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-Am I live? -What up, peeps?
-We are live from Phuket Walking Street.
-Two months after the public launch of Facebook Live in 2016,
more than 800,000 people tuned in
to watch an exploding watermelon.
[ Crowd shouting ]
The app, described by the company as a great medium
for sharing raw and visceral content,
has been used to stream events from the silly to the serious.
-Everybody move out.
-But then it captured the aftermath
of a fatal police shooting...
-He let the officer know that he was -- he had a firearm
and he was reaching for his wallet,
and the officer just shot him in his arm.
...and then this.
-A 15-year-old girl sexually assaulted
by four or five teenage boys
who streamed what they did on Facebook Live.
-Professor Desmond Patton studies the relationship
between youth violence and social media.
-We now have a window into what's happening in communities
where trauma and stress and violence
are everyday occurrences,
and so Facebook Live captures those moments
inadvertently or advertently.
-In the sexual-assault case,
Chicago police charged two juveniles with taking part
and using their phones to share it online.
-There is this thing that happens around celebrity
and, "Who's seeing this?
How far can it reach, and will it make me famous?"
-Authorities say at least 40 people
viewed the Facebook Live video,
but not a single person called police.
-It just disgusts me.
-But police went out of their way
to chastise another group,
what might be called the digital bystanders.
-Where are we going? What are we doing as a society
that people will actually look at those crimes taking place
and not pick up the phone and dial 911?
-But that troubling question is not unique to the digital age.
Take a case from the 1960s in New York City,
where 28-year-old Catherine Genovese,
or "Kitty," as she was called,
lived with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko.
-She was very outgoing, very gregarious,
very people-oriented.
We were sort of closeted.
I just never thought about it, you know?
It just was my life.
-They shared an apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens.
-We just both tended bar, lived a very quiet life.
The area was very, very nice.
It was rather artsy in a way.
Kew Gardens was really very safe.
-But late one night in March 1964,
Genovese drove home from the bar she managed,
unaware she was being followed by a serial killer.
As she got out of her car,
she saw Winston Moseley and started to run.
-This is where the killer must have started
to catch up with Kitty Genovese.
She didn't quite make it halfway down the block
before the killer drove a knife into her.
-She screamed, "Oh, my God. He stabbed me. Help me.
Somebody help me," and she goes down on the ground,
and she continues to scream.
There are lights going on in the apartment houses,
windows going up, and a man looked out,
and he yelled, "Leave that girl alone."
-Witnesses saw Moseley, startled by the noise, run away,
but none of Genovese's neighbors came to her aid,
even as she staggered into a nearby doorway,
screaming again for help.
-As she's lying helpless on the floor and the door opens,
it's her attacker.
He stabs her multiple times.
Then he cuts off her clothing.
He sexually assaults her.
Winston Moseley flees.
A police car pulls in.
-But it was too late.
Kitty Genovese died in the ambulance
on the way to the hospital.
Her partner, Mary Ann, didn't hear the news until later
when the police knocked on her door.
-I felt, well, she was so close,
and I was sleeping, and I didn't know what happened,
that I could've saved her, you know?
That's what I really think still.
-At first, the murder was not big news,
but two weeks later, after a tip from police,
The New York Times published a chilling front-page story
that began, "For more than half an hour
38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens
watched a killer stalk and stab a woman."
-The story was absolutely and utterly shocking.
No one could imagine
that not only would people fail to call the police,
but that they would watch the murder take place
over half an hour.
-One witness was quoted as saying,
"I didn't want to get involved."
The story became a sensation,
and the public reacted with disgust and fear of city life.
-Tell me why you felt it was necessary
for you to carry a knife.
-The Kitty Genovese case
where no one came to her rescue even though she begged for help.
-38 of her neighbors watched the woman die,
and when it was over, they all went back to bed.
-In the aftermath of the murder,
the 38 witnesses, who were not involved in Kitty's murder
but were only witnesses to it,
had been portrayed almost worse than the murderer himself.
-29-year-old Winston Moseley was picked up by the police
and confessed to the killing.
-The detectives asked the killer,
"How could you attack this woman in front of so many witnesses?
Weren't you afraid?"
And the killer said, "I knew they wouldn't do anything.
People never do."
-Genovese's death became a metaphor
for public apathy and moral decay,
but two young social psychologists,
John Darley from NYU
and Bibb Latané from Columbia University,
had a different take.
Their idea became known as the bystander effect.
-What struck me and struck John as we talked about it
is that 38 might not have been just a coincidence.
It might have been a cause.
It might have been what made it happen,
that it might have been that each of the people
was actually concerned but somehow was misled
by the idea that other people were watching.
-Using students, Latané and Darley designed experiments
to test their counterintuitive theory
that the more people who witness an emergency,
the less likely it is that any of them will intervene.
-I would like to thank the two of you for being here today.
-A student was told she was speaking privately
over an intercom with one other student
who suddenly said he was having a seizure.
-If somebody would -- would give me a l-little help.
-Hello?
-She quickly got up and ran for help,
as did most of the subjects
who thought that they alone knew someone was in trouble.
-Anybody here? Help! We need some help!
We've got somebody hurt! Hello!
-But look what happened when students were told
there were others listening to the conversation.
-Somebody g-give me a little -- little help here.
I'm having a real prob-- problem right now.
-In repeated experiments,
the majority of them just sat there and didn't help.
-You think that if there are many people
who witness something
that other people certainly already have done something.
Why should it be me?
-New evidence in the Kitty Genovese case has emerged
showing that details of that shocking New York Times story
were exaggerated.
Two neighbors did call the police,
and while dozens heard her screams,
only a few actually saw the attack take place.
-We can look back and say that it wasn't entirely accurate,
but the fact is that it was a powerful change agent
for society.
-911 emergency.
-In the wake of the murder, the 911 phone system was created
to make it easier to report a crime,
and more states passed Good Samaritan laws
to encourage people to help,
but tougher measures, so-called duty-to-assist laws,
are not widespread.
-It's the law in many, if not most, states
that there's no criminal penalty for failing to get involved,
for failing to help someone
who's in dire straits or an emergency.
-Others watching the violence take out their cellphones
and record it without intervening.
-But the age of violent videos taken by bystanders
has led to calls for new kinds of laws.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
That happened in California after a 14-year-old boy
suffered a concussion during an assault by one teen
while another filmed it and posted it on Snapchat.
-Why would you do this? For a laugh?
For a like?
-The boy who threw the punch was given probation.
The teen who filmed it was not charged.
-Taking someone's worst moment
and making it your best moment on social media
is expanding exponentially,
and we need to do something about it now
before it gets out of control.
-California has since passed a law
that allows additional jail time
for those who take part in a crime and video-record it,
but what about those watching online?
-Viewing things around rape and beatings and murder
are extreme cases that are actually rare on social media,
but what do you do when you see negative things?
Should you report it like you would a physical situation?
Should you call 911?
Should you call a community-based organization?
I think that police and schools
and parents and technology companies could come together
and really put forth some ideas on what people should do.
-Under fire for not anticipating how its platform would be used,
Facebook has hired thousands of people
to remove offensive material faster
so its users don't become unwitting bystanders
to violence.
-We will keep doing all we can
to prevent tragedies like this from happening.
-But social scientists say the bystander effect,
taught in textbooks worldwide, is a much broader phenomenon,
as ingrained in us today as when it came to light
55 years ago in the Kitty Genovese case.
-What we now understand is that this observation
and not knowing what to do
is something that we've done for a really long time
and that technology has not shifted that.
It just puts a finer point on what we've already been doing,
and I think we should stop there and think about,
"Why are kids doing this to other kids?"
And social media gives us an opportunity
to really dig into that,
and so that's where I think our attention
should be at this moment.
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