Virginia Shooting Gone Viral, in a Well-Planned Rollout on Social Media
By Farhad Manjoo

In one sad sense there was nothing new, or even very unusual, about the televised killing of two journalists in Virginia on Wednesday morning.

Death on TV has occurred with frightening regularity ever since the advent of the medium: Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963; and the Sept. 11, 2001, fall of the World Trade Center. The prospect of death appearing suddenly on our screens is as common as it is ghoulish.

Yet in another way, the video of the Virginia shootings posted by Bryce Williams, whose real name is Vester Lee Flanagan and who is thought to be the gunman who killed two of his former co-workers at the television station WDBJ, is a frightful twist in an age of online sharing and ubiquitous video documentation.

The killings appear to have been skillfully engineered for maximum distribution, and to sow maximum dread, over Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones. The video Mr. Flanagan shows is an up-close, first-person execution. It was posted only after his social media accounts had become widely known, while the police were in pursuit of the killer. And unlike previous televised deaths, these were not merely broadcast, but widely and virally distributed, playing out with the complicity of thousands, perhaps millions, of social networking users who could not help watching and sharing.

The horror was the dawning realization, as the video spread across the networks, that the killer had anticipated the moves — that he had been counting on the mechanics of these services and on our inability to resist passing on what he had posted. For many, that realization came too late. On these services, the killer knew, you often hit retweet, like or share before you realize just quite what you have done.

Twitter and Facebook moved quickly to suspend the accounts of Mr. Flanagan. But not quickly enough. By the time his social presence had come down, his videos had been shared widely by journalists and ordinary users, jumping beyond the Internet onto morning TV broadcasts, and downloaded and reposted across the Internet — where, with some searching, they will most likely remain accessible indefinitely.

Also found after the killings was a demo reel posted to YouTube, showing Mr. Flanagan’s various appearances as a TV news anchor and reporter. It is unsurprising, given his familiarity with the subject, that he appeared well versed with what has become the media ritual of killing.

He seems to have known, for instance, that in a nation in which tens of thousands of people are killed by firearms every year, the shooting of two people would not become international news if it was not filmed: as is commonly said online, “Pics, or it didn’t happen.” So he waited until WDBJ’s cameras were broadcasting live before he acted.

But as a newshound, he seems also to have understood the morbid irresistibility of the citizen-produced video — the shaky, point-of-view, ground level, continuously looped recording of any incident that has become a commonplace spectacle on television news. Thus, he made sure to produce his own video as well. In the practice of our mobile age, he held his camera vertically, in one hand, allowing him to hold his gun in the other.

He might have anticipated, too, that in any widely covered shooting, reporters now rush to do an Internet search on the killer as soon as a name leaks out. Mr. Flanagan was ready, his social accounts prepared with a professional picture and childhood photos. Then, as soon as his name began to be mentioned online, he appeared to have logged in to Twitter and Facebook to begin posting the outlines of a defense and an explanation, as well as his own clip of the killings.

There was initially some doubt on Twitter about the authenticity of the killer’s account — justified skepticism, because the quickly pulled-together profile of a shooter has also become a hallmark of the ritual in which these incidents are covered. But then the killer’s account, @bryce_williams7, began updating live, erasing all doubt.

Over the course of 20 minutes on Twitter, the shooter updated his status a half-dozen times, culminating in a post showing the video of the killings. He quickly amassed a following of thousands, the sort of rapturous social media welcoming that is usually reserved for pop stars and heads of state.

There was uncertainty in the sharing. Users expressed reservations as they passed on the gunman’s profile and his tweets. People were calling on Twitter and Facebook to act quickly to pull down his accounts. There were questions about the journalistic ethics of posting WDBJ’s live shot and the killer’s own document of the shooting, given that it was exactly what he had been expecting.

But these questions didn’t really slow anything down, a testament to the power of these networks to tap into each of our subconscious, automatic desires to witness and to share. The videos got out widely, forging a new path for nihilists to gain a moment in the media spotlight: an example that, given its success at garnering wide publicity, will most likely be followed by others.

美凶手槍殺記者自拍 PO網要出名

美國維吉尼亞州兩名現場轉播記者遭槍殺，凶手傅南納根最後拒捕舉槍自戕送醫不治。此案就死亡人數或電視現場轉播發生命案而言，都稱不上稀奇，其中不尋常的是，凶嫌預謀殺人之餘，連將殺人過程完整拍攝、上傳社群媒體都在他的精心策畫之中，令人毛骨悚然，必定會有人跟進。

紐約時報報導，1963年美國前總統甘迺迪遇刺、2001年911恐攻，紐約世貿雙塔倒塌，都是在電視鏡頭前發生的悲劇，畫面比兩名記者遭槍殺更駭人。但這樁槍殺案是網路分享與視頻紀錄無所不在的這個時代中，一首令人不寒而慄的變調曲。

傅南納根利用社群媒體將他的所做所為和憤怒，透過推特、臉書和手機，做了最大的傳播和製造了最大的恐懼。

傅南納根（又名布萊斯．威廉斯）在極短時間內，將他槍擊的影片上傳到網路，他在推特推文：「我拍了槍擊案，到臉書去看吧。」

案件發生於清晨七時左右，但約莫十點之前，凶嫌即在推特上傳對女記者帕克和攝影記者沃德兩名受害人的憤怒批評，稱「帕克曾發表種族歧視言論」，抱怨沃德「炒他魷魚」、「帕克當上記者」。

四十一歲非洲裔的傅南納根在社群媒體上貼出大量的訊息和他拍攝的影像，包括他從小到大的生活困境以及遭人歧視的經歷。

警方研判，自認遭到種族歧視以及2013年遭到WDBJ7地方電視台開革是傅南納根行凶動機。

推特、臉書以最快速度中止傅南納根的帳戶，但顯然仍不夠快，記者和一般用戶早已將影片在網路瘋傳。臉書和推特等社群網站相繼推出的自動播放功能，讓用戶無意間即能直接在動態消息（newsfeed）看到了包括這樁槍殺案的的影片，引來撻伐，呼籲推特應制定標準程序防止暴力內容出現。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/technology/personaltech/violence-gone-viral-in-a-well-planned-rollout-on-social-media.html

2015-08-28．聯合報．A17．國際．編譯王麗娟