“Facebook Murder” blared from the headlines a few days back. I took it as an extreme approach to unfriending and was all set to delete my sarcastic political memes. Figured my life depended on it. Turns out this was far more serious than un-liking a post. A guy in Cleveland actually filmed himself murdering a man, a random victim, and quickly uploaded the video to Facebook. The murderer killed himself a few days later, apparently off camera.
Although we seem to be building an immunity to shock and dismay, the reaction to this murder broadcast was close to apoplectic. “No More Snuff Videos on Facebook,” demanded the Boston Globe. “Facebook Helps Violence Go Viral,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “What Could be Worse than Murder on Facebook?” asked Inc.com. Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post media columnist, said this of the episode: “Facebook’s existential crisis arrived with a vengeance this week.”
Really? So this is where we draw the line? This is where Facebook turns evil, when a guy kills somebody in cold blood and turns it into social media content? Death and violence are no strangers to Facebook. Earlier this year, a two-year-old boy’s death was streamed live there. He’d been riding in a car with his aunt and her boyfriend when a driver cut them off, left his vehicle and started shooting. The aunt filmed it for Facebook Live. Four teenagers filmed themselves on the same platform while torturing a mentally disabled man. Just last month, several men live streamed their sexual assault of a teenage girl while dozens watched on Facebook.
None of those cases provoked the wrath that followed Steve Stephens’ Easter Sunday murder of Robert Goodwin Sr., his handpicked snuff film victim. Rape, torture and a dead child fly under the radar, but this first made-for-Facebook murder was apparently a step too far over the line of outrage. Facebook is sympathetic and insists it moves as quickly as it can to delete offending content when users complain, but that the process can take hours. Amazingly, however, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a plan. It is called Artificial Intelligence. He says it will take many years to fully develop, but he envisions software sophisticated enough to distinguish between acceptable and deplorable content. Imagine that: an AI program to tell the difference between right and wrong, between a cute kitty video and a murder in progress.
Remember the days when technology was cool because it gave us more control over our lives? Think of that first time you sat smugly on the couch and changed the channel with the push of a remote button. If you weren’t up for a long diatribe on the wonders of supply side economics from your Republican brother-in-law, you could let the answering machine deal with him. And if you didn’t have the slightest idea what supply side economics was all about, along came Google. The technology was there to serve us. It was, in a sense, an extension of ourselves. We retained control.
That’s no longer the case. We now have social media networks so large and complicated that the only way they can be stopped from publishing vile, offensive content is to create a whole new layer of technology through Artificial Intelligence. When was it, exactly, that we, as a people, ceded control to technology? More importantly, how do we get it back?
This is about a lot more than one deranged man staging a murder on Facebook. A huge fact of our new technological life is that people are being constantly hurt and traumatized over social media with seemingly no remedy in sight, save a promise of AI and not-yet-invented software. Hundreds of kids kill themselves every year after being bombarded with cyber messages telling them they are too fat, or ugly, or dumb, or worthless. Over and over.
A sidebar of the Facebook killer story, one that got very little attention because it represented business as usual, involved the killer’s former girlfriend. Before Stephens pulled the trigger, he demanded, at gunpoint, that his victim pronounce the woman’s name for the video production. It was Joy Lane. Although she had nothing to do with this murder, Lane was quickly persecuted by the tapping of angry fingers on thousands of keypads. The messages: “Moral: don’t date Joy Lane.” “Joy Lane deserves to feel horrible.” “He killed people because of a fat bitch.”
Twitter hashtags emerged quickly. One was #JoyLane Massacre. “No disrespect but if somebody had to die it should’ve been Joy Lane,” read one of the tweets. Over on YouTube, there was an “Original Song About Stephens Ex-Girlfriend”. Lyrics: “Hell yeah I’m sick, psychotic deranged/And it’s all over a bitch named Joy Lane.”
This kind of stuff happens all the time. It breaks people and destroys lives. It has become the new normal. Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter last year after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. Feminist writer Jessica Valenti unplugged from all social media after receiving a rape threat against her five-year-old daughter. Until Reddit finally banned it, there was a discussion group with 150,000 subscribers called “Fat People Hate”. Users would find pictures of overweight people, mostly women, attach mean captions and post them on the target’s Facebook Page.
Other than a complete social media withdrawal, there is no quick and easy answer to this problem. For starters we need to think seriously about our relationship with technology. It has given us so much, but it is quickly evolving beyond our grasp, beyond our ability to shape it in ways that will enhance, rather than denigrate, the quality of our lives. How we and future generations respond to this dilemma will determine whether technology is an instrument that adds value to our civilization, or one that manages to suck all the humanity out of it. If we don’t find a way to control technology, it will end up controlling us. That’s one horror film that should never be made.