Last month a deranged person broadcasted live video of himself on Facebook, randomly executing a stranger on the street.
As expected, the media and politicians went into hysteria-mode.
Facebook officials met with government officials and the media, and of course, everyone is “working hard” to try and prevent this from happening again.
Cable news bobble-heads clutched their pearls and gasped, asking why Facebook is not being held responsible. They held panel discussions calling for Facebook to delay all live broadcasts until someone from Facebook can “approve” of the content going out. Some, like CNN, even advocated new laws forcing Facebook to monitor and censor live video feeds.
Our question is, WHY?
We believe that the savage Facebook killer did all of us a really big favor.
If the Facebook killer hadn’t broadcast his crime and just randomly went out and killed someone we might never have known who committed the murder.
There would have been a police manhunt, hours of law enforcement officers investigating, and a hunt for whoever committed the crime, if the cops ever got an accurate description.
Think about the cost of that?
Instead, because the killer went live with his crime on his own Facebook page, the cops knew exactly who the killer was. They knew exactly where he lived, and they had proof positive of his guilt in the crime due to video evidence that was provided by … HIM.
How is that a bad thing?
We believe the Facebook killer is a role model to other savages in our country who want to go out and commit violent crimes against their fellow man. Think of the money and man hours we would save.
We are troubled that the so-called news media is supposed to be objective and probe these issues from all sides, yet we didn’t see one news outlet even ask the question: why is this bad?
We are living in a culture that values censoring uncomfortable images and words to sanitize the ugliness around us. That way of thinking has only lead to more violence and more brutal savagery in our neighborhoods than ever before.
The Valley Patriot has also experienced this.
Last month we posted a photo on-line of a man in Lawrence lying face down in the snow after being shot, execution-style in broad daylight. We were inundated with emails decrying how horrible this was. But, there was no blood, the victim was not identifiable, and there was nothing gruesome about the photo. In fact, had we posted the photo under the heading, “Man Falls Asleep in Snow” nobody would have batted an eye.
We say, it is time for Americans to start thinking for themselves and stop reacting emotionally to the images they see or the messages they hear in the media.
With all the violence going on around us, especially in neighboring Lawrence, we have decided that it’s time for the people living outside the city, (you know, those paying the bills), need to see the carnage happening on the streets of that city every day.
That’s why we have started live broadcasting video of police calls on our Facebook page, as they happen.
Let’s stop looking away when savages ply their trade of violence and mayhem. Let’s stop pretending that it’s not really all that bad, when deep down we all know it really is.
We are living in a new age of technology. We can both block out the harsh realities of the world around us and give up our free speech rights, or we can wake up and try to fix the problem.
We side with the latter.
And we are going to be proactive about it.