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 West Side 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 Streamwood, 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 double-murder 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.”
Some might be quick to blame the technology for creating more graphic video like those and the one recorded Tuesday in the West Side apartment, or contend that human beings are becoming more violent and depraved.
Campbell said the situation probably is more nuanced.
“Every time something extreme happens, the threshold is extended and there is a new extreme,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe somebody will want to top it, and that’s the scary thing.”
But Campbell doesn’t view humanity as being more violent today, and technology “isn’t inherently good or bad. We can use it to call mom on Sundays or commit a terrorist attack,” he said. “It just depends on how we use it.”
In an email response to Tribune questions, Facebook said it does not allow people “to celebrate or glorify crimes” on its network, which is why it removed the original video.
Facebook has a team on call 24 hours a day to respond to reports of inappropriate live videos as they’re happening, the company said. A viewer can interrupt a live stream if a violation of Facebook’s community standards occurs, and it takes only one report for something to be reviewed.
“Live video on Facebook is a new and growing format,” the company said in a statement about the technology and its community standards. “We’ve learned a lot over the past few months, and will continue to make improvements to this experience wherever we can.”
The company also pointed out the benefits of sharing live video of graphic content.
“In many instances … when people share this type of content, they are doing so to condemn violence or raise awareness about it. In that case, the video would be allowed.”
Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, indirectly acknowledged that value in the case of the 18-year-old man punched, stomped and cut with a knife.
“Had that not been videotaped, the kid probably would have shown up somewhere beaten and bloody with no ability to explain what happened,” she said.
That inability is one factor in the under-reporting of crimes against people with physical and mental disabilities, Fernandez said. In addition, the abuser can be someone who the disabled individual depends on for care.
A Bureau of Justice Statistics report released in November showed that from 2010 to 2014, the violent victimization rate against people with disabilities — roughly 31 per 1,000 — was more than twice the rate for people without disabilities. The report also noted that people with cognitive disabilities had the highest rate of total violent crime among the disability types measured.
FBI statistics show the number of hate crimes committed against individuals with mental disabilities dropped to 36 in 2015 from 70 in 2014, the most recent years for which data were available.
Fernandez was able to watch only a few seconds of the video depicting the man’s attack, she said, before she became sick to her stomach and had to stop.
Chicago Tribune’s Jason Meisner contributed.
