RE: When did humanity lose all sense of decency?
I'm not at all surprised that a fair amount of people would try to do selfies with a body and shit. There were dedicated forums on sites and subreddits to looking at pictures of dead people, or watching people die that had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Gore subreddits, all kinds of degenerate stuff out there with large communities where people are desensitized as fuck. Combine people who follow that kind of stuff with social media where shocking videos/photos get tons of interactions and they can get a dopamine rush from the attention, and baby you've got a weird fucking stew going.
On the other hand, the media also perpetuates that kind of shit. There was a story in my town a few months ago of someone dying on the sidewalk from ODing, body sat there for a bit and started building a small crowd. Someone called 911 eventually, but the news crews rolled up right at the same time as the police did and were trying to get video footage of the body before it was covered up. Other people in the crowd were also filming it to post to twitter and trying to grandstand about the mistreatment of the community and some other weird shit. People suck ass, man.
Sheesh. I would think that of all the various community guidelines that exist in the major social media that posting dead bodies at active crime scenes and what not would definitely be a violation. I've had nothing to do with those for a long time though so I guess I don't know what the hell is going on there.
I know what you mean about the media chasing ambulances though. Jake Gyllenhaal I think it was had a movie that was about exactly that. Don't recall the name of it though. It was worth seeing if you can hunt it down but knowing what I know about you and movies, you have probably already seen it.
So, reddit did eventually crack down and ban those subreddits. But, those places existed for about 2-3 years before they did so and grew to large numbers of subscribers. I think there's definitely policies in place for this kind of shit, but, the enforcement is another thing all together.
Also, yeah that movie is called Nightcrawler. I've seen it twice, he had a great performance of playing a sociopath in it for sure. Definitely a dark/grimey movie.