Behind the camera of suicide


Karina Duncan, Feature Writer

Sitting online, you come across a trending graphic video of a person standing next to a dead body. You seem to be confused why this is even online. Who would even let this happen? On Jan. 1st, a famous YouTuber posted a video online while finding a person who committed suicide, stood next to the body and made fun of it.

The internet started going crazy over this, but, honestly, this happens all the time and people don’t realize it.  This makes me beyond upset that Youtube’s guidelines let this video be in the top 10 trending for the Youtube community, and that it was in public mode.

This made the internet outraged that the youtubers fans are normally 11-13-year-olds and that they were being exposed to this. While this isn’t the only video that is controversial on the matter, I feel that we should actually reflect on this.

Anyone can post a video of them doing something stupid, it happens all the time. But for a famous youtube star to show a dead body is completely out of proportion. Another thing that is crazy is that the other guidelines of social media are stepping up and talking about this, but Youtube’s response was not what the people wanted.

“Our hearts go out to the family of the person featured in the video, Youtube prohibits violent or gory content posted in a shocking, sensational or disrespectful manner” said Youtubes spokeswoman.  The statement didn’t exactly show what they are going to do about this, but that it shouldn’t have been on there because of the guidelines.

The other big thing that is a big problem is people live streaming their suicide, which is mostly on Facebook live.

Facebook made a statement saying, “As a result, Facebook is adding 3,000 people to its community operations team by year end on top of the 4,500 it had as of March to police content on the site”. I feel like a statement to what the company is doing is important, the people love feeling safe and secure. On the other hand, didn’t relate to the community but by saying sorry, which in retrospect isn’t a legit apology.

Even that the matter is, rules are often broken and we really can’t do anything about that. We as the community who find eating tide pods is satisfying need to realize that if we just talk about this, nothing will happen in the end. Something has to change by people getting triggered by a person showing a dead body, but by someone showing they like someone that’s not the opposite gender.

As blunt as I am, there’s always going to be disgusting things online, that’s never going to change. The fact that little kids look up to youtube stars and that they can’t find a filter to not mess up like this is a huge problem. The online community isn’t going to improve if we keep letting these huge mistakes run the internet and mess up continuous times.