Friday, April 21, 2017

The Facebook Killer: Who's responsible?

By now, everyone's familiar with the horrific story out of Cleveland, where Steve Stephens walked up to a random stranger last Sunday and shot him dead. What made the murder of 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. stand out from all others was the fact that the gunman captured it on video and shared it on Facebook. A multistate manhunt for Stephens ended two days later he was cornered just outside Erie, Pennsylvania and shot himself as police closed in.

The incident raises significant questions about streaming online video. Its exploding popularity has exposed a dark side to the technology, with escalating examples of rapes, beatings, suicides, and now murder, and growing concern over the lack of tools that can quickly shut down streams that violate the service's terms of use and give law enforcement real-time guidance to respond to crimes broadcast online.

Right now, no such tools exist, and Facebook relies on user-submitted complaints - a process that is inaccurate and slow. In the Stephens case, the video remained online for over 2 hours after the murder was committed. In other cases, it's taken days and weeks for Facebook to process takedowns.

Facebook issued a statement - as they'd be expected to do - expressing its outrage, and is working on automated tools to monitor and address such abuses in real-time. But it's a major technical challenge, and it won't happen overnight. If and when these tools ultimately roll out, they'll come too late for the victim of this unbelievable crime.

Here's my $0.02: This is what happens when technology rushes too quickly ahead of the frameworks, rules and laws that would govern it's abuse and protect its users in the process. It also begs a number of wrenching questions:
  • Whether having access to Facebook Video and Facebook Live could have been an encouraging factor for the gunman.
  • What role the companies that make these technologies might be playing in the spread of an entirely new form of crime.
  • Whether it's time for Internet "broadcasts" to be regulated in the same way conventional ones have always been.
Your turn: What do you think? What responsibilities does Facebook have in ensuring its apps and services are used for good and not for evil?

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