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French Inquiry Launched After Live Suicide Broadcast On Periscope (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: French authorities have launched an investigation after a young woman recorded her suicide which streamed live to over 1,000 connected followers on the online video app Periscope. Prosecutors in Egly, Essone, a suburb 15 miles south of Paris, confirmed they had opened the inquiry following the incident which saw the 19-year-old throw herself under a commuter train at a railway station on Tuesday.BBC reports: Previously, she had filmed herself in her flat discussing how she intended to make a video to "send a message", warning younger viewers not to continue to watch what would be a "shocking" act, it was reported. During the filming, the young woman claimed to have been raped and named her attacker, according to the reports. It is not the first time that Periscope has been linked to inappropriate content.
This is the 21st century's equivalent of watching an execution, slowing down and creating a traffic jam to catch a glimpse of an accident on the freeway, or gawking at someone about to jump off the roof of a building. Nothing new here: human beings are disgusting voyeurs, irresistibly attracted to other people's misery, be it in online or on a sidewalk.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Who is the "THEY" you are referring to here? It's not like there is a periscope producer with her hand over the cutoff button, waiting to decide if the content is no appropriate for broadcast... oh and also, does France have regulatory control over internet streaming? In the US, we've got the FCC, but they don't deal with decency on the net... only on TV, and even they couldn't stop Janet Jackson from showing off some nipple. There is no "THEY" to actively make a decision to continue broadcasting, and there never will be. It's the internet.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
They should rename the service Perish-scope, so viewers know what to expect.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I think the main problem here is that the powers that be, after spending a long long time growing fat and happy with the general addiction
of the masses to mass media entertainment, are starting to get nervous about a slow transformation of that into consumer driven content
and peoples acceptance of the messages there contained, which are not carefully filtered and cleaned by the powers that be.
There is risk here, you see, of alternative points of view.
The focus in this case should of course not be the streaming of this sad event, or finger pointing around that. It should be that a person
was left in the situation where they could not reach out to other people for help, but instead did this. Now that is not something that can
be easily changed - and rules, regulations, etc will not achieve it - there are always a few people that slip through cracks and end up in
such a bad place internally that they will do something this bad - however we are not supposed to accept that. We are supposed to believe that
if we follow the rules, and if we accept being controlled, monitored, then we will be SAFE from such things.
Events like this remind us that that is simply not true. No matter how much control we give up, no matter how many rules we accept, and
no matter how closely we are watched 'for our own good', bad things will and do happen. People make mistakes and are fallible.
Hence, they do NOT want such things to be made public.
Why didn't one of those "over 1000 followers" call the police to try to stop it?
Who knows. Maybe they did, and no one could get there in time. I came across and tuned into the drunk driving chick while she was doing her thing, and several people did contact the police, eventually guiding them to her based on streets and landmarks. I also watched while a suicidal guy in Texas drove around threatening to shoot up Wal-Marts and several viewers were keeping the county sheriff updated as to his whereabouts. They sent a chopper up to find him eventually, at least an hour into his escapade, then he holed up inside his truck occasionally speaking to officers while threatening suicide; I had to give up listening to the scanner and go to sleep before I learned the outcome of that one.
In both of these cases, even with people calling police, it took awhile to get authorities to the correct place because the vast majority of the people watching didn't live anywhere nearby, weren't familiar with the area, weren't necessarily sure how to contact law enforcement there (or where "there" even was), etc. If you tune into a live stream and you see a lady standing in front of some train tracks, what exactly are you going to do? It's not like her GPS coordinates are embedded in the video stream.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.