Unspeakable feed

Today: Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times.

Issue No. 155

Sensitive Content
Sam Thielman

Sensitive Content

by Sam Thielman

This was on a Thursday. What I saw was the top half of a video clip that a search for “Gaza” returned on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Consider that your content warning. There wasn’t much in the news about the war because of the Democratic National Convention, so against my usual judgment, I was checking X. 

The footage was of a man holding… something. Cradling it. In his arms. Textures blend together in digital video because of the way the photos are encoded and decoded. But these technologies have gotten better—less noticeably “lossy,” if you want the old-fashioned technical term—in recent years. Everything is very vivid now.

I could see the item or entity was loose and disconnected. The word I keep wanting to use is floppy. It was not the right structure for a child, but again, the man was cradling it as if it was still a child, gently supporting it. 

People always describe the effect of bombs as turning people to meat, but that’s not right, is it? Meat is neatly dressed and butchered and treated with care. Subsistence hunters respect the animals they prey on. My wife’s niece hunts deer sometimes; she makes her own venison sausage and brings it home for Christmas. She loves animals; she used to have a pet pigeon and has always had a dog or a cat or two around. She would never treat an animal she planned to eat the way someone had treated that little child, ruining it. 

I’m sorry for saying “it.” Little children are not “its.” They are he or she or some other word they have picked out themselves. I remember when our niece was a little child, walking around Disneyland with her and my girlfriend, whom I would marry a few months later, and she would be the flower girl. She was eight, and we were not yet related by marriage, and we had so much fun that she held my hand while we walked around the park, and I remember being so proud of myself for having won her good opinion. Now I have a child of my own.

The video was posted by an account that reuses footage from wars, most of it originally posted to Instagram and TikTok, from what I can gather. The replies often call the videos fake or doctored but none of it appears to be. The posts are wildly popular; there is no rhyme or reason to what gets posted beyond the account owner’s appetite for gore. Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan—wherever there’s bloodshed. The geographical locations listed in the post text seem largely accurate. I managed to hit the pause button before the account’s most recent video showed me a man being destroyed by a malfunctioning rocket launcher. X does nothing to censor atrocity images. The account claimed the video I had seen earlier had been shot in Khan Younis, in Gaza.