Maybe you, like me, woke up last week and found yourself faced with a series of auto-playing videos of agents mobbing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Maybe you watched as an agent shot him while he lay on his knees on the street. Or maybe a few weeks ago, your phone showed you the amateur video taken from multiple angles of Renee Good’s last moments before she was shot by an ICE agent at close range. Or maybe you logged on this fall and had to witness Charlie Kirk’s gruesome assassination in your feed.
No, none of these things happened to me, because I don’t have anything on my phone that would make such experiences possible. And on my Mac I don’t go to the kinds of sites that would show me such things. You don’t have to set up your tech life that way — even journalists don’t have to, though they always say they do. We have choices.