What should you watch? This summer alone, it hasn’t been hard to find digital images or video of Ray Rice punching Janay Palmer unconscious; of masked ISIS militants executing not only James Foley but also Steven Sotloff; of St. Louis Police shooting and killing mentally ill Kajieme Powell; of Michael Brown’s lifeless body; and of the bodies of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 victims.

In each of those cases, I have seen exhortations not to watch the video, not to look at the images.

Sometimes these appeals are argued from a place of respect. “The intent of the ISIS video is to strip James Foley of his humanity, to turn him into a symbol,” writes Margaret Eby. “We can pay tribute to him best by refusing to participate in the twisted one-act play, this allegory that his killers have scripted for us.”

Sometimes this respect becomes a call for consent: Did Jamay Palmer permit the video of her abuse to become public? If not (and it sure seems not), then the average viewer shouldn’t see it.

And sometimes these entreaties are paired with an appeal to the viewer’s mental health. Not only should you abstain from watching a video because it’s disrespectful to the victim, but you should also avoid it because it’s bad for you. Watch too many of these—watch even just one—and you will be worn down, made a little less hopeful. Yes, it’s your duty to know about the monstrosities committed by humans, but you risk losing something vibrant in yourself if you watch a document of every new one.

I’ve seen all of these arguments sketched by different readers—but I’ve seen all of them contested, too.

How should the media treat the products of networked lenses? In 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and executed. Film of the murder was uploaded online, but, as Eby writes, that was “before the reign of social media, when images and videos did not automatically embed in your timelines, unbidden.” (The Internet as a whole was just much slower then too, and video content more time-consuming to obtain and download.)

Still, some journalists made the video available. “This is the the single most gruesome, horrible, despicable, and horrifying thing I've ever seen,” wrote Stephen Mindich, the publisher of alt-weekly the Boston Phoenix, before he linked to the video.

This year, New York tabloids placed images from the beginning of the Foley video on their front-cover. Even The New York Times embedded a still. Should they have? Just yesterday, The Intercept’s Peter Maass argued that he thought more Americans should watch the execution videos in their entirety.

And this goes beyond snuff films, too: Should the media show images of Michael Brown’s body? Should it screen-cap Ray Rice punching Janay Palmer? Should it embed Instagrams of Flight 17 victims?

If not, should it give readers a way to access these videos? Or are we unwise to ask these questions: Perhaps films like these should always be handled case-by-case. Yesterday, a roommate of mine said he thought images from the Foley video should be shown, but not any that depicted the murder weapon.

What do the product of networked lenses do, once you add them to a situation? We know something about the violence the American press should and shouldn't depict—there have long been rules, however loose, about those sorts of things. But we know less about how to handle and assess the consequences of showing, or not showing, those images when they’re available elsewhere. Are we preparing to bomb ISIS because of the horror of the images of the Foley and Sotloff murders? Should the press account for that somehow?