The Death of Nikki Catsouras and the Ugly Underbelly of the Web
Nikki Catsouras and her tragic death in her father's Porsche have shown us a more sinister side to the web. Although news organisations have generally been sensitive and offered limited coverage of this story (a search on Google news for "Nikki Catsouras" at the time of writing brings up very few results), the web was awash with searches and references to Nikki, or "Porsche girl" as she has become known. Her name and related searches remained at the top 100 searches for longer than most other key searches on Google Trends.
Nikki Catsouras was an 18-year-old college student from California, living at home with her parents and two sisters. On Halloween of 2006 she had an argument with her parents, after which she took off with the keys to her father's Porsche, which she borrowed without permission.
Catsouras was driving the Porsche at one-hundred miles an hour, when she lost control of the car. According to reports, she was trying to overtake a Honda which was cruising at a much lower speed when her father’s Porsche slammed into a cement tollbooth at intense speed. The impact was so violent that Catsouras was killed instantly, her body crushed and mutilated.
The story would have been tragic in its own right, but nothing prepared her family for what was to follow.
According to media reports, when California Highway Patrol officers investigators arrived on the scene they took detailed photographs of the crash and Catsouras' badly mutilated body, presumably for the purpose of the investigation. Those gory and very disturbing images somehow found their way onto the Internet and within days became so prevalent that thousands of sites carried them. ABC picked up on the story and ran in on its 20/20 programme, which added to the interest in Catsouras' death.
Once Nikki Catsouras' pictures were on the Net, there was no way to completely eliminate them. And the reason? The huge demand. Because so many web users were looking for Nikki's images, site owners repeatedly posted them to supply this demand for images of death. Some did so to gain traffic, while others were simply happy to feed the frenzy.
Another effect of this story was an increased interest in death websites in general. An analysis of searches, in the week that followed the release of Catsouras' pictures, shows a massive rise in related web queries. According to Google Trends the terms fatal car accidents, death photos, faces of death, and world of death were all within the top 100 searches - the latter two are sites dedicated to images of death.
The Catsouras family has since filed a lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol for allegedly releasing the accident scene pictures, and a judge in California ruled that the lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol could go forward. At the time of writing, proceedings were ongoing.
On reflection, it is sobering that many sites simply referred to Nikki Catsouras as "Porsche Girl", a dehumanising term that made her into an item, rather than a person. She became a commodity, and the demand for the macabre images of her death will forever remain at large.
It shows us that the underbelly of human nature and its curiosity for things that are taboo is stronger than any moral or ethical code. I am not sure what can be done to make it better and I am a great advocate of freedom of expression. However, in this case I feel strongly that of dignity of a young girl and of her family should somehow be protected, and that freedom of expression does not mean a free-for-all, forsaking any shred of humanity and kindness to others.
It is worth noting that there is a fundamental difference between the legal frameworks that govern these sorts of cases in the US and those in force in the UK. In the US, publishers of gore imagery could claim the First Amendment - protecting their right for freedom of speech. In the UK, however, there is no equivalent to the First Amendment, and Nikki Catsouras' accident images may well fall under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 & 1964. Of course this is utterly theoretical at the point where imagery finds itself onto the web at large.
Nikki Catsouras - The Video report from 20/20: