Shock site

A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive or disturbing to its viewers, though it can also contain elements of humor or evoke (in some viewers) sexual arousal, or which contain hate speech and dehumanization which causes the site to target people with their social identities such as gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, age, skin color, disability/neurodiversity, nationality, body type, appearance, height, weight, and more. Shock-oriented websites generally contain material that is pornographic, scatological, racist, antisemitic, sexist, graphically violent, insulting, vulgar, profane, disparaging, misogynistic or of some other provocative nature of the viewer's social identity. Websites that are primarily fixated on real death and graphic violence are particularly referred to as gore sites. Some shock sites display a single picture, animation, video clip or small gallery, and are circulated via email or disguised in posts to discussion sites as a prank. Steven Jones distinguishes these sites from those that collect galleries where users search for shocking content, such as Rotten.com (which was the first shock site, from 1996 to 2012 or 2021). Gallery such as image and video sites can contain beheadings, execution, electrocution, suicide, murder, stoning, torching, police brutality, hangings, terrorism, cartel violence, drowning, vehicular accidents, war violence and criminality, rape, necrophilia, genital mutilation and other sexual crimes. During their operation, the owners of Rotten.com launched several new sites, one of which was Shockumentary.com in 2006. Shockumentary.com was created to sell mondo films like Traces of Death (1993). Ogrish.com's reputation rested on its publication of gore media from terrorists and war. Marek pleaded guilty and was given a six-month conditional sentence for his role in a case where he was accused of corrupting public morals in Alberta, Canada. Some shock galleries, however, established more specific niches. In the early 2000s, the site Necrobabes hosted images of women pretending to be dead, while the sites Cannibal Café and Gourmet tailored themselves to would-be cannibals. The latter sites gained attention in 2003 when Armin Meiwes, an aspiring cannibal, used the sites to connect with Jürgen Brandes, a man who desired to be eaten.

There have also been several individual videos that received viral attention. Goatse was one of the earliest and best-known shock sites, featuring an image of a man stretching his anus with his hands. The site featured a page devoted to fan-submitted artwork and tributes to the site. In 2012, it was resurrected as an e-mail service. In 2008, the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs posted the graphic murder video 3 Guys 1 Hammer. In 2013, a student at Florida State University hacked the wireless network of his campus and redirected all traffic to Meatspin. In 2015, consternation followed when a family restaurant played the website in front of young children. An advertising industry website documenting this incident referred to it as creating Swedish MeatSpin. The site first went live on March 10, 2005. John-Michael Bond of The Daily Dot stated that to an extent, "casual homophobia" of the 2000s helped popularize Meatspin.

Legality

Currently, there is no federal or state legislation in the United States that outlaws possessing or viewing videos or images that depict the death of a human being. The owners of Rotten.com were successfully sued by families for hosting photos of dead people and videos of their deaths on the site.

In the United Kingdom, Parliament passed the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, which included a section outlawing extreme pornography (that which is intended to sexually arouse viewers that threatens a person's life, is likely to seriously harm a person's anus, breasts, or genitals, or involves a human corpse or an animal). This has resulted in shock sites, as well as American pornographers including Max Hardcore and Extreme Associates, being convicted of obscenity in the United Kingdom. The video was shared on Facebook and uploaded to YouTube shortly after. Footage of the mass murder was hosted on 4chan, 8chan, LiveLeak, Voat, Zero Hedge, and KiwiFarms. can cause or trigger post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and cause other emotional distress.

Legality

See also

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Further reading