The video nobody should have to watch
The planned live streaming of a US execution is a human rights failure, and Australia's frontline digital workers will carry much of its cost.
Most public debate will focus on the execution itself and whether Australians should be able to watch it. Both matter. But someone has to find, review and remove this footage every time it is uploaded, shared, clipped or reposted - and this is unlikely to attract as much public discussion as the event itself.
Much of that labour falls to commercial content moderators employed by platform contractors, largely in Africa and Asia. Here in Australia, it falls to professional social media managers, community managers and moderators, and volunteers across the same areas. Between them, they will see this video and make judgements around it so the rest of us don't have to.
Australian Community Managers (ACM) represents and supports these workers. This is our position, and what we believe needs to happen before, and after, the footage goes live (if it goes ahead).
Our position
ACM stands against this execution and against any attempt to turn it into broadcast, monetisable content. Killing a person as an act of state is incompatible with human dignity, and Australia settled that question long ago. We want our government using every diplomatic avenue to prevent it, here and wherever the death penalty is still applied.
The UN's human rights chief has cautioned that televising the killing would make it a public execution and violate the ban on torture. Our concern is also what happens after the stream stops. Footage of a real death, staged for an audience, is built to circulate. Extremist networks, and countless others, will clip and reshare it long after the broadcast ends.
Community managers spend their working lives deciding what a space is for and what it won't tolerate. Every healthy community draws lines, and those lines are what make people safe enough to take part. Declining to host a recorded killing is the same judgement applied at national scale. Australian law already agrees: material like this sits in the most serious category of content and cannot be classified for distribution.
Anyone set on watching will find a way. Our focus is on everyone else: the people who never chose to see it, and the workers whose job is to keep it from reaching them.
Commercial content moderators
Commercial platform moderators will review this footage at scale, repeatedly, and under time pressure.
Automated tools can match exact copies of a known video, but can struggle with versions that are cropped, mirrored, filtered, slowed down or embedded inside reaction content. Bad actors make these edits deliberately to evade detection. Every variant that slips past automation lands in a human review queue. After the Christchurch attack, Facebook reported removing around 1.5 million copies of the livestream in the first 24 hours.
This is not abstract harm. Moderators working for Meta's former outsourcing partner in Nairobi are suing over psychological injury. Of 144 who volunteered for psychological assessment, 81% were classed as having severe PTSD. Most commercial moderation is outsourced to third-party vendors, often offshore, with productivity targets, limited psychological support and little say over what they're shown.
Moderators will know this is coming. They will see a real person killed, by design, in footage engineered for maximum reach. Anticipatory dread is a recognised stressor in its own right, and these workers will sit with it for days before the first upload.
Platforms have the time and money to prepare. They should be briefing moderation vendors now, preloading hashes the moment the footage exists, rotating staff off the queue, capping exposure time and funding trauma-informed support that continues after the news cycle moves on.
Frontline digital workers in Australia
Social media managers, community managers and moderators across Australia (as with every other country) will have this video arrive in their own spaces: replies on a council Facebook page, comments under a news post, a link dropped into a parenting group or a fan forum. The worst of it is likely to hit Big Social media platforms - owned, high-trust and semi-private or private spaces are better positioned to guard the door - but no one is immune. There are thousands of professionals working in this space, and even more volunteers.
Workload impacts
• Expect a spike in links, clips and screenshots posted into comments, often by accounts seeking attention or testing moderation limits.
• Expect coordinated posting and brigading from people who frame removal as censorship.
• Timing depends on the US schedule, and may land overnight or on a weekend in Australia when fewer people are overseeing things.
• Even after removal, members will want to talk about what happened, and some will be distressed. Holding that space, debriefing, repairing, is skilled emotional labour that forms a key part of community management and moderation work.
Mental health
• Frontline workers can't opt out of exposure. One click on an unlabelled link can show them the content.
• Many manage communities on personal devices, so the footage can intrude on their own time and space.
• Repeated exposure to violent material carries significant risks of vicarious trauma, anxiety and burnout, even for experienced practitioners.
• Community managers often feel responsible for their members' safety. Failing to catch a post quickly enough can carry guilt that outlasts the event.
Risk
• Moderators who act to remove the footage may be in turn targeted with abuse or harassment, particularly by politicised actors who see the video as a recruitment tool.
• Organisations running pages and groups carry legal and reputational exposure for what sits in their comment sections. Since Fairfax Media v Voller (2021), page owners have been treated as publishers of third-party comments for defamation purposes.
• Volunteers running informal groups often have no employer, no employee assistance program and no access to workplace health and safety protections.
What employers owe their people
Exposure to this footage is a foreseeable psychosocial hazard, which Australian employers are legally required to guard against.
Every state and territory now requires employers to identify and control psychosocial risks. The jurisdictions under the national model WHS laws adopted these duties between 2022 and 2023. Victoria followed with the Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025, which took effect on 1 December 2025. Both frameworks treat exposure to traumatic material as a psychosocial hazard that must be managed like a physical one.
The broadcast of this violent content has been announced in advance. An employer who puts a social media manager on a page likely to attract the footage, with no plan and no support, will struggle to argue the risk was unforeseeable. Agencies and organisations that contract out community management share this responsibility.
What we're asking for
We know this footage is likely coming, so there is no excuse for a reactive response.
The Australian Government should use diplomatic channels to stop the execution.
eSafety has strong powers and used them effectively after Christchurch. It should be working with platforms now to pre-empt distribution, rather than relying on takedown notices once the video is out. It can also issue a time-limited blocking direction. The footage likely meets the threshold for seriously harmful material, as content that promotes or incites extreme violence, cruelty or abhorrent violent conduct.
Platforms should prepare detection before the broadcast, stop monetising any content carrying the footage, and protect the moderators doing the work. Ad revenue from this video would reward its spread.
Employers should treat this as a known psychosocial hazard, with a documented plan, rostering, debriefing and access to support. If you don’t already have these systems in place, now’s a perfect time.
Lawmakers should see this as the case for a Digital Duty of Care. Platforms should be required to anticipate foreseeable harms like this one, not just respond to them. That duty should extend to the workers who absorb the harm on everyone else's behalf.
If you manage or moderate a community
This is an unenviable, complex situation. Here are some simple tips that can help reduce both your workload and your exposure.
It’s always important to tailor these to your people and context (some communities will be higher risk than others).
Before
• Decide your position with your team or co-moderators in advance.
• Update filters or auto-moderation rules to hold posts mentioning the execution and related topics for review.
• Consider temporarily limiting links, video uploads or comments on high-risk posts and pages.
• Roster coverage across likely broadcast window so no one is carrying it alone.
• Pre-emptive comms to your community explaining your stance, what you'll remove and why. This should be contextualised within your existing guidelines and governance - e.g. explicitly calling this out may be high-risk for some user groups, so approach with caution.
During
• Remove first, without playing the video. Turn off autoplay and thumbnail previews where and if you can.
• Report the content to the platform, and to eSafety where it isn't removed.
• Step away if you see something distressing. Swap with a colleague if one is available.
After
• Debrief with your team.
• Use your employee assistance program (EAP) if you have one. Lifeline is on 13 11 14 for anyone who needs to talk.
• Notice if the footage stays with you in the days that follow, and seek support if it does.
ACM will share resources and check in with our community as this unfolds. Nobody should have to carry this work alone. If you’d like to chat to Venessa or the ACM team about preparing for this event, if it goes ahead, drop us a line.
