No I am not. I don't excuse the people that upload that content to social media or news stations I condemn that behavior in its entirety. We are not talking about those people though. We are talking about the real people facing real traumatic events and having real reactions to them.

There have been studies done on how people react in traumatic situations and if anything has come from them it is that we have very little control how we react in those situations. For a lot of people their brains initial reaction is to protect it's self above other people and that involves minimizing the psychological impact of what is happening in that moment. These people are literally in a state of shock and are reacting in a way beyond their control (in this case reverting to muscle memory and putting up a psychological barrier).

Yes it's shit that their reaction doesn't help the person in need but neither does the actions of the bystander effect or people having panic attacks or many of the other typical reactions to traumatic incidents.

As I said before most of those people will feel terrible afterwards when they think about how they reacted and blame them selves for what was ultimately outside their control and delete the footage. Uploading the footage to social media however is within their control and choosing to do so should be judged and prosecuted harshly.

So instead of ripping into people who are just trying to cope with a situation completely out of their daily norm and reacting badly how about you go after the people that actually upload the videos and profit from it or the articles that reflect terribly on the victims of traumatic incidents instead.