Mayor pleads with South Africans to stop sharing the shooting video

A mayor has asked South Africans to stop passing around video of a shooting incident, saying the footage is circulating widely on social media and that the family and children affected will be hurt by it for the rest of their lives.

The appeal, carried by eNCA (YouTube), was directed at the public and at journalists alike. The mayor said the family’s trauma is the concern, and that the children in particular will have to live with what is being shared.

“Even the video of the shooting incident itself is shared,” the mayor said. “This trauma that is going to be caused to the family and to the kids for life, I don’t know how they are going to survive.”

The mayor asked people to hold back from sharing material that may be sensitive. Where such material must go out, the mayor said, the public should be warned first so that anyone who does not want to see it can switch off or look away.

The concern about timing was as strong as the concern about the images themselves. The mayor said information is at times shared before the family has been told, and that this is not how things are done in the country, in the province or in Africa.

The mayor also acknowledged the scale of the problem, describing a world in which social media has made everyone a journalist and in which a great deal of sensitive material is shared.

“It’s very hurting,” the mayor said.

The broadcast does not name the mayor, the province, the location of the shooting or the people involved. It gives no account of what happened in the incident itself, and no date for when the video began circulating.

The source is eNCA (YouTube), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1idrUfFTAU.