To keep up with world events, Grade 12 student Hanna Grover ventures online, like most teens do. But she finds it “disturbing” that violent content regularly pops up — often appearing from questionable sources or without context.
The Surrey, B.C., high schooler said she has seen “brutal short-form videos that one, provide absolutely no context on what’s happening, and two, are just very graphic and often not from verified sources. They’re just individual, private users posting videos.”
As well, Grover said, “I’ve seen influencers and commentary accounts do stories on these kinds of very graphic events and using [that] footage because they know that it will provide them with engagement.”
Friends scrolling for entertainment — and not news specifically — also see this kind of content, Grover added.
“Those disturbing images stay with me. Graphic content stays in your head and sometimes you will find yourself thinking about it days later.”
Chilling videos of school fights. The Charlie Kirk killing. Violent encounters with police. Depictions of animal abuse, sexual abuse or sexual content. A new survey of more than 1,000 teens across Canada offers a glimpse into graphic content they say they’re seeing online — largely without seeking it out — and what young people want done about it.
More than four out of five of the teen respondents, who were aged 13 to 18 and hailed from every province in Canada, said they’ve seen violent or gory content via online platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Few were searching this material out, with most noting the material appears in posts from a stranger’s account or through a platform’s algorithmic recommendations.
The report, entitled Young Canadians’ Exposure to Authentic Violent and Gore Content Online, came out of recurring comments teens shared in focus groups for the research project Digitally Informed Youth: Digital Safety, according to project member and lead author Alexa Dodge, an associate professor of criminology at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
“We imagined this was something that maybe a couple of teens were experiencing,” she said from Halifax. “When we did the survey, we found that 85 per cent of young people in Canada had seen real gore or violent content, and some of the categories of content they saw were really on the more severe end of what we thought we would see.”
Researcher Alexa Dodge outlines the violent and graphic content teen survey respondents said they most commonly encounter on their online and social platforms.
For instance, half of the teen respondents reported seeing the fatal shooting of U.S. activist Charlie Kirk. Overall, school fights and beatings, violence from police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, and clips of people gravely injured or killed in global conflicts were the types of content most commonly cited.
Dodge said it’s a change from years past, when young people would primarily see disturbing content after intentionally seeking it out, whether it be for research or shock value.
“There’s something very different about scrolling and having, all of a sudden, this very disturbing content pop up into your feed when you maybe just went on Instagram or TikTok to chill out and decompress for 10 minutes after school.”
- What should parents or teens do when violent content shows up in teens’ feeds? Tap here to join the conversation.
The researchers partnered with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a national child safety charity, for the report.
‘Media we consume makes us who we are’
While the precise impact of exposure to violent or gory content depends on the individual, generally it pushes people away from empathy toward being “more cruel, more aggressive and more violent,” according to Michael Cheng, a child and youth psychiatrist at Ottawa children’s hospital CHEO.
“We are what we eat and the digital media we consume makes us who we are in terms of values and ethics. So if you show violent, gory content, then the brain learns that that’s acceptable. It desensitizes us to violence. It makes us less caring, less empathetic, more narcissistic.”
It’s not just teens: even adults can find it tough to avoid a peek at something disturbing or boundary-pushing, he said.
“The problem is [when] that is what the companies monetize … our kids click the stuff which might be a bit scary and forbidden. It’s really hard to resist that.”
Grade 11 student Finn Ye has become somewhat resigned to encountering violent content on Instagram and TikTok, thinking that her interest in news and politics pushes more of that material to her feed.
When she encounters graphic content, the Richmond, B.C., high schooler worries about younger peers likely also seeing this material. At the same time, Ye describes feeling somewhat desensitized.
She also feels a sense of hopelessness about trying to rein it in. While some teens might try to flag or steer themselves away from offensive material, Ye says others find it tricky to figure that out or are unmotivated to do so.
“Reporting one video generally doesn’t work,” she said. “I’ve recently seen videos that I saw when I was 13 — and [they’re] still cycling through the internet.”
Ye thinks tech companies must do more to educate young users about navigating violent content and to “strengthen their own systems” against it.
CBC News reached out to Google, Meta and Bytedance — the parent companies of YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, respectively — but representatives declined comment without having seen the report.
Dodge also pointed to recommendations teens made in the survey, including for platforms to respond faster when content is flagged and adding more barriers to violent videos, such as removing the autoplay feature, blurring videos or adding a click-through so users must choose to watch it.
With the federal government having just introduced online safety legislation, Dodge wants to see lawmakers lean into regulation — for instance, mandating transparency reports for platforms, setting clear moderation guidelines and enforcing them.
She also wants adults — parents, guardians, teachers and others with teens in their lives — to be more open and calm and avoid overreacting if young people disclose that they’re seeing this kind of content.
“They’re often not gonna go to adults for support if they think it’s going to result in them having their technology taken away from them in really broad ways,” she said.
As someone who first encountered disturbing and violent online content as a tween, Ye says teens want a safe space to talk, and someone to allay their fears and provide guidance in navigating safety.
“I felt bad for just coming across [this material], because it felt like I was doing something wrong. And I think that it’s definitely not a unique experience.”
