The First Purge: whistleblowers

Question

I just finished watching The First Purge. And while I enjoyed its social commentary I couldn't help to notice one thing that was bugging me.

It was pretty evident that there was a large amount of mercenaries hired by the NFFA to supplant the killing as the citizens weren't killing enough. The movie almost made it look like there were only a handful of civilian kills.

All of the characters had phones it seems, and I found it strange that none of them felt it necessary to document this (especially seeing how everyone feels the need to document everything nowadays). A few moments would have been quite damning like when the mercenaries were talking on the radio about "civilians fighting back".

All of this could have been captured, streamed, sent to news outlets, .etc.

I suspect that had word gotten out there would have been an investigation in to this, and ultimately the purge would have been done with and the NFFA... well who knows.

Was there any explanation to this? Or just an oversight?

Answer 1

Fictional universe

The universe of The Purge is one where the NFFA is becoming an oppressive force, not unlike the Nazis. We can't necessarily rely on the logic of what would happen in our world to this world because they are different. I'm not saying people in The Purge wouldn't think to film it, but you can't necessarily say that just because people in our society would film it then that means people in a fictional universe with a completely different political climate would or should have thought to film it.

Fear of the NFFA

As soon as Dr. Updale realized what was going on, she attempted to stop it and was taken into the purge zone and murdered. The NFFA is willing to do anything to make sure it succeeds and its likely that the citizens were aware of this and so this might explain why they didn't think to try and simply gather evidence to prove what was happening. There's nothing in the movie indicating this was the reason though.

Busy being murdered/defending themselves

I think the most likely reason based on the events of the film is that people were too busy either being killed or fighting back to pull out their phones and document everything. Anyone standing around with a phone would have been shot along with everyone else. Also remember that the mercenaries WERE ALREADY on television and news being shown killing masses of people, but they were in disguise so no one knew. You'd need more than some more footage of them killing people to prove that they were hired by the NFFA.