When Does Morbid Curiosity Become Participation?
Content note: This article discusses murder, including the deaths of children.
The internet has turned spectators into distributors, and sometimes into authors of the story itself.
By Jack Malacat
On September 11, 2025, the day after Charlie Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, the FBI released two grainy security-camera images of a person of interest. Within hours, sharper versions were circulating. People had run the photos through AI tools, and the results looked like the clean surveillance shots investigators must have wished they had. A county sheriff’s office in Utah shared one before adding a note that it appeared to be AI-enhanced. Fact-checkers soon explained what the software had actually done, which was to guess. It invented detail where the original had none, and in some versions it produced the face of a different person. The images were offered to the public as help. They were also very good at collecting likes and reposts.
That episode holds most of what makes the aftermath of a modern tragedy so strange. When something terrible happens, a second version of the event begins forming around the first. Screenshots travel without their context, and the gaps in the official account fill with material that resembles evidence. The people producing that second version are rarely villains. Most of them started where nearly everyone starts, by looking.
The urge to look is far older than the platforms that now measure it. Crowds once gathered at public executions, and drivers still slow down for highway wrecks, usually with some mixture of dread and fascination. The psychologist Coltan Scrivner, who developed a scale to measure morbid curiosity, treats it as an ordinary trait that varies from person to person, covering interests as different as the minds of dangerous people and the paranormal. His work suggests the interest may be practical, giving people a way to study threats from a safe distance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he found that more morbidly curious people were also more drawn to pandemic films. On this account, someone who keeps reading about a murder late into the night is doing something people have probably always done, and the research gives little reason to read cruelty into it.
The harder question is what happens after the looking. Reading and searching keep a person on the receiving end of a story. Reposting an unverified claim or “enhancing” a blurry photo moves them to the other end, where they start shaping what other people will see. Sharing alone isn’t the problem. In 2020, a 17-year-old named Darnella Frazier filmed the murder of George Floyd and posted it, and her video became central to holding the officer responsible. She later received a special citation from the Pulitzer board. Frazier was recording something she had seen with her own eyes, while the people sharpening the FBI’s photos were adding detail that existed nowhere except in a model’s best guess.
What has changed is how much power the spectator holds. A witness once had few ways to shape a story beyond retelling it to whoever would listen. Today the same person can edit footage and publish it to thousands of strangers before investigators, or the people directly involved, have established what is true. Generative tools extend that reach into exactly the places where evidence is missing. A crowd that once had to wait for a photo or recording to surface can now produce something that looks enough like one to circulate.
That power operates inside a reward system. Being first feels valuable, and so does seeming better informed than everyone else in the comments. A 2018 study in Science that followed rumor cascades on Twitter found that false stories spread faster and farther than true ones, a gap the researchers tied partly to novelty, since falsehoods tend to be more surprising. Later work by Gizem Ceylan and colleagues found that much misinformation sharing works like a habit trained by the platforms themselves. Their most habitual users shared headlines with little regard for accuracy, and changing what the platform rewarded changed what people shared. Plenty of people who share a tragedy are acting out of grief or real concern. The research suggests something more structural: platforms reward speed and surprise far more reliably than they reward being right, and people adapt to whatever gets rewarded.
Truth is slower than social reward.
The Lindsay Clancy trial showed what that system looks like at full scale. Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, is charged with killing her three young children in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 2023, and her defense argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. The livestreamed trial ran through the summer of 2026 and ended in a mistrial in September after the jury deadlocked. A parallel trial unfolded on TikTok, where one count put the number of videos under a single case hashtag above 164,000. The Financial Times reported on creators who gained followers and income from their coverage. Online theories cast the children’s father, Patrick Clancy, as the real culprit, a claim neither side argued in court. At one point the two trials nearly merged, when the defense turned to a former McLean Hospital social worker who had come to its attention through her TikTok videos about the testimony. The case remains unresolved, and underneath all of that content are three children and a family still living with what happened.
Synthetic media pushes this further, because it removes the need to wait for reality to supply something worth sharing. Four days after Kirk’s death, a TikTok video began circulating as his final message, opening with him saying he had recorded it in case this day came. The footage was real, taken from a video he posted the day before he was shot about an unrelated subject. According to the fact-checking site Lead Stories, the voice was an AI clone, and the farewell to his wife and children was invented. Whoever made it had read the demand correctly. A grieving audience wanted last words that didn’t exist, and software made them cheap to produce.
The costs of this kind of participation rarely land on the people producing it. They land on whoever the story attaches itself to by mistake. Within hours of the Kirk shooting, Reuters fact-checkers traced a video claiming to show a Black man being arrested for the killing. The footage came from an unrelated arrest in California months earlier. The AI-sharpened suspect photos carried a similar risk, because a confident, invented face can resemble a real stranger closely enough to send people looking for him. These are the people a spectator rarely pictures in the moment before passing something along.
Being drawn toward something disturbing is still a different act from shaping the version of it other people will encounter. We stop and keep reading because something unsettles us or because we are trying to make sense of it, and there is little reason to be ashamed of that. The weight shifts at the moment of passing something on, especially when we haven’t checked it, or when sharing gives us something back. The internet makes that moment feel weightless, even though every repost is a small vote on which version of the story survives. A publication like this one runs on the same curiosity it is examining here, so the question applies to the writer as much as the reader. If passing it along earned you no attention at all, would you still feel the need to do it?
About the Author
Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.
Sources and Further Reading
Scrivner, Coltan. 2021. “The Psychology of Morbid Curiosity: Development and Initial Validation of the Morbid Curiosity Scale.” Personality and Individual Differences. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886921005183
Scrivner, Coltan. 2021. “An Infectious Curiosity: Morbid Curiosity and Media Preferences during a Pandemic.” Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.26613/esic.5.1.206/html
Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. 2018. “The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science 359 (6380). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559
Ceylan, Gizem, Ian A. Anderson, and Wendy Wood. 2023. “Sharing of Misinformation Is Habitual, Not Just Lazy or Biased.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120 (4). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216614120
Grubbs, Joshua B., Brandon Warmke, Justin Tosi, A. Shanti James, and W. Keith Campbell. 2019. “Moral Grandstanding in Public Discourse: Status-Seeking Motives as a Potential Explanatory Mechanism in Predicting Conflict.” PLOS ONE. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6795490/
The Pulitzer Prizes. 2021. “Darnella Frazier: Special Citation.” https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darnella-frazier
Miller, Dean. 2025. “Fact Check: FBI Did NOT Release This High-Resolution Video of Person Sought in Charlie Kirk Shooting.” Lead Stories. https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2025/09/fact-check-fbi-did-not-release-high-resolution-video-of-shooting-suspect.html
PolitiFact. 2025. “Image Altered by AI Led to False Claims About Shooter in Charlie Kirk’s Death.” https://www.politifact.com/videos/image-altered-by-ai-led-to-false-claims-about-shoo
Reuters Fact Check. September 11, 2025. “Rumors, Misinformation About Charlie Kirk Killing Rampant on Social Media.” Republished by GV Wire. https://gvwire.com/2025/09/11/rumors-misinformation-about-charlie-kirk-killing-rampant-on-social-media/
Thompson, Sarah. September 19, 2025. “Fact Check: Charlie Kirk Did NOT Record a Video Before His Death, ‘Knowing This Day Might Come.’” Lead Stories. https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2025/09/fact-check-charlie-kirk-did-not-record-a-video-before-his-death-knowing-this-day-might-come.html
Financial Times. 2026. “How TikTok Creators Are Cashing In on the Lindsay Clancy Murder Trial.” https://www.ft.com/content/1053717b-be89-4044-bf43-59603247dd3f
TheWrap. 2026. “The 2 Lindsay Clancy Trials: Inside the Social Media Firestorm.” https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/journalism/lindsay-clancy-trial-social-media-true-crime/
Associated Press. September 4, 2026. Reporting on the Lindsay Clancy mistrial. https://apnews.com/article/6e2dfdafdd67530c7e5f34f2f21a0de6