Did Facebook Help Police Officers Kill Korryn Gaines?

Facebook is under heavy fire after word got out that they deleted the account of Korryn Gaines at the request of the Baltimore County police during a standoff at her home.

"When Facebook acted at the behest of Baltimore County police last week by abruptly deleting Korryn Gaines’ social media accounts amid an ongoing standoff between authorities and the 23-year-old, did the private corporation become an agent of the State? If it did, far more precipitously, did the social media giant impinge on Gaines’ constitutional rights as a chilling new manifestation of subjective government-sanctioned censorship?

During what became a five-hour standoff, Gaines posted a number of videos documenting her prolonged encounter with a heavily-armed Baltimore SWAT team — summoned to the scene after officers learned the woman had a firearm. In one video uploaded to Instagram, which Facebook owns, Gaines speaks with her five-year-old son, who sits on the floor wearing red pajamas.

“Who’s outside?” she asks him.

“The police,” he softly responds.

“What are they trying to do?”

“They trying to kill us,” the child says, not realizing the accuracy in his innocent answer.

Not long afterward, the child would be shot in the cheek and Gaines mortally wounded by the police in military gear outside the door.

But the conclusion of that standoff, as well as the time directly prior to police firing their weapons, would not make it onto social media, thanks to Facebook’s compliance with law enforcement requests to delete Gaines’ Facebook and Instagram accounts. Officers, unsurprisingly, were not equipped with body cameras to document their actions and potentially hold them accountable."

The problem here is the ability of companies like Facebook to dramatically reduce the ability of its users to contact those who may be able to influence their current circumstances. Maybe Gaines was in the right, maybe she was in the wrong, but either way the fact that Facebook denied her access to communication is insane. It is another form of Facebook censorship, and this time someone ended up dead.

My original blog post: http://www.intangibl3.org/#!Did-Facebook-Help-Police-Officers-Kill-Korryn-Gaines/c1u9t/57ab90570cf26d54f731f4fc