Editorial: Entertainment at the cost of empathy

By the Smoke Signal Editorial Board

Warning: Discussion of sexual abuse. The final draft of this editorial was written on October 14 and may not reflect any updates in the ongoing investigation.

Last month, the discovery of 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez in a Tesla licensed to alternative R&B artist David Burke, or d4vd, set the Internet ablaze. Within days, commentary and speculation flooded social media platforms: Reddit threads and YouTube documentaries detailed Burke’s lengthy digital footprint while Instagram reels and TikToks satirized his past interviews and songs. In its heated excitement, the Internet quickly transformed the horrific death of a young girl into cheap entertainment.

This isn’t the first time the Internet has traded empathy for virality. When rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs was charged with racketeering, sexual abuse, and sex trafficking in 2024, the Internet repackaged the case into a joke, popularizing memes about the “Diddy parties” that had exploited hundreds of victims. When multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein was convicted for more than two decades of sex trafficking in 2008, the Internet circulated dozens of conspiracy theory memes, diminishing the scale and severity of his crimes. Time and time again, the Internet has exploited violence and human suffering for entertainment value. This sensationalism trivializes victim experiences and contributes to widespread desensitization, implicating our own conversations.

Internet culture and social media algorithms fuel a harmful cycle of sensationalism, where tragedies are diminished for attention and engagement. This trend is already prevalent among teenage audiences: according to a 2024 study on teens’ consumption of social media content by the Youth Endowment Fund, 70% of participants reported seeing violent content on social media in the last year, even though only 6% actively searched for it. The repetitive circulation of violent and shocking content on social media allows users to grow accustomed to passive consumption. Graphic events become group chat one-liners and abuse and suffering are reduced to Instagram reel captions. Through the chaos, empathy drowns beneath irony and convenience, shaping a concerning culture of apathy in modern media. 

When tragedies are normalized as entertainment, the Internet loses more than empathy: it learns to forget. Victim stories fade away, while perpetrators are immortalized through memes, viral sounds, and record-breaking streams. Just two weeks after Hernandez was found, Burke’s first song, “Romantic Homicide,” even landed on the Billboard 200 chart and Spotify’s Top 50, having gained more than 9 million streams. Burke’s discography is now tied to his alleged involvement in Hernandez’s death, not to mourn, but as a soundtrack to dramatic edits and sensational videos. The memeification of Combs echoed this irony: as users retweeted “Diddy” references and devoted new slang to his name, the Internet sidelined thousands of victims and the broader issue of celebrity power abuse. Virality strips tragedies of their weight; video-by-video, post-by-post, society falls into a dangerous pattern of tolerance and neglect. 

Responses to tragedies are far more compassionate and serious when they occur in the community directly around us, rather than online. In July, a 16-year-old Fremont resident went missing, and the local community reacted with kindness and action, holding search parties, raising more than $36,000 in a GoFundMe campaign, and extending grievances to their family and friends. These demonstrations of empathy and respect greatly contrast with desensitized online environments. Separated by a screen, users are more likely to form echo chambers that encourage psychological detachment from human pain. 

Ultimately, the responsibility to strive for change lies not only with faulty algorithms and social media corporations, but with the consumers who feed the cycle. While we cannot control the Internet’s response to tragedy, we can do our part in consuming mindfully: asking whether we are engaging with news or exploiting pain; whether we are remembering victims or reducing them to quick content. From every repost to every like, the decisions we make and the content we endorse matter. We can choose to resist desensitization and preserve our humanity — or watch as suffering remains an Internet spectacle.