Is Facebook ready for live video’s important role in police accountability?

Facebook hoped that the raw immediacy of live-streaming might help coax its users to share more about their personal lives. On July 6, a woman in the passenger seat of the car where Philando Castile lay dying, shot in the arm by a Minnesota cop during a traffic stop, used Facebook Live to show the world the shooting’s gory aftermath.

hen Facebook introduced Facebook Live, it was likely anticipating safe viral moments like Chewbacca Mom or the Buzzfeed watermelon explosion. Instead, Facebook found that livestreaming is a lot more than that. Like real life, livestreaming can have a light side and a dark side. It also has a long history of use as a powerful medium for accountability. This is what Diamond Reynolds did on July 6. Reynolds’s video disappeared from Facebook the night of July 6, before reappearing with a warning that it showed “graphic” imagery. Facebook later said that the video was temporarily taken down because of a “technical glitch” without explaining further. But the sudden loss of access raises questions about whether Facebook is ready to judge which raw, visceral moments that its users broadcast may stay on the site, and which will go. As Facebook’s users continue to stream their varieties of experience through Live, the company is going to have to make decisions about which of these the world can – or can’t – see, particularly when those experiences contain both graphic imagery and vitally important information. Reynolds’s stream is an example of this, and of its power: it transformed how the story of Castile’s death – and her grieving of his death – is told. Her perspective from inside that car became that of her viewers, and she relied on no one else to tell it.