Young people are watching the Minneapolis shootings on repeat — and it’s taking a toll

By Fairriona Magee, for The Trace 

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

Last month, a video of Renee Macklin Good being fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis rattled the entire country. Then, a few weeks later, bystanders captured the shooting death of Alex Pretti at the hands of agents, part of that same deployment, in the same city. All told, as of mid-January, more than 80 percent of American voters have seen the shooting of Good, and Pretti’s killing has amassed millions of views online — images of both captured by bystanders, circulated on countless digital platforms, and causing untold emotional harm to the public. 

Those numbers reflect millions of American adults, but the number of children and teens who’ve been affected by the video recordings remains unknown, and could be causing the greatest harm. Researchers said the collective harm caused by firearm violence — including through digital and social media — still lags behind the reality: gun violence is a leading cause of death among young people.  

And despite data that shows 95 percent of American teenagers use some form of social media, and that they are especially prone to the damage caused by vicarious trauma, or exposure to violence and traumatic events, the links are not clearly understood. 

“The more someone engages with content after a traumatic event, the higher the development of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and anxiety about future events," explained E. Alison Holman, a professor of nursing and psychology at the University of California, Irvine. Holman is among the nation’s leading researchers of collective trauma and has studied the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting.

In a 2019 study on the effects of viewing gun violence, researchers at the University of Southern California found that videos of shootings lead to mental health distress and depressive states among adolescents. Other studies have similarly shown that direct gun violence exposure can have adverse health consequences for all people, but the damage to young people can lead to anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We often assume that only kids who are undocumented or have undocumented parents are affected by actions by federal immigration officials, and that's just not true,” said Joanna Dreby, a sociology professor at the University of Albany who studies the effect of immigration policies on families and young people. “When there's overt physical violence, there's also the shock waves of structural violence, and children are very sensitive to the waves as they come and go in the news.”

Traumatic events have played out on visual media for many years, but the national rise in shootings and the prevalence of social media began to converge around 2009, marked by the shooting of Oscar Grant, a 22-year old Black man, who was fatally shot by a transit officer in California. Cellphone videos taken by bystanders were disseminated online and quickly sparked a national conversation around guns, structural racism, and use of force by law enforcement. 

The urgency for those conversations has only increased. In recent years, the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger killed in Georgia in 2020, and a mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022 in which 10 people died, live-streamed by the perpetrator, among other incidents, have shaken the social and political landscape. But Holman noticed that the shootings by federal agents in the immigration-enforcement operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul represented something different from what she had previously seen in her research: a political narrative that is seemingly disproven by the videos themselves. 

She said that political leaders, in their statements after the shootings, dehumanized the victims and, in so doing, gaslit the public. “The government is engaging in propaganda to convince us one way, when our eyes are telling us it's something else.”

Dreby, the University of Albany researcher, agreed and added that these incidents will shape younger generations. 

“Enforcement has been around in the United States for our entire history as a nation, but when you look at past campaigns, they always did so with the cooperation of local communities,” said Dreby, referring to mass Mexican repatriation in the Eisenhower era and Japanese internment during World War II. In this case, Dreby noted, there was a complete disregard for what officials and communities called for, as federal officials “continue to show up anyway.”

As the presence of federal agents looms across other U.S. cities, Holman said it was crucial that people monitor the ways they engage with violent media, especially young people who are more online than ever before.

“​​I am most definitely not a person to suggest people put their heads in the sand... we need an informed populace and an informed citizenry, Holman told The Trace. “But people need to be very aware of what they're doing when they're engaging with [this] media.” 

She recommended that people pay attention to their physical health, like their breathing and muscle tenseness, while also finding community in media engagement, which is particularly important for young people. 

“We are social beings by nature,” Holman said. “If you're going to engage with the media, do it with a friend… talk about how you're feeling and what it means to you, so that you have a chance at that moment to process.”

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