Live video can be a shocking and grim aid in finding justice
CHICAGO — In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his motivation for Facebook Live, the streaming video app that enables anyone with a phone to live-stream whatever they’d like across the globe.
“We built this big technology platform,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News, “so we can go and support whatever the most personal and emotional and raw and visceral ways people want to communicate are as time goes on.”
That communication was pushed to shocking boundaries Tuesday in a Chicago apartment. There, during a Facebook Live broadcast that ran for about a half hour, people were shown attacking an 18-year-old man with mental disabilities while his wrists were bound and mouth taped shut. On Thursday, Chicago police charged four people with hate crimes and other felonies.
Graphic video and audio are surfacing more often as the ease of streaming and the ubiquity of phones grow. But the case of the Chicago attack shows the dichotomy of live video. It makes images of depravity easier to spread and prosecute. It also underscores the grim societal trend that people with disabilities are more likely to be victimized by violence than those without disabilities.
In the early days of video recording, amateurs would shoot and store the material, said University of Michigan professor Scott Campbell, who studies new and emerging media. Then the enhanced video capability of phones made it easier to send electronically whatever was recorded.
“Now, it’s experiencing the moment and letting it go,” Campbell said of Facebook Live, “even though it’s not gone. It’s lingering.”
Police from suburban Streamwood, Ill., where the victim had been reported missing, found the Facebook video after investigating texts sent to the man’s parents. Chicago police contacted Streamwood authorities after finding him bloody and battered wandering the Homan Square neighborhood about 5:15 p.m. Tuesday. His family had dropped him off at a Streamwood McDonald’s on Saturday, ostensibly to meet friends. One of his alleged attackers reportedly knew the victim from a school both attended in Aurora.
Campbell, who viewed part of the video, said the attackers failed to realize the power of this latest social media innovation — “how much visibility can occur and how quickly.” Instead they probably were focused on impressing a small group of friends, he said.
Facebook Live launched to a limited group of users in August 2015, then started a full rollout in December of that year. Last spring, Zuckerberg said it was like having a television camera in your pocket, giving anyone with a phone “the power to broadcast to anyone in the world.”
But less exhilarating consequences emerged. Shortly after Facebook Live debuted, a man in Chicago was shot multiple times while live-streaming himself taunting his rivals. In Turkey, a man upset over a romantic breakup shot himself in the head while viewers begged him to reconsider.
And, in October, a doublemurder suspect streamed from a vehicle he’d carjacked while on the run from police in Oklahoma. “This ain’t a prank,” Michael Dale Vance said, turning the camera to an AK-47 assault rifle on the car seat. “I’m going f— live.”