By Dan Russo
With the dawn of mobile phones, Face-Time, and a massive new market for live streaming, it is no surprise that Facebook and Instagram have jumped on the live streaming bandwagon. However, it seems as they were ill prepared for the terror that would quickly ensue.
Facebook’s quality assurance has had their work cut out for them since the launch of Facebook Live in January of 2016. What started out as a simple way for people to capture the events shaping the world around them quickly turned dark. On April 16 of this year, a man named Steven Stephens live streamed the murder of Robert Godwin Jr. for the world to see. The video remained online for about two and a half hours and was then taken down by Facebook. It doesn’t matter, however, because the video is now immortalized by sites such as Liveleak.
“Live streaming gives people a false sense of freedom, when in reality everybody is watching,” says Moon High School student Connor Perry, who is a fan of social media otherwise, but dislikes Facebook Live. However, even before this, another horrific event was live-streamed. On January 3rd, a twenty-three-minute video documenting the kidnapping, torture, and scalping of an 18-year-old schizophrenic man went live. Again, the stream was deleted, but mirrors exist all over the internet just a quick Google search away. Facebook has not been the first live steaming platform to showcase acts of violence. Popular video game streaming website Twitch had a problem with these types of bad streams a while ago, albeit in a slightly different vein.
Swatting is the act of making a prank phone call to emergency services to prompt sending the SWAT team to someone else’s house. There are many accounts of the SWAT team entering the streamers house with military grade weapons and unrelenting force.
Jordan Mathewson, a famous YouTube and Twitch streamer who goes by the alias “Kootra”, was broadcasting a round of Counter Strike: Global Offensive in his home when the swat team burst into his house and began pointing guns at him. All of this was captured through his face-cam. Jordan was okay, and knew he was being swatted, but it still sets a shocking precedent.
There isn’t much in the form of punishment for this type of behavior due to the nature of the crime. The perpetrators often make this call using a service like skype, while also scrambling their IP address, which makes them near impossible to track down. When these prank callers are caught, they are typically sent to one year in jail and fined.
“You go on Google and search for Facebook Live, and there’s not a single article praising it. You know something is a bad idea when there literally hasn’t been a single good piece of media concerning it at all,” added Connor Perry.
In the grand scheme of things, streaming is still in its infancy. While there cannot be a person monitoring every single stream, Facebook has made some strides to fix these issues so that they do not happen again. They’re starting by hiring 3,000 monitors to keep the streams clean and safe. Despite these efforts, it still raises some more problems, mostly concerning the safety of the monitors themselves, having to flip through pages of violent material. It is better than the automated system that was used before. Still, Facebook continues to push its live platform despite everything, and there’s only so much we can be protected from.
MoonBeams 