Four days after its upload, nearly 6 million people have watched the Facebook Live video posted by Diamond Reynolds, documenting the 10 minutes immediately after her boyfriend, 32-year-old Philando Castile, was shot dead by a police officer in the front seat of his car.

Is it cold to consider that number? To wonder why the same span of time brought 95 million more people to the front seat of Candace Payne’s car, where she cracked herself up with a Chewbacca mask? Or to wonder why the same amount of time drew 10?million viewers to the Buzzfeed office, where two staffers exploded a watermelon with hundreds of rubber bands?

Of course there are differences that separate what we want to watch online, what we expect to watch, what we’ll bother to watch, and what we can’t bring ourselves to watch. They seem obvious, to us. These microdecisions take microseconds; we barely notice the luxury of watching the world so passively, so selectively. Determining whether to tap in or scroll by, modulating our exposure to the world around us to accommodate our moods — these are the ways we protect our delicate sensibilities, the ways we virtualize our privilege.

“Stay with me,’’ Diamond pleads in the first few seconds of the video — she means Philando, she means God, she means us. And so I, and about 6?million others, stayed. I watched the whole thing. It didn’t feel like it ended when it ended. I never want to see it again. I don’t have to.

I heard Diamond’s voice tremble, keeping unthinkable calm and composure for her sake, for 4-year-old Dae’Anna’s sake, for Philando’s sake. I watched the blood stain spread across Philando’s T-shirt, and his body slump between the seats. I saw the rigid arms of the officer in the corner of the frame, steadying a gun still pointed at Philando’s dying body. I heard the officer’s voice fray in panic. I saw the sky when the phone was thrown, the way any of us might turn to the sky if this happened.

Having watched it, I have now seen it. With my own eyes. And I am no longer a viewer. I am a witness.

I still see it happening, looping in my mind. Again and again. None of these views will be logged, they will be carried. If that figure of 6 million viewers sounds, at first, almost callously low, 6 million witnesses sounds impossibly high. We only need to watch Philando Castile die in his car once. But we do need to watch.

Some would disagree with me. I have many friends who assert that watching one black man after another lose their lives to police officers — like Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Samuel Dubose, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, the list is too long — is tantamount to a public lynching. This ceaseless assembly of spectacles not only desensitizes us to abuses of power, but reinforces an institutional narrative of white supremacy, even as it purports to expose its ugliest manifestations. And for others, watching these videos has the same smearing effect on law enforcement at large. This new view we have, they say, however close, however clear, serves only to obscure and distort.

But these videos, along with the ones that capture the moments before and after these tragedies (as in the cases of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Christian Taylor, and Freddie Gray) may be the only way to disrupt the carefully crafted views of the world our feeds feed us.

Is it really better not to watch? To simply know what these videos contain and simulate as best we can the disgust that watching them might inspire?

Is it better not to share? To simply excuse ourselves from the conversation and join the comfort of silence, knowing we spared ourselves and our friends the anguish of getting “political’’ or “negative’’ on Facebook?

And for those who find themselves in these situations themselves, is it better not to record? Or not to post? To trust procedure and protocol and systems of justice that routinely fail those populations who require justice the most?

Just look at the words in that last sentence: procedure, protocol, populations, systems, justice. How easy language makes it to abstract the deaths of black people at the hands of police, flattening these violations into formless tragedies that call for uncertain solutions.

Videos seldom tell the whole story, but they do offer a view free of abstraction — they play out in front of us, raw, unedited, unprocessed by commentary, spin, or equivocation. It is on us to look first and ask questions later. Then we must question those questions.

Those forces within us that compel us to watch such horrors will always be less of a threat than those forces outside of us that insist we forget. And once you watch, you cannot forget. What matters is that we see it happening. What matters is that we believe it’s happening. What matters is that we stop it from happening. Now.

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.