Are you worried about what your children, students, friends, or community are being exposed to online right now?

The teenage gunmen who carried out Monday’s deadly attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego did not radicalize in a vacuum.

They were shaped by systems, and manufactured by design.

While communities mourn the lives of Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad, commentators keep asking:

How does this keep happening?

The urgent question is:

How do we expect to protect young people from online radicalization while ignoring the algorithmic systems, dehumanizing political language, grievance economies, and engagement-driven infrastructures that normalize extremism in the first place?

The infrastructure of modern violence has fundamentally changed.

What once lived in fragmented corners of the internet is now embedded into everyday digital life, reaching children earlier, faster, and more intimately than ever before.

It connects seemingly disparate horrors: ISIS propaganda networks, the Christchurch mosque livestream, antisemitic synagogue attacks, and the rising global surge of femicide and targeted misogyny.

For years, Western institutions treated these threats as distant, fringe, or external. Domestic extremism was minimized, selectively labeled, or politically compartmentalized while the underlying systems continued expanding in plain sight.

Today, state actors, influencers, extremist networks, and platform economies increasingly exploit the same vulnerabilities: fear, isolation, humiliation, identity crises, discrimination, and social alienation.

The pipeline is digital, and its consequences are physical.

So I created this tip sheet not as a panic document, but as a practical starting point for parents, educators, journalists, organizers, and communities trying to understand what is actually happening around them, and what warning signs we can no longer afford to ignore.

This is only the beginning.

In the coming weeks, Unembedded will continue publishing:

• practical prevention guidance

• platform accountability analysis

• newsroom reporting frameworks

• policy pressure points

• school and community intervention strategies

• investigations into the systems shaping modern online radicalization

Prevention starts long before violence. It starts with understanding the systems shaping attention, identity, belonging, and belief.

Subscribe to Unembedded, and restock and share this with your networks.

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Please note: the guidance and frameworks shared through Unembedded will continue evolving as technologies, platforms, policies, and online behaviors rapidly change. Stay subscribed for updated analysis, corrections, resources, and future action frameworks.

— Raja Althaibani, Editor, Unembedded

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

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Part 1 covered the first three shifts media practitioners should make before reporting— pitch the system, report the consequence, center the burden-bearers. Here are two more bonus shifts to carry with you. Because I care, and because I want us to win.

From Killing Spectacle: 15 Shifts for Reporting on Online Harm and Extremism, a guide for journalists, editors, producers, researchers, and media practitioners. Published here in parts. Each installment stands alone. The full picture builds across the series.

Start here: Part 1: Frame the Story Right .

Here are two more shifts to make in our daily practice to help us kill the ‘spectacle’ in ‘spectacle journalism’.

My first piece published here covered first three mindset and technical shifts, before reporting: pitch the system not the spectacle, report consequence not conflict, center the burden-bearers not the perpetrators. Those shifts are about what story you’re telling and whose experience is at the center of it.

These two are about something that happens before any of that, reading the information environment you’re working inside before you let it assign the story for you.

On beats covering online harm, extremism, and AI abuse, the platform is not a neutral surface. It is an active editorial force. It decides what looks significant. It manufactures the appearance of consensus. It makes fringe content look mainstream and widespread harm look marginal. Journalists who don’t account for that are not reporting reality. They are reporting the platform’s version of reality, which is designed, in specific and documented ways, to serve interests other than public understanding.

These two shifts are about closing that gap before the first word is written, or first raw video is collected, edited, or clipped.

Shift 4: Virality is evidence of distribution, not importance

Unlearn: Treat trending content as proof that something matters.

Relearn: Virality tells you something was distributed at scale. It tells you almost nothing about whether it reflects reality.

One of the most corrosive habits in covering online harm and extremism is treating visibility as proof. A piece of content goes viral. It appears in your feed, your editor’s feed, your source’s feed. It feels significant because it is everywhere.

But everywhere on a platform is an editorial decision made by an algorithm, not a measure of cultural reality, social consensus, or genuine threat. Platforms are built to surface conflict and blur the line between significance and visibility. Journalism walks straight into that trap when it treats the trending tab as an assignment editor.

Urgency and importance are not the same thing. A piece of content can reach ten million people and reflect almost nothing about how those people actually think, behave, or live. A pattern that affects millions can be entirely invisible on a platform because it doesn’t produce the engagement mechanics that make content travel.

The shift is learning to ask:

is this visible because it is significant, or does it seem significant because it is visible?

What this looks like in practice

The 2024 tradwife surge looked, from inside the feed, like a mass cultural shift: a generation of women returning to domestic roles. Mainstream coverage treated it that way. Research from Monash University and the International Journal of Communication found no evidence of that in behavioral data. What the data showed was that recommendation algorithms were artificially funneling users toward increasingly extreme gender content. The trend didn’t reflect what women wanted. It reflected what the platform rewarded and amplified. Reporting it as a cultural shift normalized extremist content through perceived popularity, exactly the outcome the amplification was designed to produce.

The same failure appears constantly on extremism beats. Coordinated seeding makes fringe content look mainstream. Manufactured outrage cycles make marginal figures look culturally significant. The platform’s engagement mechanics are not neutral. They are specifically designed to surface the most inflammatory version of any story. Treating that surface as reality is a reporting failure, not just an editorial one.

Editorial test:

If this were not trending, would you still assign it?

If the answer is no, you are covering distribution, not reality.

If this incident had never been filmed, clipped, or algorithmically amplified, would it still matter?

If the answer is yes, that is where the story begins.

Field note on extremism and online harm beats specifically:

On these beats the virality problem is often deliberate, not incidental. Bad actors engineer viral moments specifically to manufacture the appearance of consensus, to make a fringe position look mainstream, a marginal figure look culturally dominant, an isolated incident look like a pattern. The tradwife surge was organic platform mechanics producing a distorted picture. Coordinated extremist content seeding is the same distortion produced intentionally.

The verification question is the same in both cases:

is this visible because it is significant, or significant because it is visible?

Before escalating any trending story on these beats, ask whether the spike is organic or cluster-driven. The answer changes what you’re actually covering.

Toolkit 4: Auditing virality before you escalate

Before escalating any trending story, run this test:

Does this affect policy, safety, public resources, or a meaningful number of people beyond the feed?

If not, you are covering distribution.

For checking whether a spike is organic or coordinated: Junkipedia tracks coordinated inauthentic behavior and platform manipulation; the Stanford Internet Observatory publishes platform-specific research on amplification mechanics; CrowdTangle (now Meta Content Library) and Brandwatch track cross-platform spread patterns.

For situating platform trends in behavioral reality: look for data that exists outside the platform such as surveys, behavioral research, policy data, academic studies that either corroborates or contradicts what the platform surface suggests. Monash University’s platform research and the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report are both useful starting points for cross-referencing platform visibility against real-world data. Also check out Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit.

Newsworthiness test before escalating any trend:

does this have policy effects, safety implications, measurable behavioral uptake, or institutional consequences outside the platform?

If it scores zero on all four, it is a distribution story, not a significance story.

See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 5: Situate the incident in the pattern

Unlearn: Let one vivid case carry the argument about scale.

Relearn: Every incident needs a baseline, a trend line, and proportionality ( in both directions).

One vivid case can distort an entire public conversation. This happens constantly in coverage of online harm, extremism, and AI abuse: a single incident is treated as a trend, a trend is treated as a crisis, a crisis is reported without baseline data. Audiences end up with inflated fear, or false reassurance, and no way to judge what is actually escalating versus what is simply newly visible.

The proportionality failure runs in both directions, and both directions cause harm.

Inflating rare incidents produces moral panic, bad policy, and the kind of fear that bad actors deliberately manufacture. Minimizing widespread patterns produces public blindness to structural harm that is hiding in plain sight. Both failures serve bad actors: the first by manufacturing urgency around marginal threats, the second by providing cover for systemic ones.

Reporting the pattern means reporting both directions with equal rigor. How common is this, really? Is it rising, falling, or newly visible? Is this incident exceptional or representative? What would a reader need to know to make an accurate judgment about the scale and nature of the harm?

What this looks like in practice

Coverage of incel-linked violence regularly treats isolated attacks as evidence of a mass movement, inflating a rare incident into a pattern that the data doesn’t support. Coverage of Andrew Tate’s reach did the inverse: the Hope Not Hate finding that 8 in 10 boys aged 16 to 17 had seen his material, and the YouGov finding that 1 in 6 boys aged 6 to 15 held a positive view of him, were treated as fringe statistics in coverage that hadn’t done the work of situating the numbers. That is not a fringe statistic. Reporting it as one was a failure of proportionality in the opposite direction, minimizing a documented, widespread pattern because the number was uncomfortable to report at its actual scale.

The Marshall Project’s context-first reporting on crime data is the model for how to do this right: every incident is situated in the baseline, every trend is measured against historical data, and the story names clearly what the data shows and what it doesn’t. One dramatic incident never distorts the national picture because the national picture is always present in the reporting.

Editorial test:

Are you showing readers where this event sits in the real pattern — or are you allowing vividness to substitute for scale? Can you state, specifically: is this incident typical, exceptional, rising, falling, or simply newly visible?

If you can’t answer that question before you file, the context is missing.

Field note on these beats specifically:

The proportionality question is weaponized on both sides of these beats. Extremist actors inflate their own significance to appear more powerful and culturally dominant than they are. Treat their visibility claims with the same skepticism you’d apply to any source with an incentive to exaggerate. Platform harm is simultaneously minimized by the institutions that produce it. Treat their framing of harm as marginal or exceptional with the same skepticism. Your job is to find the actual baseline, which usually requires going outside the platform, outside the institution, and outside the most visible sources on both sides.

Use the context box. Add this to every spike story and every incident report on these beats:

• Baseline: what is the normal rate or scale of this type of incident or behavior?

• Trend line: is this rising, falling, stable, or newly visible?

• Rarity: is this exceptional or representative?

• Responsible inference: what can we actually conclude from this data, and what would we need to establish what we can’t yet conclude?

That box, applied consistently, prevents a single dramatic case from doing the work that evidence should do.

Toolkit 5: Context tools for situating incidents in pattern

For baseline and trend line data on online harm and extremism: the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) publishes research specifically designed to provide contextual data for journalists; the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) tracks platform harm at scale; Hope Not Hate’s annual State of Hate report provides UK and European baseline data on extremism reach and penetration.

For AI harm and platform data: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute all publish research that provides the baseline data most platform coverage lacks. Use them before you file, not after.

For proportionality in both directions: the Context Box above. Apply it to every spike story. If you can’t fill in all four fields, you don’t have enough information to report the incident as evidence of a pattern.

Pro tip: add the context box to every spike story: baseline, trend line, rarity, and what we can responsibly infer. It takes ten minutes and prevents the single most common framing failure on these beats.

See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

What these two shifts have in common, and how they complete Phase 1 (shifts and tips before reporting)

Both shifts are about the same underlying discipline: not letting the platform assign your story.

Shift 4 asks whether what is visible is actually significant. Shift 5 asks whether what is significant is being accurately sized. Together they close the two most common framing failures on these beats: treating virality as cultural evidence, and treating a single incident as proof of a pattern.

Combined with the first three shifts, Phase 1 is now complete. You know what story you’re telling (the system, not the spectacle), whose experience is at the center (the burden-bearers, not the perpetrators), what you’re following (consequence, not conflict), whether the platform signal is real (Shift 4), and whether the scale is accurate (Shift 5).

Phase 2 begins where Phase 1 ends. Once you know what you’re covering, how you gather and weigh evidence determines everything.

Please share your favorite tips and any additional shifts you think we should be making as media and human rights practitioners reporting on online harm. The shifts, tips and toolkits in this series are non-exhaustive, and are serve as a launching pad for this community, which includes YOU, to extract from as well as contribute to.

Because we care. And because we want to win. Collectively.

The Field

The practices above are easier to sustain inside a community of people working on the same problems than alone. That’s what The Field is: a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technologists working at this intersection, built on the principle that the people with the most situational knowledge are often those with the least institutional power, and that better practice requires closing that gap deliberately. If this is your beat, wherever you are, it’s yours to join.

Join The Field: Fill out the intake form or reach out to me directly at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com

The Frontier

Phase 1’s specific frontier question is the platform transparency problem: you can’t accurately situate incidents in pattern or audit virality if the platforms controlling the data don’t share it. Shifts 4 and 5 both require external data sources precisely because platform data is inaccessible, unreliable, or strategically curated. The EU Digital Services Act and US platform accountability efforts are the most significant structural responses to this problem, and both are currently contested, partially implemented, and under pressure. Naming that gap is part of what this guide does. Closing it requires more than better journalism. It requires platform accountability infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist at the scale these beats require.

Up next — Killing Spectacle, Part 2: Rigor Without Cruelty

Phase 1 is complete. Phase 2 is where the frame you built either holds or falls apart.

How to verify claims in spaces designed to mislead — including how to slow down when emotion spikes and bad actors are deliberately manufacturing urgency. How to build an evidence hierarchy rather than a transcript of competing claims. And how to use AI to see what only becomes visible at scale, rather than to produce faster noise.

Part 2 is where the craft gets specific. The frame is only as good as what you can prove.

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If this is your beat — or someone you edit, teach, or commission —send it directly and invite them to join The Field. The journalists and media practitioners who need this most are rarely the ones looking for it.

These aren’t universal rules. They’re practices drawn from years in this space. What works in a long-form investigation won’t always survive a breaking news brief. Context matters. This guide is a conversation, leave a comment or reach me directly with what’s missing and what works. What’s useful goes into the guide, with credit.

About the author. Raja Althaibani is an advisor, strategist, and trainer working at the intersection of human rights, media systems, digital evidence, and emerging technology. With over 15 years of experience across the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States, she has worked with journalists, civil society organizations, and international institutions to document harm, build accountability processes, and adapt human rights practice to shifting technological and political realities. She previously worked at WITNESS, the human rights organization specializing in video and digital documentation. She is the founder of Arab Hyphenated.

She writes Unembedded, which includes the ongoing series The Safari Is Over, and founded The Field, a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, and technical practitioners working on these beats.

inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Join The Field

killing spectacle | media guide | virality | platform accountability | online harm | extremism | framing | Raja Althaibani

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

The problems at the intersection of media, online harm, technology, and accountability don't respect disciplinary boundaries. Neither should the people working on them.

A journalist investigating an extremist network needs to understand platform infrastructure. A human rights lawyer building a case around digital evidence needs to understand how that evidence was collected and verified. A technologist building tools for open-source investigation needs to understand what practitioners in conflict zones can actually access and use. A researcher documenting online abuse needs to understand how newsrooms make editorial decisions, and what gets lost in translation between the field and the published piece. And a community documentarian on the ground needs to understand how her work will travel once it leaves her hands: who will interpret it, in what context, and toward what end.

These people rarely work together in any sustained way. The communities of practice1 that exist are largely siloed: by discipline, by geography and language, by institution, and by the structural imbalances that have long shaped who gets to lead, contribute, and be heard in this space.

The Field exists to change that.

What The Field is

The Field is a cross-sector community of practice (CoP)2, global from the start, for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technical practitioners working at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability.

It was founded on a simple argument: that the existing community of practice in this space is fractured, skewed toward Global North institutions, and structurally extractive toward the practitioners with the most situational knowledge and the least institutional power. That better outcomes— better journalism, stronger accountability, more effective tools, more durable practice require deliberate, unblocked collaboration across the full spectrum of the field.3

This is not a network. It’s a working community co-created, contribution-led, and designed to be less monopolized, more inclusive, and genuinely global.

What The Field does

The Field brings together practitioners to:

• Build shared knowledge across disciplines, geographies, and languages so that the journalist, the lawyer, the researcher, and the technologist are working from the same foundation rather than talking past each other.

• Develop practical frameworks and field guidance including methodologies, tools, and resources that are actually usable by the full range of people doing this work, not just those with institutional backing and Global North infrastructure.

• Strengthen the work that holds systems accountable by centering practitioners with situational knowledge, reducing extractive dynamics, and creating conditions for collaboration that is fair, equitable, and genuinely useful.

• Build a community of practice that lasts by connecting practitioners across sectors and geographies who are doing this work, sharing what they know, and building something more durable than any single investigation, report, or news cycle.

Who it’s for

If you work in any of the following, wherever you are in the world, The Field is for you:

Journalism and editorial practice · Open-source investigation and digital evidence · Human rights documentation and advocacy · International law and accountability · Disinformation and information disorder research · Platform policy and tech accountability · AI, emerging technology, and public interest practice · Media training and capacity building

This includes, and deliberately centers, practitioners from the so-called Global South (Global Majority), diaspora communities, and those working in and on conflict-affected and underrepresented contexts. The people closest to the harm are the ones this field most needs to hear from.

You don’t need an institutional affiliation. You don’t need to be based in a Global North city. You need to be doing the work, or building toward it.

Further Reading

The Field builds on arguments first made here: The Case To (Re)new Community of Practice for the Open Source Investigative Field — Symposium on Fairness, Equality, and Diversity in Open Source Investigations, OpinioJuris.

How to join

The Field is in its founding phase. This is the moment to get in early, shape what it becomes, and connect with the first cohort of practitioners building it together.

To join or express interest:

Fill in the intake form here

Reach out directly: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com ; Or leave a comment below.

Tell us who you are, what you work on, where you’re based, and what you think The Field needs to do. That information will directly shape how the community is built.

There is no membership fee. No institutional gatekeeping. No prerequisite except the work.

Subscribe now

The Field was founded by Raja Althaibani. Read her work at Unembedded.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability— advising, training, writing, investigating, and building the infrastructure that helps practitioners and institutions respond to an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow.

Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law and accountability, and open-source digital documentation. She works with journalists, editors, researchers, lawyers, advocates, technologists, and institutions across sectors and geographies, advising on online harm, information disorder, and emerging technology; training practitioners to work with greater rigor and judgment; and building cross-sector communities and tools designed to make the field stronger, more inclusive, and less extractive.

Her work is defined by one consistent thread: closing the gap between complex systems and the people who need to understand, navigate, and hold them accountable.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, practical guides, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It publishes original reporting, case studies, curated resources, tools and templates for practitioners, and research and reading lists across the beats it covers.

Unembedded includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over—on how media covers harm, extremism, and algorithmic culture, and what better practice looks like— and The Field Dispatch, the working intelligence arm of The Field community of practice. She is the founder of The Field.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com or via contact form; and website www.rajaalthaibani.com

From Killing Spectacle: 15 Shifts for Reporting on Online Harm and Extremism, a guide for journalists, editors, producers, researchers, and media practitioners. Published here in parts. Each installment stands alone. The full picture builds across the series.

Killing Spectacle is part of ‘The Safari Is Over’, an ongoing series on media, harm, and the information landscape.

There’s a moment most journalists on this beat recognize, even if they don’t name it.

You’re pitching a story about a harmful online community, an AI abuse case, a radicalization pipeline. And somewhere in the process, the story migrates toward its most watchable part. The clip. The personality. The confrontation. The thing that makes an editor say: that.

It feels like journalism. It has texture and tension and a hook. But something has gone missing: the part that would actually change how the public understands what’s happening. The part that helps them identify where to direct action.

This guide is about that gap, and how to close it, deliberately.

What this guide is and isn’t

These are practices, not rules, drawn from years in this space, watching what holds and what collapses under scrutiny. They’re also shifts: things we have to actively unlearn before you can replace them with something more useful. Most of the bad instincts on this beat aren’t careless. They’re trained. They got rewarded. They got pieces commissioned and clips shared and panels booked. Unlearning them requires naming them first.

This is also a living document and a conversation. If you work on these beats— as a journalist, researcher, advocate, lawyer, technologist— what’s missing and what works belongs in here. Leave a comment or reach out directly. Everything useful goes into the guide, with credit.

How the full guide is structured

The 15 shifts are arranged across four phases: Framing (how you conceptualize and pitch the story before reporting begins), Rigor (how you verify and source in environments designed to mislead), Structure (how you shape and distribute the story without reproducing the harm), and Sustained Practice (how you protect and maintain this work inside institutions that don’t always reward it). The three shifts below are Phase 1. You don’t need to follow them sequentially, but the logic is cumulative, and each phase assumes the one before it.

The question that runs through all 15 shifts

Does this story increase public understanding, or does it redistribute attention?

Redistributing attention is easy. It generates clicks, and it can feel like exposure. But it rarely changes anything. Public understanding is harder to produce and harder to sell. It’s also the only thing journalism in this space can offer that the algorithm can’t.

What prompted this guide

This guide didn’t come from one story. It came from a pattern.

There is a structural problem in how online harm, extremism, and algorithmic culture get covered, and it shows up across formats, platforms, and beats. It’s not about bad journalists and storytellers. It’s about the gravitational pull of certain types of stories: ones that arrive pre-loaded with conflict, personality, and outrage, and make spectacle feel like investigation.

You know these stories.

The influencer radicalizing teenage boys, covered through his most inflammatory clips. The deepfake abuse case that leads with the viral moment and buries the policy vacuum. The AI system causing harm, reported as a curiosity rather than a systemic failure. The harassment campaign reconstructed around the abuser’s language rather than its cost to the target. The extremist community profiled through its most watchable members, never its recruitment infrastructure.

The Jihadi Johns and Andrew Tates—manufactured characters who understood exactly what the media would do with them, and built the spectacle, legitimacy, and reach they so desperately wanted accordingly. The alt-right figures who gamed outrage cycles to launder fringe ideology into mainstream debate. The misogynist podcasters whose revenue model runs on the very coverage claiming to expose them. The election disruptors who flood the zone knowing the correction will carry the lie further. The war crimes filmed and uploaded by perpetrators— state and non-state actors—because they knew journalists would distribute them.

In every case, the harmful actor understood the media environment better than the coverage did. And they know the media environment and its participants better than it knows itself.

These stories all have legitimate public interest at their core. The coverage often doesn’t find it because the spectacle is closer, faster, and easier to sell. That’s not a personal failure. It’s an editorial one.

And editorial choices can be made differently. This is a guide to making them differently: 15 shifts from spectacle-driven coverage to high-impact public interest reporting across online harm, extremism, AI, and algorithmic culture.

Shift 1: Pitch the system, not the spectacle

Unlearn: Anchor the pitch to a personality or incident.

Relearn: Pitch the system the incident reveals.

The most damaging instinct on this beat is reaching for a compelling figure or moment to sell a story. This is understandable, it’s how pitches get bought. But on beats involving harassment, extremism, or AI harm, incident-led coverage carries real costs: it re-traumatizes victims, amplifies the people causing harm, and normalizes what should remain structurally shocking. More practically: it produces stories that don’t survive the next news cycle. Incident-led coverage has a shelf life. System-led coverage has a subject.

What this looks like in practice

When AI-generated non-consensual images of a female student at a Louisiana middle school circulated last year, early coverage treated it as a conflict: a fight, an expulsion, a drama between teenagers. Readable. Thin.

Stronger reporting reframed the same facts around a policy vacuum: schools were applying outdated cyberbullying frameworks to a new type of harm and deepfake technology those laws never contemplated. No mechanism existed to respond, discipline, or protect. The incident was the entry point. The institution was the story.

One version ages out when the next incident lands. The other stays useful to every educator, parent, and policymaker who encounters the same gap. By focusing on the public-interest frame over spectacle, 8 more students were identified as victims of the same abuse, revealing a critical lack of oversight and accountability.

Editorial test:

Can you name the failing institution, platform, or policy in your first two paragraphs? If the story falls apart without the viral moment, you’re chasing spectacle.

Pitch frame to keep nearby:

The public needs to understand how [system] is responding to [harm] because it affects their ability to [protect themselves / hold someone accountable / make an informed decision].

Field note on AI and algorithmic beats specifically:

When a model or platform is implicated in harm, resist the pull toward anthropomorphizing the technology as the protagonist. The model isn’t the story. The decision to deploy it without safeguards, the gap between the terms of service and what the product actually does, the accountability structure that allowed the harm to scale, those are the story. Name the company. Name the design choice. Name the person who signed off.

Toolkit 1: Pitching the system when editors want the story

Before pitching, build a one-page map of the system you're investigating: the institution, the policy gap, the harm pathway, the people absorbing the cost. Kumu or a shared Miro board forces you to articulate the system before a word is written, and gives editors something concrete to look at beyond a clip or outrageous hook. AI-assisted document analysis (DocumentCloud Analyst, OCCRP Aleph) surfaces patterns across large document sets faster than manual reading. And maintain a running accountability file on the institutions on your beat (policy changes, enforcement actions, known gaps) so when an incident occurs, the system story is already half-reported.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 2: Conflict is the delivery system. Consequence is the story.

Unlearn: Let the most dramatic moment become the unit of analysis.

Relearn: Treat conflict as the delivery system. Report the consequence.

Conflict generates heat, and heat generates clicks. But heat dissipates, and if you’ve only reported the confrontation, nothing survives the news cycle.

Covering consequence is different. Consequence is what changed. Who gained power, money, reach, or legitimacy. What the people most affected did next. How institutions responded or didn’t, or built in deniability so they wouldn’t have to.

What this looks like in practice

Podcast formats built around confrontation and humiliation, Fresh & Fit being a well-documented case, tend to get covered through their worst and most outrageous clips. That coverage is reliable and easy to produce. It also explains nothing.

But it doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t tell you how the format generates revenue, how engagement mechanics reward escalation, how humiliation becomes entertainment, or what that does to the young men watching. Consequence-led reporting asks: what changed as a result of this? Who built a platform, a business, a political foothold? Who lost their safety, their sense of what’s normal? Who absorbed the cost?

That’s where the story lives.

Editorial test:

What happened after the conflict? Who gained, measurably (in reach, revenue, or legitimacy) and who absorbed the damage?

If you can’t answer both, the reporting isn’t finished.

Field note

Consequence is harder to report because it's often disaggregated and delayed. The influencer's revenue doesn't appear in the clip. The behavioral shift in the audience doesn't show up in the incident report. This is partly by design, platforms and bad actors alike benefit from keeping consequence invisible. Closing the gap requires a different sourcing strategy: researchers, platform transparency data, former employees, and the people most affected tracked over time, not quoted once. Phase 4 of this guide addresses the longitudinal obligation in full.

Toolkit 2: Following consequence when platforms obscure it

For platform and influencer revenue: Social Blade tracks estimated YouTube and Twitch earnings; SimilarWeb tracks audience growth and traffic sources; OpenCorporates surfaces corporate structures. For political influence: InfluenceMap. For moving from "here's the personality" to "here's the infrastructure": Gephi visualizes how content, accounts, and communities connect. For high-volume content beats, AI transcription (Whisper) and synthesis tools (NotebookLM) let you track rhetoric and escalation patterns across thousands of hours of material, the slow radicalization pipeline, not just the viral moment. And set calendar reminders at 3, 6, and 12 months after publication. The follow-up is itself a reporting method.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 3: Center the burden-bearers, not the perpetrators

Unlearn: Let perpetrators set the terms of the story.

Relearn: Center the people who carry the long-term burden.

This is the structural failure that runs deepest, and the one most resistant to change because it’s baked into how stories get told.

On extremism, harassment, and abuse beats, perpetrators routinely set the frame. They’re quotable, accessible, often actively seeking coverage and eager for attention. Victims and survivors appear later : as context, as reaction, as proof that something bad happened. That structure isn’t neutral. It reproduces the hierarchy of the harm itself.

Centering burden-bearers isn’t a fairness question. It’s a reporting accuracy question. The people who live with the long-tail consequences of these systems understand them differently, and often more completely, than the people producing them. Their testimony is evidence. Not color.

What this looks like in practice

Amnesty International's Toxic Twitter research didn’t focus on what abusers said, it focused on what the abuse cost. Women changed how they used platforms. Many withdrew from public life online. Some feared for their physical safety offline. The damage was measurable, documented, and largely absent from coverage that kept returning to perpetrators and their rhetoric. That research made harm legible in terms institutions could act on. It named the hidden tax. It showed the invisible majority.

Editorial test:

Who has the most to lose in this story? Are they present with name, context, and consequence in the first third of your piece?

If not, you’re reporting the fire. Not the building that keeps catching.

Field note on source relationships

Burden-bearers are often sources who've been burned by coverage before: used as a single quote, stripped of context, left exposed after publication with no follow-up. The relationship requires more than a consent form. It requires transparency about how the material will be used, what decisions you'll make about their identification, and what your obligations are after the piece goes live. Phase 2 of this guide addresses this in depth, specifically, how to handle sources who are also subjects, and what rigor looks like without cruelty.

Toolkit 3: Reaching burden-bearers and protecting them

Secure communications are baseline: SecureDrop for newsrooms; Signal with disappearing messages for individual reporters. The Freedom of the Press Foundation's operational security guides are shareable with sources, not just practitioners. For community-based sourcing, the antidote to the parachute model, build relationships with survivor advocacy groups, mutual aid networks, and community organizations before you need them for a story. Meedan's Check enables collaborative verification with input from affected communities, valuable for content in languages or contexts outside a reporter's fluency. And the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma carries peer-reviewed, practitioner-tested guidance on trauma-informed practice. It belongs in your working reference, not just your reading list.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

What these three shifts have in common

They all require resisting the pull toward what is easiest to see, film, quote, and sell.

That pull is real. Editors want the hook. Platforms reward the clip. Audiences click on conflict. None of that is going away. And none of it is an excuse, either.

These shifts aren’t about producing slower journalism or quieter journalism. They’re about producing journalism with a longer half-life: stories that build public understanding instead of borrowing its attention.

Phase 1 of this guide is conceptual. It changes how you frame the story before you report it. The shifts in Phases 2, 3, and 4 build on this foundation: rigor without cruelty, structure that makes systems visible rather than personalities legible, and the sustained practice of doing this work inside institutions that don’t always reward it. A story with the right frame but weak verification is still a weak story. These phases are cumulative. Each one assumes the work of the one before.

Because I care—and because I want us to win—here are two bonus shifts to carry with you from Part I before you start reporting: treating virality as distribution evidence, and placing the incident within the larger pattern. Both are about closing the gap before the first word is written.

Killing Spectacle (Part I-Continued): Framing the Story — Two Bonus Shifts Before You Report on Online Harm and Extremism

Read it here.

The Field

The practices above are easier to sustain inside a community of people working on the same problems than alone. That’s what The Field is: a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technologists working at this intersection, built on the principle that the people with the most situational knowledge are often those with the least institutional power, and that better practice requires closing that gap deliberately. If this is your beat, wherever you are, it’s yours to join.

Join The Field: Fill out the intake form or reach out to me directly at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com

The Frontier

These three shifts will make individual stories better. They won’t fix the structural conditions that make better journalism hard to sustain: the revenue models that reward speed over depth, the synthetic media environment that is actively contaminating the evidentiary record, and the reach gap that means the reporting most needed by communities closest to the harm is the reporting least likely to reach them. Each of those problems gets its full treatment in the phase where it becomes most acute, synthetic media and verification in Part 2, the reach gap in Part 3, the revenue question in Part 4. Naming them here is a promise, not a deferral. The frontier is the reason the guide exists. Craft alone doesn’t close it.

Up next— Killing Spectacle, Part 2: Rigor without cruelty.

How to verify claims in spaces designed to mislead, including a synthetic media environment where the detection tools are always one cycle behind the fakes. How to handle sources who are also subjects, and what informed consent actually looks like as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time form. And the specific problem no one talks about clearly enough: what you do with evidence you can verify but cannot safely publish, and how that shapes what you can responsibly claim.

Part 2 of this guide is where the frame you built in Part 1 either holds or falls apart. The craft is in making it hold.

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Two additional shifts to consider before you start reporting: treating virality as distribution evidence, and placing the incident within the larger pattern. Both are about closing the gap before the first word is written.

Killing Spectacle (Part I-Continued): Frame the Story Right with Two More Shifts (read here)

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If this is your beat, or someone you edit, teach, or commission, send it to them directly and invite them to join The Field, our new community of practice. The journalists and media practitioners who need this most are rarely the ones looking for it.

These aren’t universal rules. They’re practices drawn from years in this space. What works in a long-form investigation won’t always survive a breaking news brief. Context matters. This guide is a conversation, leave a comment or reach me directly with what’s missing and what works. What’s useful goes into the guide, with credit.

About the author. Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability— advising, training, investigating, and building tools for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow.

She writes Unembedded, which includes the ongoing series The Safari Is Over ; and founded The Field, a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, and technical practitioners working on these beats.

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