After three days, I was only mildly disturbed—and very much underwhelmed. But as the week went on and I acquired more friends, the online world I was in became more disquieting. A flurry of new connections with ever more extreme Islamists overwhelmed my timeline with pornographic violence. Everywhere I clicked I found religious snuff films masquerading as “battlefield updates” and snippets of footage from Syria, accompanied by the droning chants of Allahu akbar every time a weapon was discharged. Gruesome images of the recently “martyred”—in Syria, Burma, Afghanistan, Iraq—were swapped and shared like baseball cards.

The constant on my feed—the thing that made me long for the Facebook where high-school friends squabbled about the efficacy of gun control legislation—was ceaseless images of dead children, mostly killed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Everywhere I clicked, there were piles of murdered children; their limbs twisted and bloodless faces staring past the camera. With every login, there were dozens more, blurring into one easily recalled composite dead child. I took to squinting at my laptop, deliberately blurring my vision; when the fuzzy contours of a child appeared, I jerked my head away from the screen and kept scrolling. But when my eyes returned, another lifeless kid was always waiting for me.

The images were clearly intended to be horrifying. And insofar as they provided a record of the brutality inflicted upon ordinary Syrians by the Assad regime, they were. But there was also something about the presentation and context—the fetishization of violence against innocents, followed by the celebration of violence against innocents—that blunted their emotional effectiveness.

Indeed, when not photographed in death, toddlers were frequently enlisted for the jihad.