New TeeVee broke a story yesterday about the tragic death of 19 year-old Abraham Biggs who committed suicide while broadcasting himself live via online "lifecasting" video site, Justin.TV. The second-most upsetting aspect of this story is the official statement issued by Justin.TV CEO, Michael Seibel:As for the broadcaster incident last night, we don’t comment on individual videos, however, our policy prohibits inappropriate content on Justin.tv. We rely on the community to flag videos that they feel are objectionable. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed and quickly removed from the system if it violates our Terms of Use.
I'm in PR, I've counseled clients similar to Justin.TV through similar crises. I understand the hand-wringing that goes on in the C-suites of Internet companies when a crisis occurs. Blame the users for not flagging the content! Blame the victim for not reading our Terms of Service! Blame society for everything else! If I were Michael Seibel or his PR rep, I would probably demonstrate a bit more compassion for this kid’s family in his statement to the media. There is a frigid non-chalance in these words. In reality, most people wouldn’t blame the site or its management for this incident and those that would blame Justin.TV would have done so anyway. To treat a tragic suicide as a “violation of the terms of use” is PR posturing at its most heartless.
Justin.tv's subsequent blog post (quoted in my blog post) was just as heartless as the comment that you quoted. They couldn't even bother to mention Abraham Biggs by name, because of a supposed concern for privacy. Let's face it, justin.tv had a system to allow notification of objectionable videos, and decided that it was up to the users to offer these notifications. In this case, the system didn't work. How will the system be improved?
ReplyDeleteI partially blame justin.tv as providing an arena for this event and discuss it more here: http://suicide.findfastr.com/suicide/how-can-this-be-happening
ReplyDeletehttp://www.suicidesurvivalguide.com