I understand it academically, but every time I see or read something like this I realise that I don't really understand it.
To address the argument that we should "see how horrible the world is", I think it's worth asking why that's necessary? What will it change, beyond making it harder to sleep? Further, there's always something worse you can see, so should we go on trying to fund ever more horrible videos to watch? What is gained by watching something live that isn't gained simply by reading about it or reflecting on injustices without becoming voyeurs to people's horrors?
There's a reason why, when spruiking for donations, organisations like UNICEF like to show pictures of suffering children, and read first-hand accounts. These are the things that motivate people to act. We're not perfectly rational beings. We're all well aware that there are poor and starving people in the world, and mostly we do nothing about it. It's that emotional reaction that prompts us to act.
Reflecting on it instead might be sufficient, but if so then it's demonstrably not what people do, or else those pitches wouldn't be as successful as they are.
That action, to me, is the point, and it comes in many forms. Some active, like for instance donating to a cause. Some passive, like changing opinions on an ongoing war that your country is party to.
Sure, some people are watching it for entertainment value. Is that a big problem, if it changes opinions nevertheless? And from reading the other comments on this thread, I think it's apparent that it changes opinions.
Seeing some of those things helped me understand why people in the past did such radical things to avoid capture.
What? Will we start more wars to provide it? Make workplaces, roads,etc less safe?
Chances are this type of content has saved more lives than anything by making people more sensitised to what can happen and aware of things like workplace safety.
There's something to be said about people seeing war and intervention as boring policy moves, not being able to stomach the thought of seeing where the meat they eat comes from for some reason and thinking about boring warning videos when thinking about workplace safety or a court case when thinking about drunk driving.
The way you phrase this makes it sound like you think people intentionally create these videos where people die just to post it to LiveLeak for people to be entertained by.
A lot of it was stuff that was going to happen anyway that happened to be caught on film.
Utter bullshit and you know it. It didn't have an audience until it was uploaded. By that point it was already recorded. People have always recorded events throughout history for as long as they were able to be recorded.
Was the Hindenburg disaster recorded in the hopes that something awful would happen so it could 'have an audience'?
Unfortunately those humans are going to die and be maimed anyway. If those videos are out there, there's a chance of educating people on the danger of not paying attention crossing the road, or using a lathe, or throwing a firework into a sewer, or any of the million other mundane things that people do that don't seem super dangerous on first thought but actually are?