Last month, a 13 year old boy in Georgia accidentally shot himself on Instagram live while his friends were watching.
Facebook released a statement saying that they are going to hire 3,000 more people to review graphic, inappropriate videos to make it easier for it’s users to flag and report them.
This announcement came more than two weeks before a man shot a Cleveland retiree and posted it on Facebook live.
This is one of many instances where a killing occurred on screen.
With children accessing social media more, there is a growing concern for these videos.
There have been numerous accounts in which teens committed suicide or videotapes of fights online.
“Obviously any killing is horrific and shouldn’t be happening, but furthermore, broadcast murder to the world puts people face to face with it in a way that they shouldn’t be,” said junior Elizabeth Lauderdale. “Facebook live and other streaming sites are tools. Like a knife or a rope, they’re not inherently violent, but can be used for murder.”
While there are some guidelines put in place, there is much to be done.
Society nowadays is more concerned about getting the re-tweets and the likes than the issue at hand.
We have become so accustomed to the shock value that we continue to do things to continue to shock other people. It has come to a point where murders and deaths don’t even faze us.
When something bad happens, our first instinct is to videotape it, or take a picture. We all either want to report that something happened rather than calling or doing something about it or not report it at all.
Many people have the mentality of “if it doesn’t bother me, then it is not my problem,’ but this has got to stop.
The Guardian reports that the bystander effect is to blame for why people don’t do anything.
Two psychological researchers who published studies beginning in 1969 experimented in many cases on people to see whether or not they would report encounters.
They came to the conclusion that the more people that there are, the less likely anyone with do anything because they rely on the other person to perform the action.
In this case, when a murder or a fight is being livestreamed, people are more likely to just watch without doing anything because they think the other person might call.
That’s what happened with the young boy and that’s what is continually happening today.
When hearing about all this, people are accustomed to blame the app or the company or the parents when in reality, the people who are watching instances like this occurring and not doing anything are part of the problem.
“Would these people have been killed if their killer hadn’t had a weird exhibitionist thing about putting it on the Internet? We can’t know for sure. But easier report options and monitoring could help curtail it,” Lauderdale said.
We as a society need to evolve and change our mindset.
What if that was you in that situation? Wouldn’t you want someone to help you?
The bystander is never the good guy. In fact, the good guy is the person who calls the police or tries in some way to stop the action than just sitting there on the computer watching the event happen.
It is important to use our voices, and social media, for the better and report to keep instances like this from happening.
Can you imagine how many suicides and casualties like the Texas boy playing with his gun could have been prevented if someone told him that what he was doing was dangerous or if they called the police on him?
There is only so much that Facebook live or any other streaming websites can do.
We need to stop waiting for someone else and actually do something.