Eight years later, incidents like this—as well as murders, assaults, and other violent acts—seem to be occurring more frequently, inciting a flurry of media coverage and prompting the providers of streaming services to amp up protections. In April, an 18-year-old woman named Marina Lonina was charged with kidnapping, rape, sexual battery, and pandering sexual matter involving a minor after streaming 29-year-old Raymond Boyd Gates sexually assault her 17-year-old friend live on the Periscope app. According to the New York Times, these charges were "almost as severe" as those facing Gates himself. The prosecutor described the footage: "For the most part she is just streaming it on the Periscope app and giggling and laughing," he said. (Periscope did not return Broadly's request for comment.)Read more: A Horrifying Week with My Borderline Personality Disorder
Dr. Becky Lois specializes in suicide prevention and is an attending psychologist on the behavioral consultation team at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center. In an interview with Broadly, Lois explained that anyone who comes into virtual contact with suicidal behavior has a responsibility to help the person at risk. "You have to take these kinds of things seriously, even if you believe that the person is doing this for dramatic effect, or doesn't really mean it, or is just communicating distress but doesn't really want to end their life," she said.I hope you have this in the back of your head for a very long time. Someone who was very sick killed themselves after reading your comments.
Psychologically speaking, those opinions are wrong. The American Association of Suicidology considers talk of suicide a sign of "acute risk"; the National Institute of Mental Health lists "threatening to hurt or kill oneself or talking about wanting to hurt or kill oneself" as its first warning sign of suicide. Lois says that anyone who talks about killing themselves is at a "very high" level of risk. "We need to take those type of comments very seriously and make sure that person gets help," she said.
It has to do with the way that social norms are established within different environments, he says. While "individual comments or likes are insignificant," as those accumulate they collectively produce the values and behaviors that the group then adheres to. These can include the passive click of a "like" on a live stream in which someone is saying they want to die, or silence, or "encouraging individuals to proceed with their destructive self-act," Hendricks said. It can become normal to doubt, mock, criticize, or encourage the unwell person on screen. In 2003, 21-year-old Brandon Vedas overdosed on several different types of drugs on his webcam. Although he had outlined his plan to ingest a large quantity of anti-depressants and alcohol, he had also instructed other members of his chat room to call his cell phone if he began to look like he was "dying." Instead, users told Vedas to "eat more" and said they wanted to see if he would "survive or just black out." Vedas's last message before his death early in the morning on January 12, 2003, read, "I told u I was hardcore." He has since become a disturbing meme.I told people I saw it and they asked why I didn't do anything.
"Part of going online to do this may be not only communicating distress but also trying to get feedback," Lois told me. "Perhaps there's a process there where they're trying to see if anyone cares enough to stop or try to intervene."Read more: Can Virtual Sex Prevent Pedophiles from Harming Children in Real Life?
Lois believes that live-streaming platforms such as Periscope and Facebook Live have a responsibility to monitor content. "Technology is always further ahead than morality," she said, pointing out that the tragedy often has to occur before safeguards are implemented. Facebook just released new suicide prevention tools last week, and the social media company is reportedly working with French authorities after a man slaughtered a policeman and his wife on a Facebook Live stream in Paris.This poor kid was probably wanting somebody out of the thousands who watched him die to care enough to call the cops.
In 2010, Misc. user Illriginalized wrote that he'd recently heard about Biggs's suicide, and was embarrassed by the cold-heartedness of his fellow bodybuilding.com posters. Further, Illriginalized said that anyone who told Biggs he should kill himself ought to be criminally prosecuted. "Now when I see someone egging anyone in this forum to go kill themselves, I'll do whatever it takes to locate that member and call the proper authorities, preferably the FBI," he wrote.We believe the vast majority of people are using Facebook Live to come together and share experiences in the moment with their friends and family. But if someone does violate our Community Standards while using Live, we want to interrupt these streams as quickly as possible when they're reported to us. So we've given people a way to report violations during a live broadcast. We do understand and recognize that there are unique challenges when it comes to content and safety for Live videos. It's a serious responsibility, we work hard to strike the right balance between enabling expression while providing a safe and respectful experience. We're deeply committed to improving the effectiveness of how we handle reports of live content that violates our Community Standards.
There's no such thing as an accident without a crowd gathering and standing on tiptoes in order to see the person lying on the ground.
The difficulties in preventing and dealing with active live-streamed violence create other problems. While Banglid hasn't yet been alerted to an active suicide live-stream, he has worked on cases where violence is occurring live online. Such cases need to be approached with exigency, Banglid explained. "It's the same as witnessing an offense right in front of you," he said, adding that live-streamed suicide attempts or violent crime can be more challenging to stop because "you're separated by an internet connection." Investigators trace an IP address when possible, and look closely for identifying details onscreen that may tip them off to the location of the feed. Banglid explained that his cybercrime team works with social media platforms on an almost daily basis. "We've had situations just as recently as this weekend where we've actually prevented a suicide from occurring based on the cooperation of private companies," he said.The cybercrimes unit where Banglid is employed has only existed since 2014, meaning that law enforcement is already far behind; the internet has been around much longer. Though sinister online activity is often associated with the "dark web," Banglid says that most of their work "is driven towards what the public would normally see." It's too early to say whether or not the live-streaming of suicide or violent crime is a trend, but the apparent rise in these cases is alarming to Banglid. "Such acts of violence and things of that nature just don't need to bear witness," he said.Yet those who turn on their webcams during the darkest, most desperate moments of their lives must feel a need for someone to bear witness to them. "Suicide is always an interpersonal act," said Dr. Henry Seiden, a clinical psychologist who specializes in suicide and the devastating effect it has on surviving friends and family. "It's a narrative, it's a story," he told Broadly. Seiden explained that broadcasting death in a live-streamed video feed, while a new technological advancement, is simply human nature. "The man on the mountaintop is imagining God is his witness," he said. "Technology is just the latest tool."Still, it is impossible to generalize the actions or motives of suicidal people. "Within the framework of interpersonal motives, there are as many motives as there are stories," Seiden said, explaining that when it comes to public acts of suicide, the only person who might know "why" is the victim themselves. "But whatever it means for the person doing it and whoever those he or she imagines are witnesses, being seen is certainly one of [those motives].""Maybe it's, 'Save me,'" he added. "Maybe it's, 'Try and save me, but you can't.'"It isn't surprising to Seiden that online viewers tap into these streams. "There's no such thing as an accident without a crowd gathering and standing on tiptoes in order to see the person lying on the ground," he said. Violence and destruction are everywhere in American society, from the news to the entertainment industry. "There is a fascination with other's pain because it's only one gesture removed from our own pain," he said. "We could be the one lying on the pavement, and most of us know that we could be the one killing ourselves.""The likelihood of someone being able to jump in and intervene in time before something awful happens is incredibly low," Lois said of suicides and other violent acts published through live-streaming platforms. Facebook, Periscope, and other streaming services are on the front lines of these tragedies; as time goes on, they will have to remain vigilant and develop better and faster modes of intervention. But that won't get to the root problem. "The reality is that if someone wants to commit suicide whether or not they live-stream may not matter," Lois said. "They may complete that suicide regardless of the streaming service."This idea can further limit individuals' sense of responsibility. "In some ways, it sort of takes you off the hook for having to intervene because [it's like], I don't know this person, they don't know me, nobody knows that I'm looking at this," Lois said. But that way of thinking could mean the difference between someone's death or survival.The police can try to stop it, but they are limited, too. "We can't possibly see every post that's being created," Banglid said. "We can't possibly look at every user's feed, nor do we wish to." The rest of us, then, become responsible for each other. It would be helpful if the public treated live-streaming acts of self-harm and criminal violence as if they were real emergencies that need to be responded to. "The sooner we become involved in an investigation, the sooner we can get to the bottom of it and perhaps even stop it in the midst of its mission," Banglid said.Shortly after Biggs died, his father spoke with the Associated Press, and he suggested that anyone aware of his son's actions on Justin.tv—both the live-streaming provider and the commenters who egged him on—was at fault. "As a human being, you don't watch someone in trouble and sit back and just watch," he said.Read more: Psychologists Weigh In on the Teen Who Live-Streamed Her Friend's Rape