Like so many do following a breakup, a shirtless Erdogan Ceren sat on the edge of his bed, crying.
Though the 22-year-old was alone in his bedroom in the Osmaniye Province in southern Turkey on Monday, any one of Facebook’s 1.23 billion users could have seen him. That’s what Ceren sought: He was streaming a video of himself through Facebook Live.
The young man, who had just broken up with his girlfriend, appeared distraught on the video. He tilted the camera down, so viewers could catch a glimpse of what appeared to be a shotgun in his left hand.
According to the Mirror, he read a poem dedicated to his girlfriend that stated, “Our love was going to be a saga, our eyes were not going to shed tears, now tell me love, are you leaving, will my hands burn without you.”
“No one believed when I said I will kill myself,” he said in the video, according to a translation in USA Today. “So watch this.”
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He held the gun up to himself – it isn’t clear where, as the camera falls away – and pulled the trigger, but the gun produced an audible clicking sound as it jams or perhaps caught on the safety.
He then placed the gun’s barrel to his stomach, and this time it fired. The screen immediately went black, but rap music continued to play in the background, punctuated by occasional horrific gurgling sounds, a man gasping for breath and moaning in pain.
Hearing the gunshots, his family rushed him to the hospital, where he died hours later, according to Turkish news outlet Bugunun Haberi.
The video has been removed from Facebook, and the company declined a request for comment from USA Today.
Facebook describes its Facebook Live feature as “the best way to interact with viewers in real time” and a way to “broadcast to the largest audience in the world with the camera in your pocket.”
An anecdotal glance at the Facebook Live Map, which allows users to view popular videos from around the world, turned out mostly preachers offering religious sermons, local news broadcasts and homemade pornography.
It’s used from everyone from professional organizations – Bleacher Reporter just announced it will be livestreaming games on the platform and The Washington Post has used it for political coverage – to amateurs seeking a few moments in the spotlight.
The darker side of the human experience has also repeatedly appeared on the streaming service since its inception. Most famously, the Minnesota police shooting of Philando Castile was streamed by his girlfriend Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds sparking outrage and protests across the country.
But lesser noticed incidents have also been streamed through the service, such as a Georgia mother beating her young daughter, a killer who admitted to murder and announced his own suicide and an alleged terrorist confessing to murdering a police officer.
The immediacy of the platform simplifies impulsive streaming and can lead in different directions, from the mundane to the joyful to the horrific to the downright evil. In the latter cases, Facebook has a system in place for reporting videos.
According to the social media site:
“As with all videos and content on Facebook, we have reporting tools in place to enable people on Facebook to report content that they believe violates our community standards. Our teams will review those reports, and if content violates our standards it will be removed.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Travis M. Andrews / Featured Image: screenshot
