Facebook Live, the social network’s popular live-streaming video feature, has become a home for a wide range of content, including the famous video of a Star Wars fan enjoying her new purchase of a talking Chewbacca mask. But the feature has a darker side as well — on Wednesday, a Chicago man was shot and killed while filming himself on Facebook Live.
According to Chicago police, 28-year-old Antonio Perkins was shot at about 8:45 p.m. while streaming video of himself and a number of friends who had gathered on South Drake Street. Perkins can be seen talking to the camera while walking, and then multiple shots are heard and he falls to the ground. The screen goes dark, but bystanders can be heard screaming in the background. The video had been watched more than 550,000 times by mid-afternoon on Friday.
The incident is the second time this week that Facebook Live has been used during a violent crime. On Tuesday, an ISIS sympathizer in France stabbed a police office and his partner and took the couple’s 3-year-old son hostage. While in the couple’s house, he broadcast a message live on Facebook with the boy in the background (he was later rescued by a SWAT team). The video has been removed.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
In March, a second man in Chicago was shot at while filming himself on Facebook Live, although he survived the attack. Brian “Sugar Ray” Fields was recording video while outside a store when a gunman walked up and fired 16 shots, five of which struck Fields. As he is streaming, the phone falls to the ground and the shooter can be seen briefly in the video stream. Fields is still in hospital.
Although he didn’t film the shooting on Facebook Live, the gunman in the recent attack in Orlando — in which 49 people were shot and killed at a gay nightclub — posted to Facebook and searched for mentions of his crime while he was still inside the club, according to a letter released by the Senate committee on homeland security.
As the popularity and availability of live streaming video increases, so does the potential for violent crimes to be broadcast live by bystanders, or even those involved. In April, an 18-year-old woman from Ohio broadcast the rape of a 17-year-old on Periscope, the live-streaming service operated by Twitter. She claimed she was doing so to document the crime, but the prosecutor on the case said that she “got caught up in the likes.”