SICK FANTASIES BECOME REALITY
Web videos empower twisted minds: experts
The sudden popularity of livestreaming video services such as Facebook Live and Twitter’s Periscope — along with the ability to upload previously shot videos to the platforms — has increasingly been accompanied by the sharing of violent acts, such as slayings, rapes, suicides and even torture.
The videos are posted by people seeking attention, even feelings of empowerment. Now, experts worry about copycat offenders and, worse, people seeking to “one-up” the gruesomeness of the last viral video.
As Cleveland police and the FBI launched a manhunt Sunday for Steve Stephens, who posted a video of a murder, Facebook removed it from its platform.
“This is a horrific crime and we do not allow this kind of content on Facebook,” a spokesman said. “We work hard to keep a safe environment on Facebook, and are in touch with law enforcement in emergencies when there are direct threats to physical safety.”
Removing a video from the Internet is nearly impossible. Copies of a deleted video still multiply and spread at lightning speed.
Thus the latest video joins a list of horrific scenes floating around on the Internet, such as the Chicago teenager gang-raped on Facebook Live, and the many, many suicides. All, of course, can still be found.
But why did they exist in the first place?
“People who engage in this behavior, particular those posting it to social media, are characterized by feeling disempowered,” James Ogloff, the director at the center for Forensic Behavioral Science at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, told The Washington Post.
In the latest case, Stephens clearly hoped a specific person — identified by him as Joy Lane, which some outlets have reported was a former romantic partner — would watch him kill an elderly man. Stephens directly addressed Joy in the video.
Before streaming services, though, Ogloff said, someone like Stephens might have merely stopped at fantasizing about hurting someone. Instead, he seemed to have planned a murder.
“Just thinking of what you can do to someone you’re angry with is pretty empowering,” he said. But social media adds a new layer: a captive audience.
“The largest asset online that everyone is fighting for is other people’s attention,” Vincent Hendricks, the director of the Center for Information and Bubble Studies at the University of Copenhagen, told The Washington Post. “Attention is a natural currency for human beings. We like attention; we like to be recognized.”
“There’s an easy stock exchange on this — how many likes are you going to get out of it?” Hendricks said.
Last year, for example, an Ohio teenager live-streamed the rape of her 17-year-old friend. “She got caught up in the ‘likes,’ ” the prosecutor said.
As more people watch, mean- while, the more normalized such violent videos become. Ogloff said he has worked with many young people who are “very desensitized to violence by exposure to the Internet.”
It could get worse. Both Hendricks and Ogloff mentioned the idea of violent offenders not just committing copycat crimes but attempting to “one-up” each other. Or, as Ogloff put it, “trying to make your perverted behavior more shocking than the last.”
Stopping the cycle might prove difficult. Ogloff noted that although Stephens’s life will likely only get worse, “essentially no one will care what happens to him.”
“The problem is this guy will now be immortalized in that video,” Ogloff said.