On Easter Sunday, 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. was shot in the street in downtown Cleveland. The scene was filmed by 37-year-old Steve Stephens, and then posted to Facebook where it was subsequently, not surprisingly, watched and shared thousands of times.

The video is less than a minute long, with the actual impact of the bullet out of scene. We hear Stephens say, “I’m about to kill this guy right here, the old dude.” Next, we see a man lying next to a small pool of blood. Stephens says something to the camera alluding that he had taken the man’s life because of a woman. He is still at large.

In what’s been dubbed as one of the worst things ever to appear on Facebook, the killing joins a list of tragic events posted to Facebook. Two of the most remarkable of late were the shooting of a Minnesota man by police last year, and in January a rape in Sweden filmed on Facebook Live. The murder in Cleveland was perhaps unique in that Stephens didn’t publish the video to Facebook Live, but had captured an audience earlier by posting a video to Live revealing he was going to commit a murder that day.

While Facebook cannot stop what for all intents and purposes are snuff videos appearing on the site, the company has been criticized for its response time in taking down the film. It took around two hours for Facebook to remove the video, by which point it had been shared many times – and will no doubt live on in the antipodes of the Internet and be watched and shared by millions of blood-lusting Internet users. The victim’s nephew, Ryan A. Godwin, posted a message to Twitter entreating the public not to share the video.

Please please please stop retweeting that video and report anyone who has posted it! That is my grandfather show some respect #Cleveland

— Ryan A. Godwin (@god_winr) April 16, 2017

Facebook currently relies on moderators to take content down after something has been flagged as abusive by the public. Facebook is developing algorithms that can detect what might be deemed content that should not be posted, but at the moment it seems the artificial intelligence is not intelligent enough, or at least not fast enough. On top of detection, if the AI flags a post, there is still a time delay while a human moderator can judge if the content should be posted.

Facebook has also said before that it must recognize what is ethical censorship while not impinging on free expression. While the site is being told to be more proactive regarding moderation, it has also made some vastly unpopular decisions as a censor. Last year Facebook’s moderators decided we shouldn’t see the famous award-winning photograph of a Vietnamese girl running from a napalm strike, amounting to a public outcry lambasting the platform for denying the public history.

Facebook eventually reversed this decision, but its actions fomented the suspicion that it might not embrace a certain kind of freedom. That was not “connecting the world,” as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg likes to say, but trapping us in a business-minded, constructed reality.

We might have to accept, even if few of us want to, that a murder appearing on social media might just be inevitable for now. As a law academic said to The New York Times regarding this story: “Any of these platforms — especially live ones — encourages users to perform.”

The stage is set, and for a particular kind of unhinged narcissist, it’s the perfect platform to perform the last trick. The audience, however, in spite of perhaps a natural inclination to behold a taboo, could be criticized for watching. As for sharing such content, maybe that’s a far more serious ethical crime – a breach of our social (media) contract.

Image: Carlos Maya via Flickr