, Jamieson, and Aday 2003 ).

Overall, based on cultivation literature, it can be argued that structures of the news cultivate unrealistic expectations and risk perceptions among the public that are in fact independent of what happens in the real world. Since news sources presume to give their audience factual stories, the heavy sensational coverage of different negative incidents ( Hamilton 2000 ) could well increase expectations that victimization of certain (uncommon) threats is likely.

Several scholars have, however, critiqued the claims related to cultivation theory and empirical studies found mixed results. Yet, and in line with the premise of cultivation theory, scholars overall agree that media act as a kind of filter that translates information from the world into news (Seguin 2016). Here, it is essential to note that the current study does not empirically test the central thesis of cultivation theory as we do not analyze audience data. Cultivation theory is rather consulted to provide a theoretical starting point for understanding how media reality can shape people’s social reality and therewith explain collective behavior change that can be considered irrational. Thus, against the backdrop of cultivation theory, we generally understand media’s role in society as including potential biases in news coverage that can distort people’s worldview. Since media have to make choices in their news selection, not everything that happens in the world at large can be covered and therefore certain more newsworthy events or incidents might get disproportional attention. Consequently, to get an understanding of how audience’s social world might become unnecessary filled with menace, it is important to understand such biases in the media’s news selection process.

To further understand how media have become interwoven with our daily lives, it is essential to consult literature on news selection and how such processes have changed over the years. The theory of mediatization provides a valuable starting point to understand how news media portray the world nowadays. Mediatization highlights a long-term process of societal change in which media have become more integrated into different levels of society ( Strömbäck 2008 ) and how media’s institutional characteristics have changed ( Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011 ). It conceptualizes how, through dynamic over-time processes, media have become increasingly important and influential in today’s society.

Alongside the above developments, institutional characteristics of news media have changed, including standards of newsworthiness ( Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011 ). Shaped by so-called media logic, commercial orientation, professionalization, and limited resources, news media predominantly select items that fit well into the patterns of news values ( Galtung and Ruge 1965 ). For example, events that are considered sensational or stories with particularly negative overtones (e.g., conflict, tragedy) get selected as news to gain the largest possible audience ( Harcup and O’neill 2001 ). The growing importance of such selection criteria in news coverage of current affairs has allegedly resulted in systematic biases in news coverage. Two specific news biases are of particular interest in the context of this study: negativity bias and distortion bias.

First, media’s tendency to overemphasize negative news has become more prominent over time ( Semetko and Schoenbach 2003 ; Farnsworth and Lichter 2006 ). This negativity bias underlines that negativity has become a defining characteristic of news, whereas good news is almost synonymous with the absence of news ( Soroka, Fournier, and Nir 2019 ). From a news values perspective, a negative tone in news reportage is an instrumental value for journalistic processes of deciding what news garners the highest ratings ( Galtung and Ruge 1965 ; Harcup and O’Neill 2001 ). Compared with positive information, negative news is more appealing to audiences as it is seen as unambiguous, consensual, unexpected, dramatic, sensational, entertaining, eye-catching, interesting, and short-dated ( Lengauer, Esser, and Berganza 2012 ). Accordingly, research in (social) psychology and neurology shows how audiences are drawn to negativity in information as an evolutionary mechanism to scan their environment for threats ( Baumeister et al. 2001 ; Rozin and Royzman 2001 ).

Second, since news is by definition about the extraordinary, media predominantly portray isolated events or incidents rather than mirror long-term socioeconomic trends. With this so-called distortion bias ( Entman 2007 ), media can turn rare incidents into the common world image ( Gilliam and Iyengar 2000 ). In that sense, news can partly be seen as paradoxical, the more commonly something happens in the world, the less likely it is that you read about it in the news, and vice versa, when something rarely happens it is considered highly newsworthy. Accordingly, in their focus on current affairs, media coverage is commonly found to be event driven and framed as episodic stories. In doing so, media tend to overshadow broader social and political contexts or trends needed for a complete understanding of complex societal topics.

In a mediatized environment, where news values and selection biases have become more prominent, discrepancies might arise between what happens in the world and how media portray it. As negativity and distortion biases have grown with time ( Farnsworth and Lichter 2006 ), media are likely to progressively overrepresent the frequency of negative and isolated events and create a biased reflection of reality. Thus, media, over time, might follow their own logic more instead of being guided by actual trends in the world ( van der Meer et al. 2019 ).

Extant research has observed such discrepancies between media attention and real-world developments. For example, research has shown how immigration news predominantly focuses on threats and negativity ( van Klingeren et al. 2015 ), whereas trends in immigration news seem largely unaffected by real-life trends in society ( Jacobs et al. 2018 ). Comparable findings can be found in research on crime news that has shown how news attention for crime has consistently increased and does not always reflect actual crime rates ( Paulsen 2003 ; Smolej and Kivivuori 2008 ). Also, the relative media attention for aviation accidents is found to rise rather than follow the downward trend of actual accidents ( van der Meer et al. 2019 ). As the current study is interested in the role news media play in the construction of risk perceptions regarding aviation and road accidents, we expect to observe similar patterns in news attention for these incidents. In other words, it is expected that over time news media pay more attention to these negative events—i.e., aviation and road accidents—rather than follow trends in real-life data on the frequency of occurrence of these incidents:

H1: The frequency with which news media report on negative incidents—i.e., aviation and road accidents—increases over the years.

H2: There is a discrepancy between the frequency of occurrence of negative incidents—i.e., aviation and road accidents—and news media’s attention for these events.

Next, when comparing aviation and road accidents, it can be expected that in mediatized news systems, aviation accidents gain relatively more attention. Aviation accidents, compared with road traffic accidents, are more exceptional incidents and therewith more likely to make it into the news following the distortion bias. In addition, these incidents can be considered more newsworthy since they check more boxes regarding news values such as dramatization and sensationalism ( Harcup and O’Neill 2001 ). Against the backdrop of processes of mediatization, we, therefore, hypothesize that the relative attention for aviation accidents, compared with road accidents, goes up over time:

H3: News attention for aviation accidents, relative to road accidents, rises over the years.

In addition to explaining variation in media coverage of aviation and road accidents over time, our research is primarily designed to determine whether biased news attention for rare incidents can actually distort audiences’ behavioral responses. Cultivation theory distinguishes two levels of outcomes ( Shrum 2004 ): First-order outcomes refer to when news exposure affects audiences’ memory-based judgments (e.g., the frequency of occurrence of negative incidents) and the second-order outcomes occur when meaning is extrapolated from news coverage to the extent that it shapes subjective attitudes (e.g., fear of becoming a victim of negative incidents). Such outcomes suggest that (disproportional) news attention for negative events can potentially have a large impact on society, where the inaccurate media reality constructed via the news becomes adopted as audiences’ social reality. Especially because media have become more institutionalized within society, due to processes of mediatization, audiences’ reality might increasingly mirror what the media portray.

A problematic distorted worldview among audiences might especially be created when media overrepresent aviation accidents. The occurrence of such commercial airplane crashes is extremely rare, especially when compared with the risk associated with other modes of transportation. Therefore, continuous coverage of such exceptional events, just because they are newsworthy and sensational, can distort audiences’ estimation of the frequency of occurrence of these incidents. When so-called low-probability high-consequence accidents become more available in the minds of the audiences, this might complicate their rational decision making and risk assessment. If it comes to such incidents, (lay) audiences’ risk evaluation and risk-avoiding behavior often appear as irrational or biased ( Pidgeon, Kasperson, and Slovic 2003 ).

Extant research has pointed to discrepancies between public responses and the risk judgments of experts. Incidents, assessed as minor risk events by (technical) experts, can produce a massive societal response. In contrast to the “objective” risk level, people’s perceived risk is inherently a social construct ( Beck 1992 ). People rather use social and psychological dimensions in their risk judgments, like its catastrophic potential of the risk or observable character ( Slovic, Fischoff, and Lichtenstein 2005 ). The same goes for aviation accidents. Based on rational risk calculations as a function of the probability of occurrence assessment, indicators have shown a continuous improvement of aviation safety over the last decades, making air travel the safest transportation mode ( Li et al. 2015 ). Hence, the biased or ill-informed decision to refrain from commercial air travel—for example, in the wake of a fatal plane crash—is shaped by something else than statistical changes and real risk levels.

Within the field of risk research, scholars have considered news media as key actors in the social construction and definition of what acceptable levels of risk are ( Beck 1992 ). In Beck’s view, many of modern society’s risks are open to social definition and construction. Here, mass media play an important role, both in the construction itself, as well as in criticizing and challenging institutional responses to those risks. In light of the news biases addressed in this paper, news value-driven media coverage on isolated and catastrophic accidents might cause disproportional amplification of or attentiveness to risks, creating irrationally high levels of fear ( Berger 2001 ). Several related theoretical perspectives are useful in understanding how news content may contribute to a distorted worldview among audience members, shaping not only what we think about but also how we decide to act. First, scholars who draw most directly on theories of communication science have provided a long history of how media content, especially negative news ( Soroka, Fournier, and Nir 2019 ), affects what people think about, what is readily accessible in our minds (i.e., agenda-setting theory) ( McCombs and Shaw 1972 ), and how we interpret certain issues (i.e., framing theory) ( Entman 1993 ). Hence, audiences might learn about the frequency of occurrence of certain events based on what is presented on the news and consider that these numbers are applicable to the real world. Second, psychological research highlights that individuals rely on available instances in their memory to make judgments—i.e., availability heuristic ( Tversky and Kahneman 1973 ). The repeated coverage of negative incidents can increase their availability in audiences’ memory, independently of actual trends ( Romer, Jamieson, and Aday 2003 ). Accordingly, news about negative events like aviation accidents can increase perceived vulnerability to the degree that such stories are covered frequently.

Previous research has indeed documented how disproportional media coverage relates to distortions in audiences’ perceptions and risk assessments. For example, it is observed how news exposure biases perceived risk of terrorism to self and others ( Nellis and Savage 2012 ), how negative coverage can create overly negative perceptions of minorities ( Gilliam and Iyengar 2000 ), how news exposure explains salience of and fear for violent crimes rather than real crime rates ( Gross and Aday 2003 ), and how media attention for aviation accidents can cause worries about airline safety ( Li et al. 2015 ).

Next, media-induced fear perceptions can also have behavioral effects. Exposure to crime news is, for example, found to be associated with avoidance behavior where people avoid certain areas because they overemphasize the possibility to become victimized there ( Smolej and Kivivuori 2008 ). In the context of our study, it is expected that when media disproportionally cover aviation incidents, audiences might engage in irrational avoidance behavior as they misperceive travel-related risk levels. As plane crashes are vivid media exemplars, they might become more available in the minds of the audiences and therewith overshadow real risks like road traffic accidents. In other words, a biased media reality might be adopted as people’s social reality and, in turn, result in audiences’ misinformed risk judgment where road travel is incorrectly considered a safer alternative. Whether the population irrationally switches their transportation choices from air travel to road travel, in light of media coverage on aviation accident, can become evident when such media coverage relates to increased road traffic relative to air traffic (indicating that road travel is chosen as an alternative). Such media-inspired avoidance behavior can be consequential ( Skogan 1986 ; Smolej and Kivivuori 2008 ). If people (in large numbers) decide to choose (long-distance) driving to refrain from commercial air travel, this likely increases the number of fatal road accidents as driving is statistically less safe than flying. Therefore, this study explores if media attention to aviation accidents is related to an increase in fatal road accidents:

H4: The level of news attention for aviation accidents is significantly and positively related to road traffic relative to air traffic.

H5: The level of news attention for aviation accidents is significantly and positively related to the number of fatal road accidents.

This study relies on a longitudinal design to compare US news attention with real-world statistics. A computer-assisted content analysis was applied to retrieve the articles that covered aviation accidents ( N  = 24,954) and road accidents ( N  = 55,731) in five quality and popular newspapers. The time period of 1996–2017 was selected as by this time commercial air travel has certainly become the safest transportation option and can be seen as an (affordable) alternative transportation mode to long-distance driving in the United States. Real-world data were collected for the number of fatal road accidents and total road traffic as the main outcome variables for testing the impact of potentially biased coverage. Fatal aviation accidents and total air traffic statistics are also collected as control variables in the analyses.

All data were collected for the time period of January 1996 till December 2017 and are measured on a monthly aggregated level.

Media coverage

The database of LexisNexis was consulted to obtain the number of news articles that cover transportation accidents in the period from 1996 until 2017. We relied on a combination of quality newspapers—i.e., The New York Times and Washington Post—and popular newspapers—i.e., Daily News, The New York Post, and USA Today—with the highest newspaper circulation from the United States to obtain a broad sense of the level of attention for such negative incidents. A census of all news articles about road traffic accident and accidents of commercial carriers was retrieved using a computer-assisted content analysis. In a first step, search terms were developed to retrieve relevant articles from the LexisNexis archive. For aviation accidents, the following search string was applied: “(plane OR airplane OR airline OR aircraft) AND (crash OR accident OR death) AND NOT military AND NOT striker jet AND NOT bomber” and for road accidents: “(car OR motor vehicle OR traffic) AND (crash OR accident OR death).” Numerous search strings were tested with analogies for the words in the search string; in the end, we observed that a less elaborate search string managed to best capture relevant articles. In a next step, we relied on an iterative process to improve the recall and precision of articles that actually contained references to accidents of motor vehicles or commercial carriers. We examined if the exclusion and exhaustion to ascertain the articles’ topic would improve when the words in the search string appear closer to each other in a news article. A comparison was made between the word range of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 words. So, for retrieving articles about aviation accidents, it was explored what range between the words (“plane” or “airplane” or “airline” or “aircraft”) and (“crash” or “accident” or “death”) would retrieve relevant articles most accurately. We did the same for road accidents with the words (“car” or “motor vehicle” or “traffic”) and (“crash” or “accident” or “death”). In the end, by systematically scanning the texts and the topics of the articles, we concluded that the range of ten words was the best approach to retrieving articles about motor vehicle traffic accidents and accidents of commercial carriers. Table 1 presents an overview of number of articles about each type of accidents per newspaper.

Total News Coverage on Aviation and Road Accidents

A monthly level measure of media attention was constructed by aggregating all the articles per month. For the analysis, this study relies both on the absolute and relative media attention for both types of incidents. The absolute measure reflects the total number of articles in the selected newspapers that discuss aviation or road accident. In addition, a relative measure was constructed where the number of news articles about these accidents was divided by the total news circulation of newspapers in the United States. This measure allows for controlling whether over-time trends in news attention are not caused by fluctuations in newspaper circulation but rather show changes in relative attention.

Total road traffic

To obtain an indication of road traffic in the United States, we rely on traffic volume trends, measured in Millions of Miles, documented by the Federal Highway Administration. These monthly statistics are based on hourly traffic count data reported by all US States. Data are collected at ~5,000 continuous traffic counting locations and re-adjusted to match vehicle miles of travel from the Highway Performance Monitoring System.

Fatal road accidents

The monthly measure of fatal motor vehicle traffic crashes was the sum of fatal accidents that occurred in a given month and were reported by National Center for Statistics and Analysis. This measure is a census of fatal motor-vehicle traffic crashes in the fifty States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. To be included, an accident must involve a motor vehicle traveling on a roadway and result in the death of at least one person (a vehicle occupant, driver, passenger, or a nonoccupant). In addition, the total number of fatalities per fatal road accidents for each month is retrieved from United States Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Total air traffic

To measure US air travel, number of monthly revenue passengers enplaned is obtained from database of Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (see data base T1: US Air Carrier Traffic and Capacity Summary by Service Class). These statistics included number of passengers on domestic and international flights of major carriers, national carriers, large and medium regional carriers. Together, these carriers account for most US commercial air traffic and can therefore be seen as a system-wide measure of commercial air traffic.

Fatal aviation accidents

The monthly statistics regarding aviation accidents were obtained from National Transportation Safety Board’s database. This database provides an overview of the number of accidents and of commercial carriers and related number of fatalities both worldwide and in the United States.

To test the first and third hypotheses, we rely on ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions. H2, focusing on the autoregressive (AR) features of media attention for aviation accidents and how it is associated with real-world data, can be tested through estimation of partial adjustment (Koyck) autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) models. These regression models take the lag values of both dependent variable and independent variables into account to explain variation in media attention on a monthly level.

To explore the over-time effect of media attention for aviation accidents (H4 and H5), we draw on monthly level Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time-series techniques ( Vliegenthart 2014 ). ARIMA modeling enables us to identify the size and delay of the effect of media coverage. In addition, these models take the series own past into account as it is assumed that the current values of time series—i.e., relative road travel and fatal road accidents—are strongly predicted by past values or seasonality in the series. Several steps are taken to ensure that the models accurately considered the autocorrelation of the series.

Before adding explanatory variables to the ARIMA models, the series need to be tested for stationarity, AR and moving average (MA) terms need to be determined, and the absence of autocorrelation of residuals need to be assessed ( Vliegenthart 2014 ). First, the Dickey–Fuller test was applied to test the assumptions regarding mean stationarity. Second, the next step is to define the AR and MA terms of the ARIMA model. The terms help to build a model that reflects the past of the series and that includes all the previous information of the series over-time variance in the model. AR orders refer to the influence of pervious values and MAs are about the influence of residuals from previous values. Finally, the Portmanteau (Q) test for white noise indicates whether the residuals and the squared residuals are autocorrelated or not.

Media Distortion Hypotheses

We start with testing whether the actual occurrence of both aviation and road accidents show a different over-time trend as compared with news coverage of both accidents. First, we test the effect of a linear monthly trend variable on the real-world statistics on number of aviation and road accidents. OLS regressions show how this monthly trend variable has a negative effect on total number of fatal road accidents ( b  = −0.31, SE = 0.03, p  < .001) and fatalities due to road accidents ( b  = −0.40, SE = 0.04, p  < .001). The same pattern is observed for fatal aviation accidents: worldwide ( b  = −0.01, SE = 0.01, p  < .001), in the United States ( b  = −0.01, SE = 0.01, p  < .001), and number of US fatalities as a result of aviation crashes ( b  = −0.02, SE = 0.01, p  < .001). These statistics suggest that the number of fatal aviation and road accidents decreases over the years. Important to note is that the monthly US fatalities as a result of road accidents ( M  = 3,237.14, SD  = 463.55) is substantially higher than fatalities related to aviation accidents ( M  = 34.43, SD  = 34.40). The figures in Supplementary Appendix visualize the over-time changes in total number of fatal road accidents ( Supplementary Figure A1 ) and aviation accidents ( Supplementary Figure A2 ).

Second, hypothesis 1 predicted that news attention for negative incidents—i.e., aviation and road accidents—increases over the years. We test whether, despite the decreasing number of road and aviation accidents, the monthly number of articles about such accidents goes up over the years. The number of articles per accidents is calculated by dividing the monthly articles (relative to total news circulation) about accidents by the total number of accidents that occurred in that given month. The same monthly trend variable is applied to predict news attention per road accident/fatality and aviation accident/fatality. The monthly trend variable shows a significant positive effect on number of articles per fatal road accident ( b  = 5.53e-14, SE = 4.08e-15, p  < .001), number of articles per fatality due to road accidents ( b  = 5.27e-14, SE = 3.71e-15, p  < .001), number of articles per fatal aviation accident ( b  = 3.41e-12, SE = 8.19e-13, p  < .001), and number of articles per fatality due to aviation accidents ( b  = 2.80e-12, SE = 4.18e-13, p  < .001). Figure 1 visualizes how the relative number of articles per aviation and road accident goes up over the years. In the Supplementary Appendix, Supplementary Figure A3 shows the over-time relative media attention for road and aviation accident and Supplementary Figure A4 shows the number of articles per accident. In support of hypothesis 1, these findings indicate that over-time news attention per fatal road and aviation accident increases, whereas the frequency with which these accidents occur decrease over time.

Relative number of news articles per road and aviation accidents over time.

To test if news media follow their own logic when reporting on negative accidents, we compare media attention for aviation and road accidents with data on the actual occurrence of these accidents. Accordingly, it was hypothesized that there would be a discrepancy between the frequency of occurrence of negative incidents—i.e., aviation and road accidents—and news media’s attention for these events (H2).

Aviation accidents

In these analyses we ask whether media coverage of aviation accidents is explained by actual statistics on fatal aviation accidents. In table 2 , two ADL models are shown, predicting the (i) absolute attention for aviation accidents and (ii) relative attention for aviation accidents. The statistically significant effects that can be observed for the AR terms of media attention indicates that attention for aviation accidents in the previous months explains attention in the next month. In support of H2, table 2 shows the absence of an effect of the number of actual fatal aviation accidents, for any lags, on media attention, indicating that the occurrence of such accidents, in the same or previous months, is not leading for newspaper coverage on these accidents.

Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model Predicting Relative and Absolute News Attention for Aviation Accidents

Note: Cells contain unstandardized regression coefficients with standard errors.

* p  < 0.05; ** p  < 0.01; *** p  < 0.001.

Road accidents

The same AR tests were run for media coverage of road accidents. The ADL models aim to predict relative and absolute news attention for road accidents based on AR terms and actual statistics on fatal road accidents in the United States. A comparable pattern is observed as was found for aviation accidents. Clear AR effects can be observed if we look at table 3 , whereas no effects of the actual number of fatal US road accidents on coverage is present. These findings together support H2 and suggest that news media follow their own mediatized logic and reality, rather than accurately representing what happens in the world.

Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model Predicting Relative and Absolute News Attention for Road Accidents

Hypothesis 3 assumed that news attention for aviation accidents, relative to road accidents, rises over the years. Accordingly, the next regression analysis presents how the number of articles per aviation accident fatalities, relative to articles per fatal road accidents, varies over the years. The total number of articles per fatal road accidents was subtracted from the total number of articles per fatalities due to aviation accidents. A positive effect of the monthly trend variable was found on this indicator of news attention for aviation accidents relative to road accidents ( b  = 2.75e-12, SE = 4.18e-13, p  < .001). The over-time changes are graphed in the Supplementary Appendix, Supplementary Figure A5 . So, despite higher absolute media attention for road accidents, the relative attention for rare aviation accidents goes up over time, therewith H3 is confirmed.

The over-time Effects of Media Attention

To determine the effects of media coverage of aviation accidents, we, in a first step, assess its effect on travel behavior (H4). By relying on monthly aggregated ARIMA modeling, we aim to see if road traffic, relative to air traffic, increases as a consequence of more news coverage on aviation accidents in previous months. A new variable was constructed to measure relative travel behavior by dividing total US road traffic with US aviation traffic and multiplying it by 10,000. This relative measure is used as it best reflects whether road traffic is chosen as an alternative for air travel since an increase in this measure indicates that the US population on average more often decided to travel by car rather than by commercial airlines. The Dickey–Fuller tested indicated that the dependent times series—relative road travel—are stationary. To remove autocorrelation from the residuals, AR terms at lag 1, 3, 4, 6, 12, and MA terms at lag 1, 7, 12 were added. Table 4 presents three ARIMA models for the effect of absolute news attention. Supplementary Table A1 , in the Supplementary Appendix, presents the same three models but with the effect of relative news attention. The first model is the model with only the AR and MA terms and the year and month as control variables. The second model also includes the following control variables: news attention for road accidents on T-1 and T-2, number of fatal road accidents on T0 and T-1, and a dummy variable controlling for the occurrence of 9/11. This 9/11 dichotomous variable was constructed as temporary dummy three months after the tragic event. The final model also includes news attention for aviation accidents at T-1 and T-2 to test whether attention for aviation accidents in the previous two months results in less road traffic. The models show positive effects of media attention for T-1 on traffic behavior. For the purpose of face validity of this empirical relationship, we look at a few instances of how increase in media coverage relates to declines in air travel. First, the time-series model showed an effect of the 9/11 variable on travel behavior. The data showed that the 9/11 incident came with a 156% increase in media coverage about aviation accidents and a drop of 20.9% in relative air travel in the subsequent two months. Next, a drop in air travel after increased media attention can also be observed beyond the occurrence of such high-profile accidents, hinting at a biased response among audience members following disproportionate media attention. For example, in July 2013, media coverage on plane crashes increased with 187.5%, a drop in air travel of 15.8% was observed in the subsequent two months, whereas number of fatalities due to aviation accidents was relatively low (i.e., 52.19 SDs below the mean). Another example is September 1998, where an increase in media coverage of 137.3% was followed by a decrease of 7.9% in relative air travel.

ARIMA Estimation of the Effect of Absolute Media Attention on Road Traffic Relative to Aviation Traffic, 1996–2017

Note: Cells contain unstandardized regression coefficients, standard errors in parentheses.

† p  < 0.10; * p  < 0.05; ** p  < 0.01; *** p  < 0.001.

Additional analyses were run to determine if accidents with high numbers of fatalities prompted greater road traffic. Since particularly deadly events might be covered at even higher rates, accidents with high number of fatalities might explain the relation between media attention and travel behavior. In the Supplementary Appendix, Supplementary Table A2 , model 1 depicts the same ARIMA model run with individual dummy variables for the deadliest incidents—i.e., all airliner accidents in the United States that have resulted in at least eighty fatalities ( N  = 6). Moreover, in the Supplementary Appendix, Supplementary Table A2 , model 2 includes the ARIMA model with a dummy variable for the months with more than fifty US fatalities due to aviation accidents ( N  = 49). The results of both models show how some of the deadliest incidents and months with high number of fatalities affect relative travel behavior, whereas the effect of media coverage of aviation accidents still holds. In sum, as predicted by H4, these results indicate that an increase in media attention for aviation accidents results in more relative road traffic in the next month.

To test H5, it needed to be assessed whether more media coverage of aviation accidents actually results in an increase in fatal road accidents. The Dickey–Fuller test indicated that the dependent times series—total US fatal road accidents—is stationary. AR terms al lag 1, 2, 11, 12, 24, 36, and MA terms at lag 1, 7 were added; however, no white noise could be obtained in the residuals. Despite the series behave with clear patterns and in a seasonal matter, adding (seasonal) AR and MA terms did not result in the complete absence of autocorrelation in the residuals. Therefore, next to adding the most important AR and MA terms, multiple control variables as exogenous variables were included in the ARIMA model, among the year and month, to control for as many confounding factors as possible.

Table 5 and Supplementary Table A3 , in the Supplementary Appendix, present the ARIMA models for both the effect of the absolute and relative news attention for aviation accidents. The first model is again the basic model including just the AR and MA terms and the year and month as control variables. The second model also controls for news attention for road accidents on T-1 and T-2, number of fatal US aviation accidents at T-0 and T-1, total road traffic in the same and previous month, total number of enplaned passengers at the same and previous month, and the dummy variable controlling for the occurrence of 9/11. The final model also includes news attention for aviation accident on T-1 and T-2. The ARIMA models show that the attention for aviation accidents has an increasing effect on the number of fatal road accidents both in the next month as well as in the month after. A single additional news article in one of the newspapers about an aviation accident in a given month yields an increase of 1.30 road accidents in the next month and another 1.14 in the month after ( table 5 ). Since the effect of media attention for aviation accidents still holds while the analyses control for actual road traffic and the autoregression of fatal road accidents, it can be argued that this media effect is not just an epiphenomenon of increase in road traffic. Since the previous analyses showed how attention for aviation accidents can be disproportionate, the observed media effect here seems to go beyond a proportional relationship between road traffic and fatalities in road traffic. This effect seems to mainly reflect irrational decisions based on news coverage of sensational and rare aviation accidents since no (negative) association between media attention for road accidents and the occurrence of actual fatal road accidents is found.

ARIMA Estimation of the Effect of Absolute Media Attention on Fatal Road Accidents, 1996–2017

Additional ARIMA models were run with total death toll from road traffic accidents, also relative to air traffic fatalities. Supplementary Table A4 in the Supplementary Appendix shows how media attention for aviation accidents increases total fatalities due to car crashes (model 1, Supplementary Table A4 ) and total fatalities due to car crashes relative to fatalities due to plane crashes (model 2, Supplementary Table A4 ) in the subsequent month. Moreover, the same controlling analyses as for testing H4 were performed. The ARIMA model in Supplementary Table A5 includes the deadliest aviation incidents and months with high number of fatalities due to aviation incidents. With the addition of these control variables, the effect of media attention for aviation accidents on fatal road accidents still holds.

Finally, since the data suggest that the absolute numbers of both types of accidents are decreasing over time, whereas the total number of trips are increasing, an additional model is run where the outcome variable, number of fatal road accidents, is normalized. Although the other models control for total road traffic, Supplementary Table A6 shows the same analyses but with the relative score of the dependent variable, where absolute number of road accidents is divided by total road traffic and multiplied by 100,000. The findings regarding the effect of media coverage are comparable with the other models.

In conclusion, in line with H5, the results presented above indicate that the level of news attention for aviation accidents is significantly and positively related to the number of fatal road accidents and number of fatalities due to road accidents in the subsequent months.

Since risk and fear dominate most headlines, this study aimed to clarify people’s irrational fear perceptions as a result of overly negative news. To do so, we rely on the case of travel accidents. The purpose was to explore if news media disproportionally portray such negative incidents and if news attention for rare and vivid aviation accidents can overshadow real-world risks. Audiences might choose (long-distance) driving over flying in the wake of a biased media reality that portrays aviation accidents as a common threat, despite that flying is statistically the safest alternative.

This paper, first of all, concludes that news media, in their coverage of aviation and road accidents, create and follow their own logic and are increasingly driven by a biased focus on the negative rather than accuracy. Our findings show that (i) despite the decreasing number of actual road and aviation accidents, the monthly number of news articles about such accidents goes up over the years and (ii) real-world frequency of occurrence of such accidents is not leading for news attention on these accidents. Thus, the current study finds robust support for what previous research has argued: News media’s interest in the negative has grown over time, such that media coverage has become increasingly detached from real-world trends ( Jacobs et al. 2018 ; van der Meer et al. 2019 ). Hence, the findings expose distortions, in terms of a negativity bias and selection bias ( Entman 2007 ), in the context of news attention for traffic accidents.

The observed over-time patterns align with the theorization regarding the long-term processes of mediatization. Media logic and the growing importance of news values institutionalized in news selection processes can potentially explain the growing interest in negative and rare incidents ( Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011 ). Moreover, the institutionalization of media in society might explain the documented absence of a relationship between what happens in the world and news attention, media rather construct their own reality based on what news events gain the largest audience. In turn, this media reality, rather than what actually happens in the world, likely shapes audiences’ social reality and therewith complicates their rational decision making.

Second, as air travel is statistically the safest transportation mode, it is argued that disproportionate attention for aviation accidents would particularly be alarming. More media attention for such accidents can induce ill-informed fear for flying and result in irrational risk-avoiding behavior. This type of behavior is exactly what we observed. As the main contribution, this study shows, based on time-series analyses that control for important confounding variables, how more media attention for aviation accidents results in more relative road traffic and more fatal road accidents and fatalities due to road accidents in the subsequent months. In line with empirical survey research that showed how exposure to crime news can relate to risk-avoiding behavior ( Smolej and Kivivuori 2008 ), our aggregated findings indicate that audiences engage in irrational risk-avoiding behavior with potentially fatal consequences. We conclude that media’s systematic overrepresentation of low-frequency high-consequence accidents can have far-reaching consequences and stimulate irrational and dangerous fear-avoiding behavior where driving is inaccurately considered a safer transportation alternative to flying. Gigerenzer (2006) showed comparable risk-avoiding behavior in the context of a period of fear for terrorism: The tragic terrorist attacks of 9/11 temporarily resulted in an increase in road travel and accidents increased. Seemingly, these effects go beyond irrational fear for terrorism as the patterns we found are not limited to the context of 9/11, and news media seem to play an important role in audiences’ irrational risk-avoiding behavior under normal circumstances.

We interpret the observed relation between news attention and irrational risk-avoiding behavior as being in line with the central notion of cultivation theory ( Gerbner 1969 ), in terms of how media can shape social reality in ways that deviate from what actually happens in the world. The strong focus of news media on vivid, but exceptional aviation accidents may cultivate audiences to focus on the risk of flying and ignore other threats or problems, like road-traffic accidents, that happen more common but there with less likely to end up on the front pages ( Romer, Jamieson, and Aday 2003 ). Traditional cultivation theory mainly studies these relationships by surveying audiences and testing whether heavy (local) news viewers are more likely to report fear of victimization of crime. With its over-time focus, the current study is unable to look at such individual level fear perceptions and news consumption patterns since such data are unavailable for a longer period. Yet, the study does expose aggregated level patterns that hint toward media’s cultivating impact on society where the relation between news attention and (irrational) travel behavior serves as a case in point for how audiences’ exposure to certain news content relates to their fear perceptions.

Despite the study’s focus on one type of topic within one national context, the findings can inspire future studies. In terms of broader implications, further work can build off of these results in exploring how news media can induce irrational behavior. Extant empirical studies have documented how overly negative media coverage can significantly alter audiences’ perceptions, irrespective of actual statistics. A next step would be assessing whether media biases can be associated with (proxies of) irrational behavioral reactions. For example, in the context of news on immigration, research has shown that this coverage is overly negative and disproportionally related to issues of crime and terrorism ( Jacobs et al. 2018 ). Such biased and negative coverage on immigration is observed to have an effect on the attitudinal level ( van Klingeren et al. 2015 ). Subsequentially, researchers can think about behavioral-level effects of media biases. One could imagine how negative stories of immigrants not only spurs the growth of anti-immigration sentiment in the United States (and beyond), but also in part fuels assaults on democracy—e.g., in terms of violent protests or (online) assaults of outgroup members. Accordingly, we often read in the news about cases of irrational collective behavior that might be inspired by media coverage. As an illustration, in 2017, 1,500 people were injured in a stampede after mistaking firecrackers for a terrorist attack when Juventus fans watched the Champions League final in a Turin square ( Jones 2017 ). Such partly irrational fear perceptions and potentially dangerous behavioral responses might well be partly related to how media, in this case, cover terrorism (since news exposure is related to irrational fear of becoming a victim of terrorism) ( Nellis and Savage 2012 ).

The observed relation between media attention for aviation accidents and fatal road accidents might not only be explained as a result of media bias, especially since the absolute number of articles about road accidents is generally higher than the coverage of aviation accidents. Arguably, the effect of media attention for aviation accidents is partly explained by a negativity bias in the information processing of audiences. Individuals generally react stronger to more negative information ( Soroka, Fournier, and Nir 2019 ). Both road and aviation accidents are negative events, yet, as aviation accidents are more exceptional, vivid, and, in a way, sensational, especially the coverage of these accidents might exaggerate the salience and availability of risk for flying in the minds of the audience. In addition, not only a negativity bias in audiences’ news processing but also in their news selection might exacerbate such trends. In a high-choice media environment, people can select all types of news they are personally interested in and opt out of news assessed as uninteresting. Here, individuals are also found to be drawn to negative stories in their news selection ( Knobloch-Westerwick, Mothes, and Polavin 2020 ). Such selection biases might further increase audiences’ disproportionate exposure to negative news on isolated incidents. In addition, when people are already worried about airline travel, they may be drawn to articles that further stoke this fear. Such news patterns relate to another selection bias, known as the confirmation bias, where audiences tend to select news that is in line with their prior beliefs and understanding of the world ( Knobloch-Westerwick, Mothes, and Polavin 2020 ). These desires for certain news can outweigh the need for correctness or a complete understanding and therewith people can create their own biased news environment.

With the observed increase in coverage on negativity, media are often blamed for having a blind spot for progression. Rather than presenting structural base-rate information, uncommon incidents are overreported, which potentially creates a distortion in audiences’ estimation of the frequency of occurrence of incidents ( Sherman 1996 ). To counter irrational risk perceptions as a result of media attention, it has been proposed to provide audiences with added context when they are presented with negative and isolated events that do not reflect a negative long-term global trend ( Skovsgaard and Andersen 2020 ). Contextualizing news stories in such a way might avoid that people automatically extrapolate risk assessments and draw overly negative conclusions about travel safety based on negative news on isolated aviation accidents. From an alternative perspective, it has been argued that the focus on negative and rare events serve a certain alarming function in society. This so-called “burglar alarm news standard” argues how negativity in news draws people’s attention to urgent issues and signals important threats in society ( Zaller 2003 ). In numerous cases, such a surveillance function of professional journalists and mass media plays an important and functional role for society. Pressing real-life threats and risks need to be brought to the attention of the public and other actors such as politicians and policymakers. Being focused on the negative and highlighting things that go wrong can therefore be essential for journalism to fulfill a critical and investigative role within society. For example, in the context of aviation accidents, grounding all Boeing 737 MAX airplanes in the wake of two crashes on October 29, 2018 and March 10, 2019, partly under pressure of the media, possibly prevented more accidents due to the faulty software of these 737 planes. Yet, when such alarms ring all the time and for the wrong reason ( Bennett 2003 ), a distorted media reality is portrayed that can bias people’s understanding of the world around them. Here, the question is if there is actually something like a “neutral” or an “objective” worldview, as compared with a distorted worldview, that news media can cover to more accurately mirror the world. Overall, this paper argues that, although negativity in the news can be conducive at times, it becomes harmful when such news biases become disproportionate as they can lead to irrational risk-taking behavior.

As with any academic study, this research bared some limitations. First, in our aim to better understand the role of the news media in irrational fear perceptions in our contemporary world, we only incorporate the case of air and road traffic accidents. Accordingly, these findings are not straightforwardly generalizable to other contexts in which discrepancies exist between the media and actual reality. Second, it was beyond the scope of this study to also incorporate the content of the news articles about the accidents. Future research could, for example, look at what type of news values or frames are emphasized in most articles and if this increases over time in light of mediatization theory. Next, additional survey data for the same years on measures such as fear perceptions would have provided us with more psychological insights into why individuals would refrain from commercial air travel based on media coverage. In addition, the findings primarily document the relationship between media coverage, number of accidents and travel numbers on an aggregated level, rather than tracing the effect of news coverage on actual individual consumer choices. Consumer choices between different modes of travel might be jointly determined by alternative explanations that were not included in the model—e.g., gasoline prices and airline pricing or perceived survivability of a plane crash versus car crash. Yet, our analytical strategy incorporated several key control variables, which solidifies our confidence in the robustness of the observed relationship. These limitations notwithstanding, this study provides a valuable exploration of how irrational fear perceptions can be media inspired and how impactful a distorted worldview can be.

Toni G.L.A. van der Meer is an assistant professor of communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on crisis communication, (negativity) bias in the supply and demand side of news, processes of mediatization, media and public framing of issues related to corporations, and misinformation.

Anne C. Kroon is an assistant professor of communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. Drawing on computational methods, Anne’s research primarily focuses on the role of algorithms in recruitment and hiring as a means to address bias, as well as (biased) presentation of minorities in media content. Her work appeared in Journals like Journal of Communication, Communication Research, and The International Journal of Press/Politics.

Rens Vliegenthart is a professor and scientific director of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the role of media in society, and specifically, the way media and politics interact. Recent publications occurred in a range of different journals.

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Media Violence Effects on Children, Adolescents and Young Adults

BY: CRAIG A. ANDERSON, MA, PhD

I killed my first Klingon in 1979. It took place in the computer center at Stanford University, where I was playing a new video game based on the Star Trek television series. I was an "early adopter" of the new technology of video games, and continued to be so for many years, first as a fan of this entertainment medium, and later as a researcher interested in the question of what environmental factors influence aggressive and violent behavior.

Of course, like most young men and women of that era, I had grown up witnessing thousands of killings and other acts of aggression in a wide array of television shows and films. Today's youth are even more inundated with media violence than past generations, mostly from entertainment sources but also from news and educational media. And even though the public remains largely unaware of the conclusiveness of more than six decades of research on the effects of exposure to screen media violence, the scientists most directly involved in this research know quite a bit about these effects.

The briefest summary of hundreds of scientific studies can be boiled down to two main points. First, exposure to media violence is a causal risk factor for physical aggression, both immediately after the exposure and months, even years, later. Second, in the absence of other known risk factors for violence, high exposure to media violence will not turn a normal well-adjusted child or adolescent into a mass killer.

SOME DEFINITIONS One reason for much of the confusion and debate among even highly educated citizens, health care professionals and even a few scientists is that when media violence researchers use certain terms and concepts, they have somewhat different meanings than when the general public uses the same words.

By "aggression," researchers mean "behavior that is intended to harm another person who does not wish to be harmed." Thus, hitting, kicking, pinching, stabbing and shooting are types of physical aggression.

Playing soccer or basketball or even football with energy and confidence are not usually considered acts of aggression, even though that is what most coaches mean when they exhort their charges to "play aggressively." Somehow, the phrase "play assertively" doesn't have the same ring to it.

By "violent behavior," most modern aggression and violence scholars mean "aggressive behavior (as defined above) that has a reasonable chance of causing harm serious enough to require medical attention." Note that the behavior does not have to actually cause the harm to be classified as violent; shooting at a person but missing still qualifies as a violent behavior.

By "media violence" we mean scenes and story lines in which at least one character behaves aggressively towards at least one other character, using the above definition of "aggression," not the definition of "violence." Thus, television shows, movies, and video games in which characters fight (Power Rangers, for example), or say mean things about each other (often called relational aggression), or kill bad guys, all are instances of media violence, even if there is no blood, no gore, no screaming in pain. By this definition, most modern video games rated by the video game industry as appropriate for children — up to 90 percent, by some estimates — are violent video games.

AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE Short-term and long-term effects of violent media use on aggressive behavior have been demonstrated by numerous studies across age, culture, gender, even personality types. Overall, the research literature suggests that media violence effects are not large, but they accumulate over time to produce significant changes in behavior that can significantly influence both individuals and society.

For example, one of the longest duration studies of the same individuals found that children exposed to lots of violent television shows at age 8 later became more violent adults at age 30, even after statistically controlling for how aggressive they were at age 8.

Similar long-term effects (up to three years, so far) on aggressive and violent behavior have been found for frequent exposure to violent video games. One six-month longitudinal study found that frequent violent video game play at the beginning of a school year was associated with a 25 percent increase in the likelihood of being in a physical fight during that year, even after controlling for whether or not the child had been in a fight the previous year.

Short-term experimental studies, in which children are randomly assigned to either a violent or nonviolent media exposure condition for a brief period, conclusively demonstrate that the media violence effects are causal. In one such study, for example, children who played a child-oriented violent video game (i.e., no blood, gore, screaming …) later attempted to deliver 47 percent more high-intensity punishments to another child than did children who had been randomly assigned to play a nonviolent video game. Even cartoonish media violence increases aggression.

In recent years, there have been several intervention studies designed to test whether reducing exposure to screen violence over several months or longer can reduce inappropriate aggressive behavior. These randomized control experiments have found that, yes, children and adolescents randomly assigned to the media intervention conditions show a decrease in aggression relative to those in the control conditions.

HOW MEDIA VIOLENCE INCREASES AGGRESSION How does exposure to media violence lead to increased aggressive behavior? Media violence scholars have identified several basic psychological processes involved. They differ somewhat for short-term versus long-term effects, but they all involve various types of learning.

Short-term effects are those that occur immediately after exposure. The main ways that media violence exposure increases aggression in the short term are:

• Direct imitation of the observed behavior
• Observational learning of attitudes, beliefs and expected benefits of aggression
• Increased excitation
• Priming of aggression-related ways of thinking and feeling

In essence, for at least a brief period after viewing or playing violent media, the exposed person thinks in more aggressive ways, feels more aggressive, perceives that others are hostile towards him or her and sees aggressive solutions as being more acceptable and beneficial.

The short-term effects typically dissipate quickly. However, with repeated exposure to violent media, the child or adolescent "learns" these short-term lessons in a more permanent way, just as practicing multiplication tables or playing chess improves performance on those skills. That is, the person comes to hold more positive beliefs about aggressive solutions to conflict, develops what is sometimes called a "hostile attribution bias" (a tendency to view ambiguous negative events in a hostile way) and becomes more confident that an aggressive action on their part will work.

There also is growing evidence that repeated exposure to blood, gore and other aspects of extremely violent media can lead to emotional desensitization to the pain and suffering of others. In turn, such desensitization can lead to increased aggression by removing one of the built-in brakes that normally inhibits aggression and violence. Furthermore, this desensitization effect reduces the likelihood of pro-social, empathetic, helping behavior when viewing a victim of violence.

Interestingly, these same basic learning and priming effects account for the fact that exposure to nonviolent, pro-social media can lead to increased pro-social behavior.

SCREEN TIME EFFECTS For a number of years, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended very strict limits on children's exposure to any types of screen media, including TVs and computers, primarily because of concern about attention deficits. For example, they recommend that children under the age of 2 years have no exposure to electronic screens, even nonviolent media. Recent research with children, adolescents and young adults suggests that both nonviolent and violent media contribute to real-world attention problems, such as attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Furthermore, these attention problems are strongly linked to aggressive behavior, especially impulsive types of aggression.

Another emerging problem with video game usage goes by various addiction-related labels, such as video game addiction, internet addiction and internet/gaming disorder. Research across multiple countries and various measures of problematic game use suggests that about 8 percent of "gamers" have serious problems with their gaming habit. That is, their gaming activities interfere with significant aspects of their lives, such as interpersonal relationships, school or work activities. This newer research literature suggests that for some individuals, video game problems look much like gambling addiction.

MAGNITUDE OF HARM News media often report exaggerated claims about "the" cause of the most recent violent tragedy, whether it is a school shooting or another mass killing. Sometimes the cause that is hyped by these stories is violent video games; other times it is mental illness, or gun control, or lack of gun control.

Behavioral scientists (and reasonably thoughtful people in general) know that human behavior is complex, and it is affected by many variables. Violence researchers in particular know that such extreme events as homicide cannot be boiled down to a single cause. Instead, behavioral scientists (including violence scholars) rely on what is known as risk and resilience models, or risk and protective factors.

All consequential behavior is influenced by dozens (maybe hundreds) of risk and protective factors. In the violence domain, there are dozens of known risk and protective factors. Growing up in a violent household or seeing lots of violence in one's neighborhood are two such risk factors. Growing up in a nonviolent household and having warm, caring parents who are highly involved with child rearing are protective factors. From this perspective, exposure to media violence is one known risk factor for later inappropriate aggression and violence. It is not the most important risk factor; joining a violent gang is a good candidate for that title. But it also isn't the least important risk factor.

Indeed, some studies suggest that media violence exposure carries about the same risk potential as having abusive parents or antisocial parents. One major difference from other known risk factors for later aggression and violence is that parents and caregivers can relatively easily and inexpensively reduce a child's exposure to media violence.

WHY BELIEVE THIS ARTICLE? It is easy to find very vocal critics of the mainstream summary that I have presented in this article. A simple web search will generate links to any number of them. Many of the critics are supported by the media industries in one way or another, many are heavy users of violent media and so feel threatened by violence research (much like cigarette smokers once felt threatened by cancer research), some are threatened by anything they see as impinging on free-speech rights, and many are simply ignorant about the science. But, a few appear to have relevant scientific credentials. So, a reasonable question for a parent or health care professional to ask is why believe that exposure to media violence creates harmful effects, rather than maintain the much more comfortable position that there are no harmful effects.

The simple answer is this: Every major professional scientific body that has conducted reviews of the scientific literature has come to the same conclusion. This group includes the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the U.S. Surgeon General and the International Society for Research on Aggression, among others. I have posted these and other, similar reports online. 1

In 1972, former U.S. Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld, MD, testified before the U.S. Senate on his assessment of the research on TV violence and behavior: "It is clear to me that the causal relationship between televised violence and antisocial behavior is sufficient to warrant appropriate and immediate remedial action," he said. "There comes a time when the data are sufficient to justify action. That time has come." 2

In response to one or two vocal critics of the mainstream research community and perhaps to pressure from other groups, the American Psychological Association created a new media violence assessment panel in 2013 to assess the association's 2005 statement and update it. They took a very unusual step to avoid any appearance of bias by excluding all major mainstream media violence scholars from the panel. Instead, the panel was composed of reputable psychological science scholars with expertise in developmental, social and related psychology domains, along with leading meta-analysis statistical experts. Their report, released in 2015, confirmed what the mainstream media violence research community has been saying for years: There are real and harmful effects of violent media.

Violent media are neither the harmless fun that the media industries and their apologists would like you to believe, nor are they the cause of the downfall of society that some alarmists proclaim. Nonetheless, electronic media in the 21st century dominate many children's and adolescents' waking hours, taking more time than any other activity, even time in school and interactions with parents. Thus, electronic media have become important socializing agents, agents that have a measurable impact.

Many of the effects of nonviolent electronic media are positive, but the vast majority of violent media effects are negative. Parents and other caregivers can mitigate the harmful effects of violent media in several ways, such as by increasing positive or "protective" factors in the child's environment, and by reducing exposure to violent media. This is not an easy task, but it can be done with little or no expense. The benefits of doing so are healthier, happier, more successful children, adolescents and young adults.

CRAIG A. ANDERSON is Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology, and director of the Center for the Study of Violence, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.

• http://public.psych.iastate.edu/caa/StatementsonMediaViolence.html .
• Jesse Feldman, statement in hearings before Subcommittee on Communications of Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, Serial #92-52 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972) 25-27.

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‘Attack on press freedom’: Killing of broadcaster Percy Lapid ignites outcry

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This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

MEDIA KILLING. Percival Mabasa, better known as Percy Lapid, was shot dead on October 3, 2022.

Percy Lapid Fire's Facebook page

MANILA, Philippines – Calls for justice poured in on Tuesday, October 4, in the wake of the murder of broadcast journalist Percy Lapid by unidentified assailants the night before.

In a tweet, opposition figure and former vice president Leni Robredo said authorities should not be remiss in their duty to find answers on the death of the radio commentator, whose real name was Percival Mabasa.

“In a society that is truly free, there is no space for violence and suppression of journalists,” Robredo asserted in Filipino.

In the Senate, public information and mass media committee chairperson Robin Padilla echoed calls for the immediate arrest of the perpetrators.

“This murder of a media man is an attack on the right to freedom of expression that is enshrined in our Constitution,” Padilla said.

Senator Risa Hontiveros and former Bayan Muna representative Neri Colmenares, meanwhile, highlighted Lapid’s role as a dissenter who kept leaders’ powers in check.

“He spoke against fake news, he was brave enough to discuss the perils of red-tagging, and he was not afraid to speak against the historical distortions of Martial Law,” Colmenares said. “He was also supposed to be part of the petitioners in filing an indirect contempt petition versus former National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict spokesperson Lorraine Badoy.”

“This is a brazen attack on press freedom. But this also demonstrates the inherent power of speech and truth telling,” Hontiveros added in a separate statement.

The progressive Makabayan bloc in Congress pointed out that Lapid’s killing incidentally took place just a few days before President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. marks his 100 days in office.

“The culture of impunity is worsening in the country. We condemn this heinous act against Percy Lapid and we are calling for an impartial probe on the matter,” ACT Teachers Representative France Castro said.

Ang Probinsyano Representative Alfred delos Santos said his team will study how his proposed Magna Carta for media workers could be expanded to avoid tragedies like Lapid’s death.

“Journalists are also frontliners – routinely risking their lives by being one of the first people at an active crime scene, a disaster-stricken area, and even disease-ridden communities,” Delos Santos said in a statement.

Lapid was gunned down by unknown motorcycle-riding assailants while inside his vehicle in Las Piñas City on Monday, October 3.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said he is the second journalist to be killed under the Marcos Jr. administration, and the 197th since the 1986 EDSA uprising that restored Philippine democracy.

As of 2021, the Philippines was the world’s seventh worst country for unsolved killings of journalists, based on the global index of the New York-based media watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists. – Rappler.com

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Killing the media

There’s been no lack of effort to highlight “media killings” in the media. Periodically, we are subjected to stories about another media practitioner ambushed, gunned down (sometimes in the radio station itself) or even shot in front of his or her children.

There’s certainly been no lack of outrage about these deaths, including the 32 media men and women killed in the Maguindanao massacre in 2009.

But why, media people ask, has it been so difficult to sustain  public anger over the killing of media people? Given how everyone agrees about the importance and necessity of a free and unfettered media in the life of our democracy, why is it that the killing of media folk still continues? (Six journalists have been killed since P-Noy took office last year.)

Those were some questions raised during Media Nation 8, the annual “talk fest” that gathers media people of all stripes and inclinations to discuss issues that bedevil the profession and alert the community to developments (like new media and Wikileaks) that have an impact on our work.

A total of 80 media practitioners took part in Media Nation 8 over the weekend held at the Marco Polo Hotel in Cebu. This wasn’t just the first time the gathering was held outside Luzon, it was also marked by the greater number of provincial journalists attending, a development that brought a new dimension to the discussions, a greater awareness of the special risks inherent in the work of provincial journalists who make up the bulk of the victims.

Ed Lingao of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism noted that there have been 180 “media killings” since 1986, with 121 described as “in the line of duty,” that is, it was their work as media professionals that led to the victims’ deaths, as contrasted perhaps with media men or women killed as a result of, say, a land dispute or an extra-marital affair. Complicating matters is the definition of a “media person.” A great number of those killed were “block timers,” commentators who buy air time in provincial radio stations and engage in vitriolic attacks on politicians, usually the political opponents of their sponsors.

The distinctions being made drew heated responses. “Those block timers were among the most courageous opponents of martial law,” reminded Inday Espina Varona of ABS-CBN and the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines.

And even if they were acting as paid mouthpieces or attack dogs, others pointed out, it was still their media work that put them in the line of fire. “Journalists enjoy special protections in our society,” pointed out Vince Lazatin of the Transparency and Accountability Network, “and because of the nature of their work, they work in a bubble that is usually respected by most parties.”

Still, part of the discussions centered on the lack of professionalism and the absence of journalistic ethics among many journalists, a factor which may explain the lack of credibility of journalist-victims and of journalists in general. Which may also explain the lack of sympathy among members of the public, who at the same time already labor under the onus of “extrajudicial killings” that are taking place.

One other reason, said Jules Benitez of Minda News, is that the media have failed to communicate the bigger ramifications of every media killing. “This is not just an individual battle or an isolated killing,” he pointed out. “We need to look at it from a larger context—the killing of truth, the death of freedom.”

Readers may remember the Gulfin family of Tinton Falls, New Jersey, who were supposed to be deported to the Philippines as illegal immigrants, including their youngest son Miguel who was brought to the United States as a child and has not known any other home.

A week before their scheduled departure last Sept. 30, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) granted Carmelo and Aurelia Gulfin and Miguel a one-year reprieve “to afford them time to legalize their status,” wrote Edmund Silvestre, reporter for the Filipino Reporter.

The ICE decision was released Sept. 22 in a letter signed by John Tsoukaris, field office director of ICE Newark, N.J.

Tsoukaris’ letter was in response to the application for deferred action status filed by the Gulfins’ lawyer, J.T.S. Mallonga of Abad Constancio & Mallonga and the Filipino American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Mallonga said the latest development is “a big victory” for the Gulfins and their numerous supporters. But more is needed to be done such as having the ICE join the Gulfins in joint motion to reopen their old deportation case so that a relief can be introduced.

“It’s easier said than done, but we have to try,” Mallonga said.

An iPad 2 will go to a lucky participant in the latest installment of FPTI’s (Forecasting and Planning Technologies, Inc.) performance management series tomorrow, Oct. 5 (1 p.m.-5 p.m.) at the Bahia Room of Hotel Intercontinental Makati.

This special discovery session on the company’s latest gallery of business applications and mobile analytics are directed at middle managers and executives from IT, MIS, finance, accounting, sales and marketing, distribution and warehouse departments. Attendees will be provided unique and innovative business solutions critical in measuring an organization’s performance in the achievement of their sales, distribution and financial goals.

Among the afternoon’s speakers are FPTI president and chief executive officer Lofreda “Dada” Del Carmen and Gian Amurao, FPTI director for business development.

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Philippine E-Journals

Home ⇛ feu communication journal ⇛ vol. 5 no. 1 (2009), media killings and its influence on the journalistic practices of community journalists.

Edmund G. Centeno | Sheila Marie D. Flores

Discipline: Communications , Criminal Justice , Media

The long string of media killings in the Philippines can affect the practice of community journalism. This paper examines the editorial policies and behavior of community news organizations in the Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon provinces (collectively known as the CALABARZON) after a spate of killing of community journalists had occurred. It analyzes their journalistic practices to minimize the risk in their profession.

Though majority of the community journalists were affected by the killings, more than half said it did not influence their favorable view towards journalism as a profession. Majority of the media institutions retained their rules, regulations, and editorial policies. Self-regulation has become a norm among the practitioners. In broad strokes, there was a call for responsible journalism among those who worked with slain practitioners. The respondents did not view having guns as an answer to the increasing number of deaths in the rank of journalists. Instead, they consider forming a strong, vigilant, and united media organization as a better deterrent to the murder of journalists.

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Media killings and its influence on the journalistic practices of CALABARZON community journalists

• December 2009
• Far Eastern University Communication Journal 5(1)

• University of the Philippines Los Baños
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Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

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By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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Our Narrative of Mass Shootings Is Killing Us

Stories are where people have always gone to find meaning. We need to tell a new one.

Civilization’s oldest stories are war stories. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to The Iliad and The Aeneid , our attractions to war and to storytelling have often been entwined. We tell ourselves stories to impose order on chaotic events in our lives, to force a narrative onto the inconceivable. And what’s more inconceivable than slaughter, whether it arrives in the form of the Trojan War, the Holocaust, or the murder of 19 children by a teenage gunman in Uvalde, Texas?

Mass shootings in America have started to adhere to a predictable—even ritualized—sequence of events. We see the headline; there’s an initial estimate of the dead, which creeps upward as more details emerge; and we learn the name of the devastated community. Perhaps a day passes, maybe two, but the familiar argument soon surfaces as to whether the solution to the scourge of mass shootings is stricter gun laws or better mental health (as though the two are mutually exclusive). Simultaneously, we learn the grim details of the shooting itself, and at the center of those details is the protagonist: the shooter.

Read: ‘This is the price we pay to live in this kind of society’

In war, the victors write the history, placing themselves in the middle of the story as the good ones, the heroes. In narratives surrounding mass shootings, this dynamic is turned on its head. In Columbine and Sandy Hook, the bad guy sits at the center of the narrative. In Uvalde, we already know the name of the shooter. We know about his grandmother, about the truck he drove to the scene and crashed in a ditch, about the Facebook messages he posted before the attack, and about what his peers thought of him. We know more about the AR-15 he carried to the scene than the team of Border Patrol agents who killed him. We don’t know those agents’ names, but photos of the shooter have already graced the front pages of some newspapers. In a nation that worships celebrity (and infamy is a form of celebrity), the stories we tell ourselves about mass shootings contribute to the phenomenon.

What story does someone tell themselves when they decide to become a mass shooter? Grievance and alienation seem common themes. A classmate described the Charleston, South Carolina, Baptist-church shooter as having “a darkness to his life,” while a classmate said of the Newtown, Connecticut, shooter that “he just didn’t really connect.” The unmet desire on the part of many of these murderers to be at the center of a narrative, as opposed to on its periphery, is a unifying thread. Yes, easy access to firearms and a national mental-health crisis contribute to the incidence of mass shootings, but we’re already debating those issues vigorously. We pay far less attention to the ways in which our culture metabolizes narratives and makes sense of them.

In Poetics , Aristotle defines stories as acts of imitation. He explains that storytelling comes naturally to people from childhood because imitation “is how we learn our earliest lessons in life.” The reason we delight in storytelling, according to Aristotle, is “that we all enjoy understanding things.” But the link between storytelling and imitation has created a contagion of mass shootings across America. The next potential mass shooter is, right now, surely watching the coverage of Uvalde.

In 2015, researchers from Arizona State University and Northeastern Illinois University conducted a study of contagion in mass killings and shootings. The researchers found a measurable increase in the likelihood of a second mass shooting for 13 days after an initial mass shooting. (The Uvalde shooting occurred 10 days after the shooting in Buffalo, New York.) They also determined that an individual school shooting, on average, incited 0.22 more shootings; that is, for every five school shootings, a sixth would take place that would not otherwise have occurred. Both social and traditional media were also found to drive this contagion. Some activists are trying to highlight this problem, which falls outside the typical left-versus-right ideological debate about mass shootings. Groups like No Notoriety , which was founded by the parents of a victim of the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, advocate for “responsible media coverage for the sake of public safety.” The group’s website promotes a six-point media protocol that includes “Recognize that the prospect of infamy serves as a motivating factor for other individuals to kill and inspires copycat crimes.”

Read: Students should refuse to go back to school

Young people—particularly young men—often have a strong desire to be heroes. During the height of the Syrian civil war, the Pentagon stood up a task force to study and counter the Islamic State’s online recruitment strategy. At the time, U.S. officials were struggling to understand the potency of these efforts, not just in the Middle East but also in Western Europe. Despite the cultural isolation that many aggrieved Muslims felt in Europe, Pentagon planners were puzzled as to why so many would abandon a relatively comfortable existence to flock to the Islamic State’s banner and take part in a quixotic crusade in the Middle East.

The answer to the question should have been obvious, particularly to American war planners. Despite the risk of death, despite the atrocities, the Islamic State was selling a story , offering young men the chance to be the protagonist, the hero—or even the antihero—in a quest to create a new nation. The breathless and at times befuddled Pentagon statements on the Islamic State’s recruitment practices were remarkable to read, when those practices hewed so closely to those of the U.S. military, which had persuaded an entire generation of young men like me to fight a quixotic crusade in the Middle East after 9/11 to create new democratic nations in the region. Watching the narrative take shape, yet again, around this latest mass shooter, a narrative in which he is the protagonist, is unsurprising. Why an outcast living in a society that prizes notoriety would commit an atrocity that promises it is no great mystery.

Is it possible to change this narrative? To tell a different story?

After the July 2016 Bastille Day attacks in Nice, several French news organizations, exhausted by the string of mass killings in their country, shifted their coverage. They refused to reprint images from Islamic State propaganda or to publicize the name of the murderer. In an editorial titled “ Resisting the Strategy of Hate ,” Le Monde announced that it would “no longer publish photographs of the perpetrators of killings, to avoid the potential effect of posthumous glorification.”

No American-media consensus exists on how to cover mass shooters. Is the French approach not worth considering? Although some American newsrooms avoid republishing the images and names of shooters, many others continue to do so. In a study on mass shootings and media contagion, Jennifer Johnston, a psychology professor at Western New Mexico University, found that “identification with prior mass shooters made famous by extensive media coverage … is a more powerful push toward violence than mental health status or even access to guns.” A heightened awareness of the narratives we apply to mass shootings needs to be considered as a tool to combat this phenomenon, alongside attention to mental health and gun control. Murderous rage is not unique to America, but the expression of that rage is culturally determined, and so requires cultural countermeasures.

A sickness is sweeping our land; one of its symptoms is these shootings. A certain subset of young men is trying to bring meaning to their lives through gun violence. Stories are where people have always gone to find meaning. We need to tell a different story; the current one is killing us.

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Social media continue to be important political outlets for Black Americans

Social media platforms have served as venues for political engagement and social activism for many years , especially for Black Americans. This was evident again in 2020, when the killing of an unarmed Black man , George Floyd, by a White Minneapolis police officer resulted in widespread protests that demonstrated the reach and power of these platforms.

Across Pew Research Center surveys, Black social media users have been particularly likely to say that these sites are personally important to them for getting involved with issues they care about or finding like-minded people. They are also likely to express positive views about the impact of these platforms for holding powerful people accountable for their actions and giving a voice to underrepresented groups. The online community known as Black Twitter has long been using these platforms to collectively organize, offer support and increase visibility online for Black people and issues that matter to them.

Pew Research Center has long studied the use of social media for political engagement and online activism. This post on the impact of social media sites, and particularly how Black Americans view them and use them, is based largely on a survey of 4,708 adults conducted June 16-22, 2020 , and a survey of 10,211 adults from July 13-19, 2020 . Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology . Data from earlier Center research – based on a survey of 3,769 adults from February 29 to May 8, 2016 , and a survey of 4,594 adults from May 29 to June 11, 2018 – are also discussed throughout this post.

The impact of social media made itself felt after instances like the killing of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police in 2014 and the death of Freddie Gray after he sustained spinal injuries in the back of a Baltimore police van in 2015. Researchers from the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI) have found that supporters of the activism movement used Twitter, specifically, to share breaking news, circulate images and engage with news stories about corresponding protests.

Analysis by the Center of publicly available tweets, from both 2016 and 2018 , supports the idea that although race-related hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter are consistent on platforms like Twitter, spikes in the use of these hashtags often correspond with current events.

Black social media users are especially likely to use these sites for some forms of political activism

Though engaging in political behaviors and types of activism on these sites is not limited to any one group, Black social media users are often more likely than their counterparts from some other racial and ethnic backgrounds to engage in different types of political activities on social media and to believe these activities are more effective. Across four types of political activities asked about in a June 2020 survey , Black American social media users are among those most likely to use these platforms for activities related to causes and issues. 

The types of online activism engaged in by Black social media users varies by age, with younger Black users being more likely to do these things than older Black users. But overall, 48% of Black social media users said they posted a picture to show their support for a cause on social media in the month prior to the survey fielded June 16-22, 2020, while a similar share said the same about encouraging others to take action on issues that are important to them or looking for information about rallies or protests happening in their area. One-third of Black users reported using a hashtag related to a political or social issue on social media in the previous month.

Across some of these activities, Black Americans who use social media were more likely to have engaged in these activism-related behaviors on these sites in the past month when compared with those from other racial or ethnic backgrounds. For instance, Black users (45%) were more likely to  encourage others to take action on issues that were important to them when compared with White (30%) and Hispanic users (33%). The same was generally true across different groups when it came to posting a photo to show support for a cause.

In other cases, Black and Hispanic social media users both stood out from White users in using social media to look for information about rallies or protests happening in their area. Black and Hispanic users (45% and 46% respectively) used the platforms for this purpose, compared with 29% of White social media users.

At the same time, the use of social media for these political activities varies by age among Black Americans. About eight-in-ten Black users age 18 to 49 (79%) say they had done at least one of these activities in the month prior to the survey, compared with six-in-ten of those who are 50 and older (59%).

Across each individual activity asked about in June, younger Black social media users were more likely than older ones to say they had done these. For instance, 44% of Black social media users ages 18 to 49 said they used a hashtag related to a political or social issue on these platforms in the previous month, compared with 13% of those 50 and older. There are similar gaps between younger and older Black social media users across the other three activities – encouraging others to take action on issues that are important to them (52% vs. 31%), posting a picture to show their support for a cause (55% vs. 36%) and looking for information about rallies or protests happening near them (51% vs. 34%).

Many Black social media users find these platforms personally important and effective for political activism and express positive sentiments toward the sites

Substantial shares of Black social media users consider these sites at least somewhat personally important to them for purposes of finding others who share their views, getting involved with issues that are important to them and expressing their political opinions – and these figures have remained relatively consistent since the Center first asked these questions in a 2018 survey .

Their views also closely align with those of Hispanic users. For example, about half or more of Black and Hispanic adults who use social media say that these platforms are very or somewhat important to them for finding others who share their views and getting involved with political or social issues that are important to them, compared with about four-in-ten White users, according to June 2020 data . Similarly, about half of Black and Hispanic users say these sites are personally important to them when it comes to giving them a venue to express their political opinions, compared with smaller shares of White users (34%) who say the same.

Age is also a factor, with Black social media users age 18 to 49 being more likely to say social media are at least somewhat important to them for getting involved with issues that are important to them, compared with those 50 and older (65% vs. 51%).

Along with being among those most likely to engage in these online political activities and finding them personally important, majorities of Black Americans who use social media also say these sites are an effective tool for social and political advocacy, according to data from a July 2020 survey .

In most cases, Black, Hispanic and Asian American users stand out from White users in how effective they think social media are at achieving some social and political aims. About seven-in-ten Black, Hispanic and Asian users say social media are at least somewhat effective for changing people’s minds about political or social issues, compared with half of White users who say the same. These views generally hold true when influencing policy decisions and getting elected officials to pay attention to issues are considered. As to whether social media are seen as very or somewhat effective for creating sustained social movements, Black and Hispanic users (82% for both) are more likely to say this than White Americans (76%) who use these sites. Some 77% of Asian Americans who use social media say these sites are at least somewhat effective for this aim.

But online activism is only part of the story, as evidenced by the thousands of protesters who gathered offline in cities across the country this summer to protest anti-Black racism and to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Scholarly research has shown that online and offline activism are often integrated and are positively correlated. This research also suggests that in some cases participation in online activism can encourage offline protest by serving as a way to ease people into offline action and help them form their identity. Additionally, the author suggests that online and offline activities can be complementary over the course of a movement.

Research from the Center in 2016 also supports this analysis. That is, social media users who are highly politically engaged are more likely to do things online like follow candidates for office or other political figures or respond when someone posts something about politics that they disagree with when compared with users who have lower levels of political engagement.

In addition to considering these platforms effective tools for social and political advocacy, majorities of Black social media users also agree with positive statements about social media on traits such as the sites’ ability to highlight important issues and give a voice to underrepresented groups.

Across these positive statements, Black, Hispanic and Asian users often have more similar views than White users. Around three-quarters of Black, Hispanic and Asian users say the statement “social media help give a voice to underrepresented groups” describes social media very or somewhat well, compared with a smaller share of White users (58%) who agree, according to July 2020 data .

Black, Hispanic and Asian users are less likely than White Americans to say “social media make people think they are making a difference when they really aren’t” describes these sites at least somewhat well – though majorities across all groups say this. Black and Hispanic Americans also stand out in being less likely to say that social media distract people from issues that are truly important when compared with slightly larger shares of White users who agree. Black social media users are also less likely than Asian American users to say these sites distract people from truly important issues.

What do the tweets tell us?

Though online conversations about racial injustice and race relations seem to peak along with race-related events in national news, a Center study from 2016 found that race-related posts on Twitter are always happening and span a variety of subjects, including social activism, pop culture and personal experiences.

Survey work by the Center in 2016 also found that Black social media users are more likely to see race-related content on these platforms. Black social media users were more likely than White users to say that most of what they see on these sites is about race or race relations (24% vs. 6%). Hispanic users fall in between these two groups, with 14% saying that most of what they see on these sites is related to race.

Still, current events do often bring these conversations to the forefront of public consciousness. From the period of July 2013 through May 2018, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was used nearly 30 million times – often increasing along with responses to real-world events – according to 2018 Center analysis of public tweets.

In May of this year, an analysis of tweets by the Center found that days after the killing of Floyd by police, nearly 8.8 million tweets contained the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. After that initial peak, the number of tweets containing the hashtag remained above 2 million uses per day through June 7.

Though the Center analysis of tweets does not include demographic information about who is tweeting, a study by the Knight Foundation on the relationship between Black Twitter (and other sub-communities on social media) and the media supports some of these findings by suggesting that participants in these online communities often use Twitter to circulate and raise awareness of issues before media organizations or journalists take interest. And even before Twitter and other well-known social media sites were established, Black-centric blogs were known for pressuring media organizations to cover topics that were otherwise going unnoticed.

Work from other researchers, like those from CMSI , suggests that social media benefit marginalized populations – by both leveling the playing field and allowing people from these groups to pursue social change. The report also suggests that today’s youth are particularly drawn toward “digitally-enabled and cause-based” activism.

• Black Americans
• Civic Activities Online
• Online Activism
• Political & Civic Engagement
• Politics Online
• Race, Ethnicity & Politics
• Social Media

Brooke Auxier is a former research associate focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center .

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• v.107(3); Mar 2017

Mass Shootings: The Role of the Media in Promoting Generalized Imitation

J. N. Meindl took the lead in conceptualizing the topic and writing the text. J. W. Ivy contributed to developing the media suggestions and analysis. Both of the authors contributed to improving successive iterations of the text.

Mass shootings are a particular problem in the United States, with one mass shooting occurring approximately every 12.5 days.

Recently a “contagion” effect has been suggested wherein the occurrence of one mass shooting increases the likelihood of another mass shooting occurring in the near future. Although contagion is a convenient metaphor used to describe the temporal spread of a behavior, it does not explain how the behavior spreads. Generalized imitation is proposed as a better model to explain how one person’s behavior can influence another person to engage in similar behavior.

Here we provide an overview of generalized imitation and discuss how the way in which the media report a mass shooting can increase the likelihood of another shooting event. Also, we propose media reporting guidelines to minimize imitation and further decrease the likelihood of a mass shooting.

Mass shootings occur worldwide but are a particular problem in the United States. Despite being home to only 5% of the world’s population, roughly 31% of the world’s mass shootings have occurred in the United States. 1 As of 2015, a mass shooting resulting in the death of four or more people occurred approximately every 12.5 days. In addition to public massacres such as the shooting in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub in 2016, these figures include mass shootings related to gang activity or family slayings. Although there are many variables responsible for a mass shooting, and each instance is immediately precipitated by different events, the commonality is that a significant number of individuals are killed during the event.

Recently a contagion effect, similar to a “copycat” effect, has been suggested in mass shootings. This effect suggests that behaviors can be “contagious” and spread across a population. In the example of mass shootings, a contagion effect would be said to exist if a single mass shooting incident increased the likelihood of other instances of mass shootings in the near future. Contagion has been documented across a variety of other behaviors, including airplane hijackings, 2 smoking cessation, 3 and binge eating, 4 and has been well researched in relation to suicide. 5,6 There is now evidence that when a mass shooting occurs, there is a temporary increase in the probability of another event within the next 13 days on average. 7

Although understanding contagion allows for some degree of prediction that when one event occurs, a similar event is more likely to occur in the near future, it affords only prediction regarding temporal contiguity. The theory does not, for example, provide information on what factors might influence another person to commit a mass shooting or how the occurrence of a mass shooting can set the occasion for someone to commit a similar act.

CONTAGION VS GENERALIZED IMITATION

When applied to behavior, “contagion” is a metaphor borrowed from epidemiology to explain how behaviors can spread across a group of people. 8 Behaviors, however, are not diseases that can spread on contact. Essentially, contagion models an outcome—when someone engages in a behavior, there is a probability that someone else may do the same—but it does not describe the behavioral mechanism for the spread of the behavior. A better model is generalized imitation, which is well studied in the psychological literature 9 and can help explain the increased likelihood of people engaging in behaviors similar to those they have been made aware of or actually observed.

The difference between imitation and contagion is not merely one of semantics. Generalized imitation is the learned ability to perform behaviors that are similar to behaviors observed or described, even when performance is delayed. It is a skill that is acquired at an early age and gradually strengthened through many life experiences. Generalized imitation does not suggest that a person will always perform an exact copy of the model’s behavior; rather, it suggests that the person will perform a behavior with similar characteristics. For example, people imitating a boxer may not throw the same punches in the same sequence, but they will engage in similar boxing-like behaviors at a later point in the near future. If the likelihood of engaging in boxing-like behaviors were increased by observing someone else boxing, generalized imitation would be an important contributing factor.

Several variables affect generalized imitation. In general, people are more likely to imitate a model who is similar to themselves, particularly in terms of age and gender; who is of an elevated social status; who is seen being rewarded; and who is seen as competent. 10

THE ROLE OF MEDIA IN IMITATION

When mass shooters imitate other mass shooters, they are generally not imitating personally observed events (although this is possible in gang-related instances). In each case in which the event is unobserved, all information that could serve as a model for imitative behavior was provided via various media sources (legacy media, social media, new media), and research has demonstrated that media can influence imitation. 11 Not only do people often imitate behaviors that are portrayed in the media, the “reality” of the portrayal does not seem to have a significant influence. Imitation can occur regardless of whether the model is presented live, whether it is presented via film, 11 or even when the model’s behavior is merely described. 12

Importantly, the way that the media report an event can play a role in increasing the probability of imitation. When a mass shooting event occurs, there is generally extensive media coverage. This coverage often repeatedly presents the shooter’s image, manifesto, and life story and the details of the event, 13 and doing so can directly influence imitation.

Social status is conferred when the mass shooter obtains a significant level of notoriety from news reports. Images displaying shooters aiming guns at the camera project an air of danger and toughness. 14 Similarities between the shooter and others are brought to the surface through detailed accounts of the life of the shooter, with which others may identify. Fulfilled manifestos and repeated reports of body counts heap rewards on the violent act and display competence. Detailed play-by-play accounts of the event provide feedback on the performance of the shooter. All of these instances serve to create a model with sufficient detail to promote imitated mass shootings for some individuals.

DECREASING MASS SHOOTINGS: MEDIA AND IMITATION

If the manner with which the media (legacy, new, social) report a mass shooting event plays a role in promoting further mass shootings, changing these reporting methods could decrease imitation. This tactic has been effective in decreasing imitated suicide, 15 and the World Health Organization, citing 50 years of research on imitation, has posted media guidelines on reporting suicides to prevent imitational suicides. 16 The guidelines include suggestions such as not sensationalizing suicide (e.g., suggesting an “epidemic”), avoiding prominent headlines, not suggesting that suicide is caused by any single factor such as depression, not repeating the story too frequently, not providing step-by-step descriptions of methods, limiting use of photographs and videos, and being particularly careful with celebrity suicides.

Similar suggestions have been provided for reporting mass shootings. For instance, the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training team, in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has developed the “Don’t Name Them” campaign. The campaign aims to curb media-induced imitational mass shootings and suggests minimizing naming and describing the individuals involved in mass shootings, limiting sensationalism, and refusing to broadcast shooter statements or videos. James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, followed a similar strategy in describing the 2016 shooting in Orlando:

You will notice that I am not using the killer’s name and I will try not to do that. Part of what motivates sick people to do this kind of thing is some twisted notion of fame or glory, and I don’t want to be part of that for the sake of the victims and their families, and so that other twisted minds don’t think that this is a path to fame and recognition. 17

Adopting the recommendations of the World Health Organization and the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training team could help decrease the number of mass shootings in the United States.

There are additional strategies, suggested by research on generalized imitation, that media outlets might adopt to further minimize imitational mass shootings. One strategy could be to present the shooter’s actions in a negative light. Discussions of the actions of the shooter (e.g., preparation, planning, shooting) could portray these actions as shameful or cowardly. Associating observed behavior with punishment has been shown to decrease the likelihood of imitation. 18 Portraying the shooter’s behavior as shameful could decrease any perceived rewarding of the behavior, as emotional responses such as shame are generally not associated with positive outcomes.

A second strategy could be to avoid in-depth descriptions of the shooter’s rationale for engaging in the behavior. In general, people are more likely to imitate the behaviors of other people who they view as similar to themselves. When the media repeatedly describes a purported motive for the shooting they may inadvertently be pointing out similarities between the shooter and others that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. For example, stating that a shooter took revenge after years of bullying may portray a mass shooting as one possible response option for individuals experiencing bullying and with similar backgrounds as the shooter. Understanding the motive for a mass shooting is undoubtedly important, but in-depth descriptions of rationales may serve not only to inform but also to increase the likelihood of imitation.

A third strategy could be to reduce the overall duration of news coverage after a mass shooting. In the case of suicide, a dose–response relationship has been suggested wherein increased media coverage of a suicide event results in an increase in imitational suicides. 19 The same might be true for imitational mass shootings. There is a clamor for news after a mass shooting, and media coverage may continue for weeks. To the extent that media attention is perceived as rewarding the actions of the shooter through notoriety, thereby also increasing the social status of the shooter, decreasing overall media coverage may minimize the likelihood of imitation following a mass shooting event.

A fourth strategy could be to limit the use of live press events immediately following a mass shooting. Although there is a heightened desire for information in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting, this information does not necessarily need to be offered in a live event, which might increase the overall level of “excitement” surrounding the event. Instead, information could be released via written updates. Not only would this minimize perceived reward, it might actually serve to decrease overall interest in the event, which might further curb imitation.

Similarly, it is important that new outlets present only the facts of a mass shooting rather than attempting to produce entertaining or dramatic digital re-creations of the event. There should be a clear attempt on the part of the media to reduce the frenetic energy or emotion of a “breaking news story.” Instead, the bare facts of the event should be conveyed in a straightforward or even dull manner to minimize interest in the event. Sensationalism should be avoided.

Finally, media reports should avoid providing detailed accounts of the actions of a mass shooter before, during, or after the event. Describing the shooter’s actions in extensive detail, or through graphical presentations, may provide additional information regarding the behaviors that might further prompt imitation. Instead, only the details necessary to describe the event should be provided. The less the behavior is described, the less likely it is to be imitated.

CONCLUSIONS

A mass shooting is a complex and destructive act that occurs as a result of many factors. One factor that is relevant to the spread of mass shootings and other “contagious” behaviors is generalized imitation. In instances of mass shootings, the media appear largely responsible for providing the model to imitate. Although there are a variety of strategies that could function in tandem to alter the likelihood of a mass shooting, changing the way the media report mass shootings is one important step in preventing and reducing imitation of these acts. Furthermore, it is likely that media-prompted imitation extends beyond mass shootings. A media effect has been shown with suicide, is implied in mass shootings, and may play a role in other extreme events such as home-grown terrorism and racially motivated crimes.

The responsibility for these acts does not reside with the media, but the media are an important vector for the spread of such behaviors. Changing the way in which the media report a mass shooting could be difficult given that sensationalizing a tragic event brings in both viewers and revenue, which is a powerful incentive. In addition, the continual creation and expansion of social and new media platforms may make change more difficult because, in these instances, individuals rather than larger corporate entities develop and disseminate media. Given the numerous media outlets that exist and the various motivations behind the posting of content, it is unlikely that the reforms suggested here could be effectively mandated.

However, public pressure could be exerted on the various media outlets and individual contributors to change their reporting tactics. In the case of new and social media, this same pressure could influence the various platforms to provide guidelines regarding uploaded content related to a mass shooting. The first step toward building this public pressure is to make the general public aware of the link between the media and generalized imitation, as well as the role the media play in unknowingly perpetuating acts of violence.

Media Influence on Crime: a Double-Edged Sword

How it works

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Media as an Informative Tool
• 3 Media and Stereotyping
• 4 Media and Crime Imitation
• 5 Media’s Role in Crime Prevention
• 6 Conclusion

Introduction

You know, the link between media and crime is pretty complicated. It’s something that scholars, policymakers, and just regular folks have been talking about for a while. Media, in all its shapes and forms, plays a huge role in how we see crime, how policies are made, and it might even mess with people’s behavior. Whether we’re talking about news, movies, TV shows, or social media, how crime is shown can sometimes help us understand what’s happening, but it can also give us the wrong idea.

This essay digs into how media affects crime, looking at how it can make us more aware, spread stereotypes, or even encourage bad behavior. We’ll try to figure out both the good and bad sides of media’s impact on crime and what that means for all of us.

Media as an Informative Tool

One big job of the media is to keep us in the loop about what’s going on, including crime. When news outlets report on crimes, it helps us stay aware and maybe a bit more careful. Like, if there’s a crime spree in your town, knowing about it might make you lock your doors at night. Plus, investigative journalism can dig up problems in the police or justice system, pushing for changes. Keeping people informed is super important in a democracy because it helps us make better decisions and stick together as a society.

Media and Stereotyping

But, let’s not pretend media is all good. It can also spread nasty stereotypes and biases. Often, media shows certain racial or ethnic groups as criminals more than others, which can make people hold unfair views and treat others badly. Research shows that media tends to highlight violent crimes by minorities while ignoring similar crimes by majority groups. This skewed view can stigmatize whole communities. And the way crime is sensationalized can make it seem like crime is way more common or severe than it actually is, scaring people more than necessary.

Media and Crime Imitation

Another issue is the so-called “copycat effect,” where media coverage of crimes can inspire others to do the same thing. When high-profile crimes get a lot of attention, some folks might try to copy them, looking for fame or recognition. Mass shootings, for instance, have sometimes been linked to previous ones that got a lot of media coverage. Detailed reporting on these crimes can give wannabe criminals a step-by-step guide. It’s hard to prove that media exposure directly causes crime, but the risk of imitation means media should be careful about how they report these stories.

Media’s Role in Crime Prevention

On the flip side, media can help prevent crime too. Public service announcements, educational shows, and awareness campaigns on TV, radio, or online can teach people about safety, encourage good behavior, and offer help to those who need it. Take campaigns against drunk driving, domestic abuse, or cybercrime—they use media to reach lots of people and make a positive impact. By showing successful interventions and fostering community involvement, media can help create a culture that tackles the root causes of crime.

So, media’s influence on crime is really a mixed bag. It can inform us and push for accountability, but it can also spread stereotypes and spark copycat crimes. This dual nature means we need a balanced approach, focusing on ethical journalism, responsible reporting, and media literacy for everyone. By understanding media’s power and using it wisely, we can lessen the bad stuff and boost the good, making our world a bit safer and more informed.

Cite this page

Media Influence on Crime: A Double-Edged Sword. (2024, Sep 17). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/media-influence-on-crime-a-double-edged-sword/

"Media Influence on Crime: A Double-Edged Sword." PapersOwl.com , 17 Sep 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/media-influence-on-crime-a-double-edged-sword/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Media Influence on Crime: A Double-Edged Sword . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/media-influence-on-crime-a-double-edged-sword/ [Accessed: 18 Sep. 2024]

"Media Influence on Crime: A Double-Edged Sword." PapersOwl.com, Sep 17, 2024. Accessed September 18, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/media-influence-on-crime-a-double-edged-sword/

"Media Influence on Crime: A Double-Edged Sword," PapersOwl.com , 17-Sep-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/media-influence-on-crime-a-double-edged-sword/. [Accessed: 18-Sep-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Media Influence on Crime: A Double-Edged Sword . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/media-influence-on-crime-a-double-edged-sword/ [Accessed: 18-Sep-2024]

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• Social media

Is social media destroying creativity?

• April 7, 2022

There’s no doubt that social media has had a profound impact on the way we communicate. out of 7 billion people,50% of the people use social media . social media has introduced us to a whole new world of opportunities and brought tones of benefit to people’s lives . like:

• Discover new ideas and trends
• Connect with an existing and new audience in deeper ways
• Bring attention and traffic to your work
• Build a craft and enhance your brand
• Follow and share inspiring stories
• Connect loved ones

Although it has created a lot of opportunities as we say it’s a channel of communication, despite this advantage, social media has many disadvantages.

Some people worry that it might be having an adverse effect on our creativity is social media killing creativity ? or it’s simply changing the way we express ourselves?

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at both sides of the argument and see if we can come to conclusion then stay with us.

Table of Contents

What is Social Media?

The websites and applications that are focused on communication we call social media. each social media such as Instagram, Youtube, and telegram, focuses on one specific action, and many people these days are working with them.

So there are many important things for those who work with them as example you can have a great design for your social media. the good news these days about designing social media is that you can find agencies that design the best social media pages or posts as soon as possible if you need any help in these cases I recommend you check temis samples in social media design and order .

You may like: What Is Social Media Designing?

The impact of social media on creativity

Some people argue that social media is destroying creativity because it encourages us to copy each other rather than come up with original ideas. After all, why bother being creative when you can just steal someone else’s idea and pass it off as your own? This might be true to some extent, but it’s important to remember that social media is just a tool. It’s up to us how we use it.

You may like : Why Social Media Is So Attractive For Consumers

If we only ever consume other people’s content and never create anything ourselves, then yes, social media will probably have a negative impact on our creativity. But if we use social media as a way to share our own ideas and connect with other creative people, then it can actually be a force for good.

How social media can inhibit creativity?

Social media can be a great tool for connecting with friends and family, but it can also have a negative impact on creativity. A study by the University of Pennsylvania found that people who use social media are less likely to come up with new ideas, and are more likely to conform to group norms. The study found that social media users were more likely to give up on a task when they encountered difficulty, and were less likely to persist in trying to find a solution. The study’s authors suggest that social media may make it harder for people to think outside the box and that the constant stream of information from social media can be overwhelming and lead to decision fatigue. If you want to be more creative, it might be worth taking a break from social media. You could also try using social media to connect with people who share your interests, and who can help you brainstorm new ideas.

In addition, social media might lead to less face-to-face interaction, which can also reduce creativity.

A study by the University of Michigan found that people who spend more time on social media are less likely to come up with new ideas, and are more likely to have trouble coming up with original solutions to problems. The study’s authors suggest that social media may lead to “cognitive overload,” and that people may be so busy processing information from social media that they have less brain power available for creative thinking. If you want to be more creative, try spending less time on social media, and more time interacting with people in person. You could also try using social media to connect with people who share your interests, and who can help you brainstorm new ideas.

You may like : How To Make A Template Instagram Post In Photoshop

Ways to overcome the negative effects of social media on creativity

If you’re worried that social media is having a negative effect on your creativity, there are some things you can do to counteract it. First, try to limit the amount of time you spend on social media each day. You don’t have to delete your accounts, but if you cut down on the time you spend scrolling through them, you’ll have more time to focus on your own creative projects.

Second, make an effort to follow and interact with people who inspire you. If you fill your newsfeed with negativity, it’s going to bring you down. But if you surround yourself with positive, creative people, it can actually help to spark your own creativity.

The importance of creativity in the workplace

In today’s economy, creativity is more important than ever. With so much competition, businesses need to find ways to stand out from the crowd. And one of the best ways to do that is by harnessing the power of creativity.

Tips for enhancing creativity through social media

If you want to use social media to enhance your creativity, there are a few things you can do. First, try following people who inspire you. When you see their work, it will hopefully spur you on to create something yourself. Second, share your own work regularly. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect – the important thing is that you’re putting yourself out there and showing your creative side. Lastly, don’t be afraid to interact with other creatives. Collaborating with others is a great way to come up with new ideas and push your creativity to the next level. ( rentalry.com )

So, Is social media destroying creativity? It’s hard to say for sure. But what we do know is that it has the potential to both harms and enhance our creativity. It’s up to us to use it in a way that will benefit us, rather than hinder our ability to think outside the box.

The most important note that you should know is that all of these points that we talk about in this blog post depend on how you use social media so there is no need to worry about the disadvantages of using it. cause you can also work with social media and earn money or you can find friends all of these aspects depend on how you use your social media pages and I recommend you work with your social media accounts as much as you can and with any arts that you have.

For more helps my colleagues in temis marketing are here to help you in many ways such as:

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There are 2 ways the media covers mass shootings. Here's why the difference matters

Sacha Pfeiffer

Jonaki Mehta

Patrick Jarenwattananon

The front page of the local newspaper is seen in the media area outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 26. Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

The front page of the local newspaper is seen in the media area outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 26.

What is the role of journalists when covering America's mass shooting crisis, and how can they responsibly report on tragedies like the recent shootings in Uvalde, Buffalo and Tulsa?

Those are complicated but crucial questions to answer, says Dannagal Young, a University of Delaware professor who studies the impact that news stories have on the public.

In particular, her research looks at whether the media has a bias in favor of covering specific events and individual people, instead of looking more broadly at what leads to tragedies such as mass shootings.

This difference is called episodically framed stories versus thematically framed stories.

Young unpacks why this matters, how the media should cover mass shootings, and the one question she says journalists should ask themselves.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

On episodically vs. thematically framed news stories

There was work that came out in the early '90s looking at whether or not the way that news stories are told could affect the kind of attributions of responsibility that viewers or readers might make. So, if you tell a news story about individual people, individual problems, really following that story narrative arc, is it possible that you're actually going to encourage those readers and listeners to attribute responsibility and look for solutions at the level of the individual in the story?

People visit memorials for victims of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images hide caption

People visit memorials for victims of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

On whether the Uvalde shooting was covered more episodically or more thematically

I think it depends on what outlets we're talking about. I have seen a whole lot of attention paid to more thematically framed coverage that looks at the history of gun control in the United States, rates of gun violence broken out by state, etc. Those thematically framed stories contextualize what happened in Texas within a broader framework — a political framework, a cultural framework, a historical framework. That's thematic.

Uvalde elementary school shooting

The tragic history of police responding too late to active shooters.

However, as the story began to unfold, and we did learn about failures at the level of the Uvalde Police and the school police in particular, some of those stories really began to focus on the individual people, as opposed to thinking more broadly about gun violence as an epidemic in the United States.

On how people understand news differently when it's more episodic and less thematic

When a story is told in terms of individual people, our brains are going to be activating constructs about this person in this place at this time. And we're naturally going to want to also protect ourselves and say, "Well, this awful thing wouldn't happen to me, because look it happened over there to those people in this place." And we're going to extrapolate from that and say, "If I don't do these things, I'm not in this place, and I'm not those people, this will not happen to me."

As opposed to when covered more thematically, broadly, in terms of systemic factors that may contribute to this trend, that is going to encourage people to think: What could the system do? What kind of legislation might be passed to address this issue?

Buffalo Police on scene at the Tops Friendly Market on May 14 in Buffalo after a gunman opened fire. John Normile/Getty Images hide caption

Buffalo Police on scene at the Tops Friendly Market on May 14 in Buffalo after a gunman opened fire.

On the question all journalists should ask themselves

The question that I wish that all journalists would always ask themselves is: What is going to help Americans understand not just this day, but this broader issue? What is going to help them figure out what action they might be able to take? What legislation might be able to come about? Those are the questions that need to be asked.

In Texas, Moms Demand Action got more than 20,000 new supporters after Uvalde

On whether she thinks journalists can do this without sounding like advocates in an inappropriate way

I do. Because it sounds as though I'm just talking about how we need to all talk about gun legislation and gun reform. But there are also conversations that need to be had about how we deal with mental health issues in this country, and how we deal with extremist groups in this country. Those are all conversations that would help Americans get closer to an understanding not just of the event, but of the broader issues underlying the event.

A toxic chemical was blamed for killing thousands of Teesside crabs – but our study explains why pyridine wasn’t the culprit

Professor of Biology, University of Portsmouth

Professor in Environmental Chemistry, Lancaster University

Professor of Environmental Chemistry, University of Plymouth

Disclosure statement

Alex Ford is an academic and receives funding from Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), European Union, Water Companies and NGOs. He was a independent panel member appointed by DEFRA to the Crustacean Mortality Expert Panel (CMEP).

Crispin Halsall receives funding from Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grants.

Mark Fitzsimons is a Professor of Environmental Chemistry at the University of Plymouth, UK. He receives funding from The Natural Environment Research Council, European Union and various UK charities supporting research. He was an independent panel member appointed by DEFRA to the Crustacean Mortality Expert Panel (CMEP).

Lancaster University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

University of Portsmouth and University of Plymouth provide funding as members of The Conversation UK.

View all partners

In October 2021, thousands of dead and dying crabs and lobsters washed up along 45 miles (70km) of coastline in north-east England. This mass-mortality event coincided with the redevelopment of one of the UK’s largest ports at Teesside.

At the time, many local environment groups and fishers believed that dredging had released a toxic chemical known as pyridine, an industrial substance thought to have settled in the water’s sediment, resulting in this mass-scale death of crustaceans.

But our recent research outlines why this “pyridine hypothesis” is wrong. It was based on inaccurate and unpublished science, and the theory was propagated through mistrust in government, toxic local politics, and inaccurate media coverage.

An investigation by the government bodies the Environment Agency (EA) and the Centre of Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) could not determine the cause of death, but speculated it could have been an algal bloom. Various interim reports from this investigation were published between December 2021 and May 2022. In spring 2022, consultants funded by the fishing industry analysed the EA data from those interim reports, and proposed pyridine as a cause.

Pyridine had been widely used in industrial processes and was historically manufactured in the area. Results from EA tests showed that pyridine concentrations were high in some crabs near Teesside, but not significantly different from other locations in the UK.

The EA had used a technique to detect pyridine in crab tissue which was designed for water samples, and warned its results might not be accurate. It had also only looked at four crabs close to where deaths had occurred, and compared these with four crabs elsewhere in the UK.

This was a very low number to be statistically confident in the results. Yet, for those who believed the crab and lobster deaths were caused by dredging, this data was the “smoking gun”.

Other potential explanations from government agencies were not believed by local environmental campaigners and opposition parties, and some newspaper articles started to suggest a cover-up .

When unpublished data from Newcastle, Durham and York universities was presented in October 2022 to a cross-party government committee , the researchers behind this data claimed that pyridine was “exceptionally toxic” to crabs, and that dying crabs exposed to pyridine display twitching behaviour similar to that observed on the beaches.

Read more: Dead crustaceans washing up on England’s north-east coast may be victims of industrial revival

A non-peer-reviewed study by this team claimed that a simulation of dredged material drifting down the coast mirrored the mortality event. They believed that dredging had unearthed large reservoirs of pyridine from within the sediment, left there by past industrial processes, which then swept down the coastline killing crustaceans due to its exceptional toxicity.

Some MPs called for an independent investigation into crab deaths and a pausing of the Teesside redevelopment.

However, the subsequent report – published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in January 2023, written by independent scientists including ourselves – deemed the pyridine hypothesis “very unlikely”. It also ruled out other potential causes of the crustacean die-off including algal blooms, deoxygenation, chemical spills and unusual weather events.

But the report was unable to rule out parasites or disease, as a comprehensive analysis of different potential pathogens had not taken place. While it noted that other global mortality events had reported unusual twitching and tremors in crabs dying with infections from viruses and bacteria, there wasn’t enough evidence to prove or disprove disease as a cause of these deaths.

Having taken part in this independent inquiry, we, along with other scientists, immediately encountered considerable scepticism from politicians and media. The Times reinforced the pyridine hypothesis and the inaccurate claim that “dead crabs contained 40 times more pyridine than control crabs”, stating that our independent panel “did not merit the name”.

Channel 4 News, a broadcaster that commissioned special reports about the pyridine hypothesis , also questioned whether the panel was independent . Some journalists and politicians serving on the cross-party committee suggested we had deliberately made an alternative disease hypothesis to cover up for the government.

Even a nature charity, the RSPB, tweeted : “The results are clear, pyridine is extremely toxic to crabs.”

And it was not only scientists on the independent panel who were criticised. Those scientists who had earlier presented the pyridine hypothesis also received some unsavoury tweets when our panel’s report was released.

The idea that politically independent scientists from universities, research laboratories and consultancies had colluded on a fictitious report is, in our view, preposterous and unprofessional. Our recent peer-reviewed paper outlines why we reject the pyridine hypothesis for five key reasons.

1) Evidence that crabs contained high levels of pyridine is weak

Re-analysis of crab tissues by Cefas using an optimised methodology found low levels of pyridine and no significant difference between the affected areas in north-east England and other parts of the UK.

2) Pyridine is no more toxic to crustaceans than to other wildlife

Claims that pyridine is “exceptionally toxic” to crustaceans when exposed in milligram/litre concentrations are not accurate. There are many contaminants present in the environment which can kill crustaceans in nanogram/litre concentrations, which are 1 million-fold lower than the milligrams/litre concentrations of pyridine found to kill crustaceans.

We found that the non-peer-reviewed study based predictions of crab deaths on inaccurate toxicity calculations – probably because the number of crabs used in its experiments was too low.

3) Pyridine has never been recorded at concentrations likely to cause acute toxicity

The non-peer-reviewed study predicted no effect on crabs at pyridine concentrations below 20,000 micrograms/litre. The highest pyridine concentration ever recorded in the Tees estuary is 2.4 micrograms/litre in 2012, at a time when it was being actively manufactured and discharged under licence by the EA. This value is still approximately 400,000 times lower than the average values predicted to kill 50% of crustacean populations based on published literature.

4) Pyridine does not stick to sediments

Pyridine is a compound which breaks down very quickly – it doesn’t particularly adsorb or stick to sediments, so is unlikely to settle and accumulate on the seabed. Large reservoirs of pyridine in the sea sediment are therefore highly unlikely.

5) Pyridine wouldn’t persist long enough to cause mass deaths along a 45-mile stretch of coastline

Pyridine was not detected in the seawater at the time of the mass death, and concentrations in sediments were too low to be deemed toxic according to our research. Even modelling of a hypothetical spill of 20,000 litres of pyridine did not result in concentrations that would realistically cause acute toxicity. The claim that this compound could kill crustaceans along a 45-mile stretch of coastline without detection is unfounded.

Unfortunately, neither the EA, Cefas nor the independent inquiry could determine a causal factor in the deaths of the crustaceans. Mistrust in the government led to a lack of trust in these public bodies. Broadcast and print media promoted unpublished research which hadn’t undergone rigorous scientific scrutiny with, we believe, an unusual degree of confidence.

We argue that this presents a problem for those serving on the cross-party committee and for wider society, who need politicians to make informed decisions based on the best available science. The committee’s decisions need to be based on rigorously tested scientific evidence, not politics.

Since 2021, there have been further dramatic shifts in the ecosystem of the waters around Teesside, such as major increases in the numbers of mussel beds and starfish . Climate change is also bringing new pressures on marine habitats, and exacerbating existing pressures from water quality, disease, coastal development and fishing.

We will probably never know the cause of the Teesside crustacean mortality event, unless something similar happens again. But better monitoring of our coastal environments is imperative. Only then can scientists understand what happens when potentially millions of keystone species across miles of coastline are disturbed or removed.

• Marine life
• Industrial pollution
• UK wildlife
• Chemical pollution

Research Fellow Community & Consumer Engaged Health Professions Education

Professor of Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries (Identified)

Communications Director

University Relations Manager

2024 Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellowships

Pagers Explode Across Lebanon in Apparent Attack on Hezbollah

The attack killed 11 people, including a young girl. Officials briefed on the operation say Israeli operatives planted explosives in pagers Hezbollah bought from a Taiwanese company. Israel declined to comment.

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Patrick Kingsley Euan Ward and Ronen Bergman

Here are the latest developments.

Hundreds of pagers blew up at the same time across Lebanon on Tuesday in an apparently coordinated attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militant group in the region, Lebanese and Hezbollah officials said.

The Israeli military declined to comment, but American and other officials briefed on the operation said Israel was responsible for the attack and had executed it by hiding small amounts of explosive material in each pager within a new batch of pagers made in Taiwan and imported into Lebanon.

The attack came a day after Israeli leaders had warned that they were considering stepping up their military campaign against Hezbollah, which has been firing on northern Israel since last year in solidarity with Hamas and its war with Israel in Gaza.

Hezbollah accused Israel of orchestrating the attack on Tuesday and vowed to retaliate for what it called “blatant aggression.”

The wave of explosions left many people in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, in a state of confusion and shock. Witnesses reported smoke coming from people’s pockets, followed by small blasts that sounded like fireworks or gunshots. Amateur footage broadcast on Lebanese television showed chaotic scenes at hospitals, as wounded patients with mangled hands and mutilated faces sought treatment. Sirens blared throughout the city.

Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, characterized the attack as “criminal Israeli aggression” and called it “a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty.” Here is what else to know:

Thousands injured: Officials said that the death toll had risen to 11 people. Hezbollah said at least eight of its fighters had been killed. Lebanon’s Ministry of Health said that a young girl was also among those killed and that more than 2,700 others were injured. Lebanon’s health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said many of the victims had injuries to their faces, particularly the eyes, as well as to their hands and stomachs. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini , suffered injuries to his hand and face when a pager he was carrying exploded, according to Iranian state news media reports.

Hezbollah’s pagers targeted : Three officials briefed on the attack said that the operation had targeted hundreds of pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives who have used such devices for years to make it harder for their messages to be intercepted. The use of pagers had became even more widespread after the Oct. 7 attacks, when Hezbollah’s chief warned that Israeli intelligence had penetrated the cellphone network, security experts said. The devices were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Escalating conflict : The blasts appeared to be the latest salvo in an 11-month conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that began last October, after Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, began firing into Israeli territory in solidarity with its ally, Hamas, which is also backed by Iran. The conflict has largely remained contained to exchanges of missiles and rockets, but for months, leaders on either side have warned that it could expand into a war involving ground forces.

Assassination attempt : On Tuesday afternoon, before the pager explosions in Lebanon, the Israeli military had accused Hezbollah of attempting to assassinate a retired senior member of the country’s security services with an explosive device that could be remotely detonated from Lebanon. The same operatives were behind a similar attempted attack in Tel Aviv last year, the military said.

Syrian attacks: In Syria, at least 14 people were injured by pager explosions in the apparently coordinated attack on Hezbollah, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor.

Pager danger: Lebanon’s health ministry has put all hospitals in Lebanon on “maximum alert,” and has requested citizens to discard their pagers.

Johnatan Reiss and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

Anushka Patil

Lebanon’s health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said on Tuesday evening that health officials were beginning to direct the injured to medical facilities outside of Beirut and its southern suburbs, where hospitals are overwhelmed, state news media reported.

One of those hospitals, the American University of Beirut Medical Center, said earlier Tuesday that it had received more than 160 “seriously injured” people in the span of three hours and that more were on their way.

The World Health Organization said it was assisting hospitals in Lebanon and providing supplies because many health facilities were at capacity with injured patients. The U.N.’s public health agency described the situation as an “emergency,” according to a statement.

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Sheera Frenkel and Ronen Bergman

Israel planted explosives inside new beepers sold to Hezbollah, officials say.

Israel carried out its operation against Hezbollah on Tuesday by hiding explosive material within a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation.

The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AR924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.

The explosive material, as little as one to two ounces, was implanted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. A switch was also embedded that could be triggered remotely to detonate the explosives.

At 3:30 p.m. in Lebanon, the pagers received a message that appeared as though it was coming from Hezbollah’s leadership, two of the officials said. Instead, the message activated the explosives. Lebanon’s health minister told state media at least 11 people were killed and more than 2,700 injured.

The devices were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding, according to three of the officials.

The American and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the operation.

Hezbollah has accused Israel of orchestrating the attack but has described limited details of its understanding of the operation. Israel has not commented on the attack, nor said it was behind it.

On Wednesday, Gold Apollo sought to distance itself from the devices used in the attack, saying that they had been made by another manufacturer, B.A.C. Consulting, which Gold Apollo said had an address in Budapest and made the pagers under a license. Efforts to contact B.A.C. were not immediately successful, and calls to a number listed on its website rang unanswered.

Independent cybersecurity experts who have studied footage of the attacks said it was clear that the strength and speed of the explosions were caused by a type of explosive material.

“These pagers were likely modified in some way to cause these types of explosions — the size and strength of the explosion indicates it was not just the battery,” said Mikko Hypponen, a research specialist at the software company WithSecure and a cybercrime adviser to Europol.

Keren Elazari, an Israeli cybersecurity analyst and researcher at Tel Aviv University, said the attacks had targeted Hezbollah where they were most vulnerable.

Earlier this year, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, strictly limited the use of cellphones, which he saw as increasingly vulnerable to Israeli surveillance, according to some of the officials as well as security experts.

“This attack hit them in their Achilles’ heel because they took out a central means of communication,” Ms. Elazari said. “We have seen these types of devices, pagers, targeted before but not in an attack this sophisticated.”

Over 3,000 pagers were ordered from the Gold Apollo company in Taiwan, said several of the officials. Hezbollah distributed the pagers to their members throughout Lebanon, with some reaching Hezbollah allies in Iran and Syria. Israel’s attack affected the pagers that were switched on and receiving messages.

It remained unclear on Tuesday precisely when the pagers were ordered and when they arrived in Lebanon.

As people gathered to donate blood at Red Cross centers across Lebanon on Tuesday, various medical professional groups called on their members, including oral surgeons, pharmacists and veterinarians, to report to local hospitals and provide what help they could, state media reported.

Hwaida Saad

Hezbollah told The New York Times that six of the nine people killed in the coordinated pager explosions were Hezbollah fighters.

The death toll has risen to at least nine killed, according to the U.N.’s special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert. “The developments today mark an extremely concerning escalation,” she said in a statement.

A doctor who visited hospitals in Sidon where some of the wounded were taken said so many people have suffered wounds to their eyes that there is a shortage of eye surgeons. The doctor, Abdulrahman al Bizri, said the hospitals he visited were flooded with people who have injured eyes, faces and hands, and the medical staffs are struggling to treat them all. “The eye injuries won’t be easy and need long treatment,” he said.

At least 14 people in Syria were injured by pager explosions in the apparently coordinated attack on Hezbollah, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor.

Laurence Tan

Medics collected blood donations in Sidon and Beirut’s southern suburbs on Tuesday after hundreds of pagers blew up at the same time in an apparently coordinated attack across Lebanon.

Schools across Lebanon will be closed on Wednesday, Lebanese state media said, citing a statement from the country’s minister of education, Abbas Al-Halabi.

Farnaz Fassihi

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon is injured in the attack, state media reports.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, lost one eye and severely injured his other eye when a pager he was carrying exploded in a simultaneous wave of blasts targeting wireless electronic devices, according to two members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps briefed on the attack.

The Guards members, who had knowledge of the attacks and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Amini’s injuries were more serious than Iran initially reported and that he would be medevacked to Tehran for treatment.

Hossein Soleimani, the editor in chief of Mashregh, the main Revolutionary Guards news website, confirmed the extent of Mr. Amini’s injuries in a post on X . “Unfortunately the injuries sustained by Iran’s ambassador were extremely severe and in his eyes,” Mr. Soleimani wrote.

A video of Mr. Amini being transported to the hospital, published by Iranian news media outlets, shows him on a chaotic Beirut street with his eyes covered by bandages and the front of his white shirt covered in blood.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, condemned the attack in a call with Lebanon’s foreign minister and said Iran was ready to medevac the ambassador and other injured people to Iran for medical treatment if needed, according to a statement released by his office. He spoke to Mr. Amini’s wife in Beirut and wished the ambassador a speedy recovery, the statement said.

The attacks appeared to mostly target members of Hezbollah, a political and militia group backed and supported by Iran. Hezbollah and Israel have engaged in intense clashes across their borders since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel last year. Hezbollah accused Israel, which did not comment, of responsibility for the blasts.

Narges Ghadirian, the ambassador’s wife, said in a post on X earlier on Tuesday that her husband “is slightly injured but thank God he is all right and the danger has passed.”

Iranian media reported that two of the ambassador’s bodyguards were also injured because they were carrying pagers that exploded. Tasnim News agency, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, said similar devices also exploded in Syria.

One of the Guards members said the pagers, including the one used by the ambassador, beeped for about 10 seconds before exploding, prompting some victims to hold the devices close to their eyes and faces to check for a message. The two Guards members said the pagers were used only by Hezbollah members and operatives and not widely distributed among ordinary citizens.

Iran appoints its ambassadors in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen — allied countries that are known regionally as the “axis of resistance’— from the senior ranks of the Revolutionary Guards because they also serve as liaisons with militant groups backed by Iran.

The news of the explosions rattled many Iranian supporters of the government who took to social media to express what they feared was Israel’s ability to cause widespread harm remotely. They also said the explosions had outed Hezbollah members, whose identities are typically secret, because video footage of the blasts and their aftermath went viral and victims were seen being injured and seeking medical treatment at hospitals.

A former vice president of Iran, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, called the means of attack “a new phase in technological warfare replacing conventional war” on Telegram. Mr. Abtahi, a politician from the reformist faction, was stationed in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Israel has carried out a series of covert operations in Iran as part of the shadow war between the two countries. Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist and deputy defense minister, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh , in 2020 using an A.I.-assisted robot controlled remotely via satellite. In February, Israel blew up two major gas pipelines in Iran, disrupting service to several cities, and, in 2021, an Israeli hack of Iran’s oil ministry servers disrupted gasoline distribution nationwide.

Tensions are already high between Iran and Israel after the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in July. Iran pledged to retaliate against Israel but so far has refrained from doing so after diplomatic efforts warned Tehran that responding risked an Israeli retaliation and wider war.

Some conservative Iranian pundits on Tuesday called on the government to act on its pledge of retaliation against Israel, saying not doing so could embolden Israel to carry out more strikes.

Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, told reporters, “we would urge Iran not to take advantage of any incident, any instability, to try to add further instability and to further increase tensions in the region.”

Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Washington.

Hiba Yazbek and Anushka Patil

Israel attacks central Gaza, and civil officials say at least five were killed.

Israeli airstrikes on homes near the Bureij neighborhood in central Gaza on Tuesday morning killed at least five people, including a child, and dozens remained trapped under the rubble at nightfall, the local emergency services said.

The Palestinian Civil Defense said that it had received dozens of calls for help from people who were wounded and trapped and that more than 50 people, including several families, were believed to be inside the buildings when they were hit.

Emergency crews on the scene could hear injured survivors screaming for help, but were forced to retreat after being targeted by Israeli aircraft, according to Mahmoud Basal, a Civil Defense spokesman. Unless medics and rescuers were granted safe access to the site and allowed to bring heavy equipment, including excavators, the scale of the tragedy could rise dramatically, he warned.

The Israeli military said that it had targeted sites near the Bureij neighborhood, where it said fighters were preparing to fire anti-tank missiles and rifles at Israeli troops. The military said it was reviewing reports of civilians being harmed, and it did not respond to the accusation that rescue workers were being prevented from reaching the victims.

Photos from several news agencies at the scene showed extensive destruction, with bloodied limbs of people visible in the rubble. Clothing and household items, including chairs and blankets, could be seen in one building whose facade had been blown off, and children and other residents of the camp were walking through the streets with their meager belongings in hand. At the al-Awda hospital in central Gaza, where some of the victims were taken, photos showed families bent in grief over the bodies of their relatives.

Hamas, the armed group that controlled Gaza before Israel’s invasion last year in response to the Oct. 7 attacks, said in a statement that the intensive bombardment had killed and wounded dozens of people in their homes and accused Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians.

Israel has repeatedly denied that its forces purposely target civilians and has accused Hamas of hiding its fighters and weapons among noncombatants.

Other Israeli strikes across Gaza on Tuesday, including several in Gaza City, killed at least 13 other people, including women and at least one child, Mr. Basal said. The Gaza Health Ministry said on Tuesday afternoon that at least 26 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli strikes over the past 24 hours.

Iran has offered to send a plane to evacuate some of the wounded to Tehran for treatment, particularly those with severe eye injuries, said Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib.

Aaron Boxerman

Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, said the United States was “not involved” in the apparently coordinated attack in Lebanon, nor had it received any advance notice about it. “At this point, we are gathering information,” Miller said. Miller also said that he had “no assessment” to offer about whether Israel might be responsible for the explosions.

It was too soon to say how the attack could impact negotiations for a cease-fire in Gaza, Miller said. The United States was continuing to tell Israel and "other parties" that they should seek a “diplomatic resolution” to the ongoing war, he added.

Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, said the country was bracing for a major retaliation by Hezbollah. “If Israel thinks by this that they’re going to return their displaced people from the north of Israel, they are mistaken. This escalates this war,” Bou Habib said in a phone call with The New York Times.

He added that the Lebanese government was now preparing to lodge a complaint at the U.N. Security Council. “Hezbollah are definitely going to retaliate in a big way. How? Where? I don’t know,” he said after speaking Tuesday with Hezbollah officials.

The son of a Hezbollah lawmaker, Ali Ammar, was among those killed in the blasts. Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, visited Beirut’s southern suburbs on Tuesday to pay condolences to the parliamentarian.

Johnatan Reiss

The Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, held a security briefing with other senior generals Tuesday evening, the military said in a statement. The officers reviewed “preparation for defensive and offensive operations on all fronts,” according to the statement.

While no new guidelines have been issued for Israeli civilians, the military said Israelis should continue exercising “alertness.”

A graphic video from social media , recorded in Bahman Hospital in Beirut and verified by The New York Times, shows scores of injured individuals bleeding on stretchers and beds. The injuries vary in severity. Some people appear to be missing parts of their hands.

Three minutes from inside the hospital in Lebanon showing how overwhelmed the hospital with Hezbollah’s member after the cyberattack. pic.twitter.com/77aHBUcIRW — Asaad Sam Hanna (@AsaadHannaa) September 17, 2024

Matthew Mpoke Bigg

Hezbollah started using paging devices more widely after Oct. 7, experts say.

Senior members of Hezbollah have used pagers for years but the practice became more widespread after the Oct. 7 attacks, when the group’s leader warned members that Israeli intelligence had penetrated the cellphone network, security experts said Tuesday.

As a result, thousands of rank-and-file members of Hezbollah — and not just fighters — switched to a new system of wireless paging devices, said Amer Al Sabaileh, a regional security expert and university professor based in Amman, Jordan. He said his information was based on extensive contacts in Lebanese political and security circles.

It was not immediately clear how those devices were distributed, but large numbers of pagers exploded at approximately the same time on Tuesday in Lebanon, causing thousands of injuries, according to Lebanese health authorities.

Since the advent of cellphones and smartphones, pagers have fallen out of use, though they remain in use by some people for quick and private contact.

Hezbollah has been security conscious about telecommunications for years, Mr. Al Sabaileh said, and has long banned its operatives from using cellphones while they are traveling in the south of the country near the Israel border. Cellphones can be used to locate the person carrying them.

But, he said, that became more urgent after Oct. 7, when some of the Hezbollah’s senior members were assassinated in airstrikes. In February, Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, warned members during a speech that their phones were dangerous and could be spied on by Israeli forces, saying they should break or bury them.

Iran, whose government has for decades supplied Hezbollah with arms, technology and other forms of military aid, and would have been pivotal both to any decision to switch to the system and in the delivery of the technology, the experts said.

Experts said that they did not know the precise arrangement for the distribution of the paging devices to Hezbollah members, nor how they had been compromised, but a key element of the new paging system was that it did not use the technology that is the basis of most conventional cellphone networks, and therefore were harder to track electronically.

David Wood, a senior Lebanon analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank, described it as a “limited, closed network.”

He said that in the short term, Hezbollah would likely resort to other methods of communication, potentially one that avoided electronic means altogether.

“It will obviously make coordination more difficult and more risky and without a doubt this is a serious blow to Hezbollah’s operational capacity,” he said.

Mr. Sabaileh said the explosions would be a psychological blow for Hezbollah because it showed the capacity of Israel to strike not just fighters but anyone connected with the group as they went about their daily business.

“It’s like doing an operation in every part of Hezbollah’s territory,” Mr. Sabaileh said, adding that the group would likely see it as a prelude to an Israeli escalation of the conflict, potentially on the ground. “The way they are targeted and the timing looks like a movie — making devices explode all at the same time everywhere is shocking.”

U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said the developments in Lebanon were “extremely concerning” given the volatile situation in the region. “We deplore the civilian casualties that we have seen,” Dujarric said, adding that the U.N. was following events closely. “We cannot underscore enough the risks of escalation in Lebanon and in the region.”

Sanjana Varghese

Video from social media, verified by The New York Times, shows two injured people on a busy street in Beirut after explosions across the city.

Hezbollah accused Israel of responsibility for the blasts in a second statement, adding that there would be “punishment for this blatant aggression.”

Residents in Lebanon are scared to answer calls. One resident, Khadijeh Fouani, was preparing winter food supplies when she answered her phone by crying out, "Please hang up, hang up!"

The office of Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, labeled the incident “criminal Israeli aggression” in a statement, adding that it was “a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty.”

Ahmad Ayoud, a butcher from the Basta neighborhood in Beirut, said he was in his shop when he heard explosions. Then he saw a man in his 20s fall off a motorbike. He appeared to be bleeding. “We all thought he got wounded from a random shooting,” Ayoud said. “Then, a few minutes later, we started hearing of other cases. All were carrying pagers.”

Here is a look at Hezbollah and what a wider war would mean for Lebanon.

For months, concerns have grown that the war in Gaza might ignite a second conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the well-armed militia that is loosely allied with Hamas and based just across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.

The two sides have repeatedly traded strikes since the Gaza war began in October, killing civilians and combatants in Lebanon and Israel, with most of the civilian casualties in Lebanon. The hostilities have also forced more than 150,000 people on both sides of the border to leave their homes for temporary shelters. That has put pressure on the Israeli government to make the north of the country safe for residents again by pushing Hezbollah back from the border region.

The pagers that exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday came a day after Israeli leaders warned that they were considering stepping up their military campaign against Hezbollah. Israel hasn’t commented on whether it was behind the attacks, but tensions between the two countries were already rising.

Here’s a look at Hezbollah and what a wider war would mean for Lebanon.

What is Hezbollah?

Hezbollah has opposed Israel since the group’s very beginnings. It was founded in the 1980s, after Israel, responding to attacks, invaded and occupied southern Lebanon, intending to root out the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was then based in the country.

But Israel soon ran into a new enemy, one whose guerrilla fighters quickly grew effective at bedeviling the far-better-equipped Israeli forces: Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim popular movement that made driving Israel out of Lebanon a major goal.

By 2000, Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon, making Hezbollah a hero to many Lebanese. It fought Israel again in 2006, launching a military operation into its southern neighbor that led to a fierce counterattack. In that war, Israel rained bombs on southern Lebanon and Beirut, the capital; the fighting killed more than 1,000 Lebanese.

Yet, the Israeli military never managed to overwhelm Hezbollah in 34 days of war, allowing the group and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to emerge as stars in an Arab world wearily accustomed to being defeated by Israel.

Hezbollah soon allied with Iran, and they became close partners.

Though the group retains a large and loyal following among Shiite Muslims because of the social services and political power it offers them — as well as the authoritarian tactics it uses to quell any dissent — many Lebanese see the group as an obstacle to progress that keeps threatening to drag the country into an unwanted war.

Hezbollah, considered a terrorist group by the United States and other countries, has evolved from a fighting force into a dominant political one, accruing significant influence in Lebanon’s government.

What would a wider war mean for Lebanon?

Lebanon can hardly afford a new conflict with Israel.

The country is reeling from years of an economic crisis that has left countless Lebanese in poverty and a political one that has stripped citizens of many basic services. The strikes at the border have displaced about 100,000 Lebanese civilians, depriving many of their income and their homes, and have cost the country billions of dollars in lost tourism and agricultural revenue, Lebanese officials say.

Even some of Hezbollah’s traditionally loyal Shiite Muslim constituents in southern Lebanon are questioning the price of the current fighting. As a result, analysts say, Mr. Nasrallah knows he has to step carefully. He has said that Hezbollah does not want a broader conflict, while warning that his fighters are prepared for one — and that Israel will face serious consequences if it comes.

A Hezbollah-Israel war could also metastasize into a larger regional war that would dwarf the ongoing fighting. Such a conflict could draw in Iran, as well as the United States, which has been working to avert further escalation.

Though jitters have grown with the frequency and deadliness of each side’s strikes, Israel, Hezbollah and Iran do not want a full-fledged war , analysts and U.S. officials say. Yet, the only near-certain way to avoid one, they say, is to end the fighting in Gaza with a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, whose Oct. 7 attack led to the war in the enclave.

How strong is Hezbollah?

Through propaganda videos and calibrated strikes, Hezbollah has repeatedly displayed signs of a bulked-up arsenal that analysts say is capable of inflicting heavy damage on Israeli cities. Its forces are also battle-tested after years of fighting against rebels in Syria, where Hezbollah sent thousands of fighters during that country’s civil war to help prop up the government of President Bashar al-Assad, a close ally of Iran and Hezbollah.

Estimates vary about just how many missiles Hezbollah has and just how sophisticated its systems are. The Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook says the group may have more than 150,000 missiles and rockets of various types and ranges. It also estimated that the group had up to 45,000 fighters, though Mr. Nasrallah has claimed to have 100,000.

But analysts and Israeli officials say Hezbollah’s arsenal is considerably more dangerous than Hamas’s because of its precision-guided missiles, which could target critical Israeli infrastructure and military assets.

Hezbollah has also displayed exploding drones that can elude Israel’s Iron Dome, the detect-and-shoot-down system designed to protect the country from incoming rockets and missiles. The group also appears to have anti-tank missiles that fly too fast and too low for the Iron Dome to intercept.

Euan Ward contributed reporting.

Lebanon's health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said in a news conference that eight people were killed by exploding paging devices and more than 2,700 were wounded, including approximately 200 in serious condition.

Dr. Abiad said many of the victims had injuries to their faces, particularly the eyes, as well as to their hands and stomachs. One of those killed was an 8-year-old girl, he said.

The wave of explosions left many people in Beirut in a state of confusion and shock. "It is complete chaos," said Um Saleh, a homemaker who lives in the southern suburbs of the city. "I cannot find an explanation to what happened this afternoon.”

Anjana Sankar

Here’s a look at some of the key events in the conflict in the Middle East.

Wireless devices were exploding across Lebanon, the day after Israel warned it would escalate its campaign against the powerful Iran-backed militia.

Tensions have been high for months in the wake of high-profile assassinations of senior leaders of the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah. Those killings in July intensified the longstanding conflict between Israel and Iran, which backs Hamas and Hezbollah.

They also fueled alarm among global leaders, including in the United States, where the Biden administration has urged restraint to prevent a broader war from engulfing the region.

Here are some of the key developments in recent months.

Jan. 2: A Hamas leader’s killing in Beirut

Hamas accused Israel of killing Saleh al-Arouri, a senior leader, along with two commanders from its military wing in an explosion in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital. Previously, Beirut had been far from the cross-border violence between Israel and Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia that, like Hamas, is aligned with Iran. Mr. al-Arouri was the first high-level Hamas official to be killed outside the West Bank and Gaza in recent years. Israeli officials declined to comment, but Lebanese and U.S. officials attributed the attack to Israel.

Jan. 6: Hezbollah’s retaliation against Israel

In response to Mr. al-Arouri’s assassination, Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets at a small military base in northern Israel. Though Hezbollah said it caused casualties, the Israeli military reported no injuries and responded with its own strikes in Lebanon. Analysts viewed Hezbollah’s response as a symbolic act rather than a significant escalation, with the group firing about 40 rockets toward Mount Meron, an area housing a military radar station.

April 1: Airstrikes in Damascus

Israel carried out airstrikes that hit part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, killing three senior Iranian commanders and four officers involved in Iran’s covert operations. The attack, one of the deadliest in the yearslong shadow war between Israel and Iran, increased regional tensions, which were already strained over the war in Gaza and hostilities involving Iran-backed groups. Israeli officials, speaking anonymously, confirmed the strike but denied that the targeted building had diplomatic status.

April 14: A barrage of missiles and drones against Israel

Iran retaliated for the Damascus strikes by launching more than 300 drones and missiles against Israel , its first open attack on Israel from Iranian soil. The strikes, aimed at military targets, caused minor damage and injured a young girl. Israel intercepted most of the projectiles and others were shot down by U.S. and Jordanian defenses. The calibrated attack, telegraphed well in advance, demonstrated Iran’s effort to avoid mass casualties or direct war, analysts said.

July 13: An airstrike in a designated humanitarian zone of Gaza

Israel tried to kill Muhammad Deif, a top Hamas military commander in Gaza, in an airstrike that the territory’s health ministry said killed 90 people and injured 300 others. The strike hit a strip of coastal land known as Mawasi, which Israel had designated as a humanitarian zone, and where thousands of displaced Palestinians were living. Mr. Deif, believed to be a mastermind behind the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, had long been a high-priority target, and after weeks of uncertainty about his condition, Israeli authorities said in August that he had been killed . Hamas has not explicitly confirmed or denied Israel’s claim.

July 27: Rocket strikes in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights

A rocket from Lebanon struck a soccer field in the Druse town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing 12 teenagers and children, according to the Israeli military. It was the deadliest single attack from across Israel’s northern border in months of hostilities. Israel accused Hezbollah, but the group denied responsibility.

July 30: A second strike in Beirut

Israel targeted Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah leader and close adviser to the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a deadly strike in Beirut . Israeli officials described the attack as a response to the Golan Heights rocket strike, but the assault quickly raised concerns in the region about Israel’s willingness to strike deep within Lebanese territory.

July 31: A top Hamas official is killed in Tehran

Hours after the strike in Beirut, Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior Hamas leaders and a key figure in the stalled cease-fire talks, was assassinated in Iran , where he had gone for the inauguration of that country’s new president. Iran and Hamas said Israel had carried out the killing, and they vowed to retaliate. Mr. Haniyeh, who had led Hamas’s political office and helped manage negotiations for a cease-fire, was killed by an explosive device covertly smuggled into the guesthouse in Tehran where he was staying, according to seven Middle Eastern officials, including two Iranians, as well as an American official.

Aug. 25: Israel says it thwarted a major attack

The Israeli military said it had launched airstrikes against Hezbollah forces that had been preparing an “extensive” attack against Israel, destroying what it said were thousands of rocket launch barrels. Hezbollah later said it had retaliated for Mr. Shukr’s killing by launching hundreds of rockets at Israeli military positions — believed to be one of its largest barrages in months — though Israel said there had been “very little damage.”

The strikes came after cross-border strikes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon had escalated sharply. A week earlier, an Israeli airstrike hit a factory in a small town in southern Lebanon, killing at least 10 civilians , according to Lebanese officials. It was one of the largest death tolls in a single strike in Lebanon since the war in Gaza began.

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