Roanoke Strong Unfolds on Social Media

Photo shared by Daryl Watkins from Creative Dog Media via the City of Roanoke Facebook page. I believe it was created to be shared, and therefore hope Mr. Watkins is okay with me sharing his beautiful image here without his explicit permission. Thank you Mr. Watkins. 

I live in Roanoke, Virginia, the town where the terrible on-air murder of two news reporters happened yesterday. Needless to say, our town is still reeling from the shock of what happened.
Not too surprisingly, in wake of the shooting, the national conversation has turned to gun control. (It's not yet a conversation in this town, and I don't expect it will be for a while.) I've explained my unusual background with firearms before, so I won't do it again today.
This story has hit not just "close to home" for me, but has hit my community, my town, and my world. I work in social media. This is my realm. And now someone has committed an atrocity in both my virtual and physical worlds. Of course I have a few things to say about it!
I can't think of any other instance where someone so flagrantly and blatantly flaunted their crime-in-progress online. I've heard of criminals stupid enough to share their spoils online, never have I heard of a crime-in-progress unfolding online.
The entire premise and concept scares me.
It scares me that someone was so desperate for attention and "glory" (after all, criminals of this nature often have a self-righteous belief that they are doing something good) that they would broadcast their crimes live.
Since the horrific Aurora movie theater shootings, there have been at least two more that I can think of without looking it up. I can't even wrap my head around how many school shootings there have been since Columbine. If there is one thing we have learned from these types of atrocities, it is that they will be copied.
And it all begs the question - will this spurn a new trend in online crime-in-progress streaming?
I pray that it will not. But I think we all know deep down inside, that it is inevitable.
Will it lead to social networks creating filters that search for such activity? (For instance, right now Facebook filters your posts for certain key words like wedding, marriage, birthday, baby, birth, born, etc., and makes sure those posts get seen by more people, using the assumption that people want to know when you get married or have a baby.) Will social networks be forced to start filtering for criminal activity?
I hate the concept, but just 30 hours after the shootings yesterday, I can foresee the need to prevent attention/glory seekers from taking advantage of social media for criminal intent.
(For the record, when I say I hate the concept, I mean I hate that there is going to be a need for it. Also, I hate that it will lead to some controversy about free speech and the First Amendment. I hate any time the First Amendment must be debated in the context of public safety. I love the First Amendment. Hate that it can be abused to hurt others.)
In my version of a perfect world, there wouldn't be crime (obviously). But in my more realistic perfect world (where crime is inevitable because no two people will ever think the same), we would be a better self-policing society. If there is one good thing that came out of yesterday, it is that as the shooter's activities were revealed online, his networks (I won't call them friends) didn't retweet or share his activities. They reported him. They told Twitter and Facebook what he was doing, and got him shut down. This is self-policing at its finest.
But it didn't work perfectly. Because before Twitter and Facebook figured it out and removed the offensive content, there were people out there who did copy and download the images and video. Because, like I said, no two people think alike.
I will let the rest of the world debate gun control and the right to bear arms. But for now, I'm going to focus on what I know best - social media - and work to make the world a better place there.





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