Image Source: Social Crime

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Crimes are inclined to be committed away from the eyes of the majority of public,not until the early years of the 21st century.

A country’s leader is brutally stabbed to death in the most public of places…a theater…making the event immediately known and shared -The first event is the death of Julius Caesar in the theater of Pompey.

Another country’s president is assassinated, also at a theater, as the murderer shouts, for all to hear, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”). - The second, despite the Latin, of course was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, also planned for maximum exposure.

And a vigilante kills a prisoner as television cameras broadcast what might have been a first of its kind. - And it was Jack Ruby who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin of President John F. Kennedy, in what has to have been one of the first of its kind.( A close-up live broadcast of a murder).......Many Steemians will remember watching it......

The unification of these events is the publicity they precisely attracted because they occurred at public venues, during public times, with the clear intention of driving maximum Chaos.

Yet no one got damnation for the Roman theater Murder or the networks that had set up broadcast cameras in Dallas where Lee was executed.

Roll it forward to today:

Some horrific events, mind-boggling, in fact…exceedingly sad as well, and yet Social Media has been blamed as self-righteous. And media outlets, which themselves tell and retell these stories, point their fingers at digital social media.

“Violent Facebook Live suicide is latest in disturbing trend” ...................New York Post

“Thai man hangs baby and then commits suicide on Facebook live” ............. Fox News

“Social Medias Streams Murder, And Now Must Face Itself.”This was published week in week out.

Using Facebook as an example,it is not the first media company to struggle with the prospect of unwittingly broadcasting violence shortly after being uploaded. The TV station was unable to stop the event from airing when news anchor Christine Chubbuck killed herself on live TV in 1974, but they never showed the footage again. Even though viewers who actually saw the live event was minimal.

Social media-related crime reports up 780% in four years.Police figures show there were 4,908 reports in which Facebook and Twitter were a strong factor, compared with 556 in 2008 And yet The New York Times writes:

“Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug?”

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced an expanded version of Facebook’s live streaming service, which had been promised to revolutionize how we communicate. In the year since, Live had generated iconic scenes of protest, but it was also used to broadcast a terrorist attack in Munich and at least one suicide. Hours before Zuckerberg’s appearance at the conference, police announced that a Cleveland man who had killed a stranger and posted a video on Facebook had shot himself after a manhunt.

Who is to be blamed?

Do we actually think the problem is Social Media and the“bugs” are the likes of Twitter or Facebook?

The others who share the images and videos, the media outlets that spread them further and the individual culprits who commit the act? Or does the fault lie in the devices, the service providers, the software, and the companies behind them?

What is the actual responsibility of social media platforms where live violent and sexual content can be so easily uploaded?

There is presently no content-analysis technology that can smartly filter live-streamed video in real time. It has to be done by people, one video at a time,one frame at a time.

The issue is as defined simply as ABC

A factor that motivates perpetrators of public acts of lethal violence is a desire to gain notoriety through media coverage of their deeds. For individuals whose lives have generally been characterized by obscurity and lack of success, the prospect of “everyone knowing their name” may be highly appealing.

According to The Guardian,

Despite insisting it is not a media company and is not in the business of making editorial judgments, Facebook, it seems, is all too happy to censor content when that content violates its own policies or at the request of police. This has led to a number of high-profile blunders in 2016, including the removal in September of the iconic Vietnam war photograph “napalm girl” from a Norwegian journalist’s post and the deletion of a breast cancer awareness video in October.

The lack of transparency over this process led to a coalition of more than 70 human and civil rights groups demanding that Facebook be more transparent about its content take down processes....

It is like Fake News – what’s fake to me might be real to you – violence seems to have a similar ethos – my violence is good to show, yet yours is bad......

And of course, to blame Social Media for suicide and attempted Suicides are based on nonsensical facts.

“As a community, we cannot prevent every suicide, but we must do more to reach out to people who are struggling,”

And As a society, we should strengthen the safety net for those who are more at risk: investing more in mental health care and support. As individuals, we can be alert for the signs in ourselves and in others and act immediately. Together, we can be there for people in distress.

One thing is clear ; all digital social media companies have an obligation to do their best to protect us – as does all media for that matter, but we are also accountable as members of society.

“Technology companies like Facebook and Google should do more. But so should you and I"...........Wiredwrote

If Social Medias had been around back then, no doubt Marcus Junius Brutus would have had someone hold up a camera for a Live broadcast when he assassinated Julius Caesar and I’d bet that John Wilkes Booth would have posted his action on the murder of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.

.....but that’s an issue of technology adding power to the way we communicate and share, not causing the terrible
acts.....

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Credits - https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-really-responsible-murder-190309488.html
- linkedin.com