Millions of people helped New Zealand mass murderer go viral

A common refrain after the horrible mass murder of 50 Muslims in New Zealand was to criticize Facebook and YouTube for failing to block the killer’s video from spreading online. While that’s a valid point, I have a bigger question. Why did millions of people repost this bloody video?
According to CBS, Facebook said it deleted 1.5 million videos of the shooting in the first 24 hours after the attack, which was posted in real time on Facebook Live by the killer. It prevented 1.2 million videos from being uploaded.
YouTube hasn’t said how many times the New Zealand massacre video was posted there, but it’s been struggling to remove the video as fast as people are reposting it.
Both Facebook and YouTube removed user comments in support of the murders, as sick as that sounds.
That’s the bigger issue here. Millions of people want to see a white nationalist slaughter innocent people. Is it morbid curiosity? A desire to share breaking news? Maybe for some people, but I fear it’s worse than that. 

Social media has become a potent platform for spreading hate and violence. The difficulty that some of the world’s biggest and most advanced companies have in pulling these videos demonstrates how determined the supporters of hate are to voice their message.
The killer made this video to immortalize his deeds and find meaning in his trivial life by going viral - similar to the fictional characters in my novel “Famous After Death.”
Sharing the video is exactly what the killer wanted. Don’t give him that pleasure. Don’t say his name.
Don’t let him have the fame he seeks.

How many people need to die on Facebook Live until tech giant pulls the plug?

Sadly, people are murdered and committee suicide every day. Few of these incidents attract the global spotlight. That’s where Facebook Live and other instantaneous social media platforms come in.

Steve Stephens gained his 15 minutes of fame by fatally shooting complete stranger Robert Godwin, 74, in Cleveland live on Facebook. In Thailand, Wuttisan Wongtalay hung his 11-month-old daughter on Facebook Live before killing himself on the same platform.

Would these crimes, and many before them, have occurred without a global platform to broadcast these murders? These videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times before Facebook pulled them. It appears that Stephens wanted to draw attention to himself as he dealt with personal problems. Shooting someone in anonymity would be another murder among hundreds every day. But a murder on Facebook Live, that put Stephens’ face all over the world.

That’s why live social media has become more frequently used by young people to broadcast suicide. Drawing more attention to their deaths has a greater impact on the people they blame for their suffering.

I anticipated this trend in my novel Famous After Death, where Miami teenagers commit murders in creative ways and post them online. In my story, most of these murders were recorded and posted soon after without the teens identifying themselves, but several of the crimes occur online in real time - similar to Facebook Live.

The question for Facebook, one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world, is what it’s prepared to do about it. After Godwin was murdered, CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed to improve the monitoring of videos on Facebook Live. Right now the company depends on users reporting questionable content. It’s working on artificial intelligence, but that could be years away.

Until a better system is in place and Facebook Live can’t be effectively policed, Zuckerberg should consider taking it down. The world will survive without Facebook Live, and so will the company. It’s a nice feature, but it’s not a crucial part of the website.

What can’t be replaced is the lives of people like Godwin.

Of course, Facebook makes plenty of money off these videos. There are more than 8 billion daily views of Facebook videos. Mobile video advertising is a multi-billion dollar market. So there are financial incentives for Facebook not to back down.

This isn’t only a Facebook problem. Platforms like YouTube, Periscope and Snapchat have been used to promote violence. In some cases, terrorist groups have posted propaganda videos on social media that went unchecked for months. This issue has caused YouTube to pull paid advertising from certain categories of videos, since advertisers didn’t want to run the risk that their ads would run alongside offensive videos.

Facebook Live has the potential to be a great platform. I wish politicians would broadcast all their meetings live on social media instead of striking backroom deals.

But until Zuckerberg and Co. can police it, one murder is too many.

A new wave of viral violence begins with brutality on live stream

As social media evolves to become more instantaneous than ever, viral violence has once again hijacked the ride.

Why wait five seconds to post a video of your life? Services like Facebook Live and Periscope provide a real-time look at what’s in front of your face. With instant audience metrics and feedback, they make life like a mini TV station. What more can the host do in that moment to grow an audience and go viral?

Four teenagers in Chicago found a way to juice their Facebook Live viewership past 15,000. They kidnapped a mental disabled teenager they went to high school with, tied him up, mercilessly beat him, cut his scalp with a knife, and taunted him with racial insults. The victim was white and the attackers were black, so this might be classified as a hate crime.

The video went on for 30 minutes on one of the suspect’s Facebook Live page, with viewership building as the seconds tick by. Facebook removed the video after the four suspects were arrested.

This story has some strange parallels to my novel Famous After Death. In my story, the teenagers are also abusing victims for the gratification of an online audience. However, they mostly posted the videos after the fact, using public wifi and a device that couldn’t be traced directly to them, and they didn’t put their faces in the video. When there is an attack in my book that is filmed live on the internet, it’s the victim’s camera phone being used for the live broadcast, not the attacker’s phone. They don’t want to be caught!


With these suspects in Chicago, they acted with zero regard for evading capture. Not only did one suspect post this on a Facebook profile using a personal device, they all appeared in the video. You know, just to make sure there’s no doubt. Yet, like the characters in my novel, there was a pack mentality. Get a bunch of people together with bad intentions and a camera, and the watch their aggression multiply.

Were these teenagers so proud that they could beat the poor guy that they wanted to show the world?

Here’s the other thing that gets me. Did any one of the Facebook Live viewers bother calling the police?

Violence can’t go viral unless an audience supports it.

The Panama Papers: Money laundering loopholes are nothing new

No one who’s been paying attention to the real estate or financial markets should be surprised over the off-shore tax havens and money laundering schemes uncovered by the release of the Panama Papers. World governments have been aware of these loopholes for years.

The only question: Will the publicity storm prompt the United States and other governments to stop the flow of dark money?

Hundreds of journalists around the world [sadly, not including me] worked through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to comb through about 11.5 million leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm and corporate register Mossack Fonseca. Among the 214,000 offshore companies it listed, some were used to conceal from the public and from governments that politically connected individuals, known criminals and people who had no apparent sources of wealth controlled significant amounts of money. In some cases, these offshore companies owned real estate, including in Miami.

Of course, not all of these companies were registered offshore. States like Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming also allow LLCs to be registered without listing a managing member.

The fact that this is going on isn’t news. The Panama Papers made headlines because it named names.


Hey, how did that hair dresser from South America buy a $1 million condo on Brickell? You can't ask those questions if you don't know who's really buying.
Law enforcement has known since the 1980s that dirty money found its way into Miami real estate through shell corporations. Watch the documentary “Cocaine Cowboys” to see how drug money built much of this town. In 2013, I wrote the story “Condos, Cash, and Criminals” in the South Florida Business Journal addressing the concerns of many experts that dirty money was contributing to the surge of cash real estate deals.

Politicians and law enforcement have known this was a problem for decades. And yet, it has persisted. Who knows who really owns our real estate? Many people would rather not know, as long as they're making money off it.

Having covered both banking and real estate in South Florida, I can tell you that I often run into companies with no clear path of ownership. Sometimes they’re registered in Delaware, or offshore in places the Isle of Jersey or the British Virgin Islands.

Other times, they’re Florida-registered LLCs but the managing member clearly isn’t the owner. There’s no requirement that Florida LLC’s list the owner, only a person to handle the company’s affairs. Sometimes this is innocent, such as a famous athlete who makes his attorney the manager of the LLC because he doesn’t want to be bothered at his home.

It could also be used by money laundering drug dealers to set up straw managers to buy real estate through. There’s really no way I can tell that the LLC isn’t funded by terrorists, drug dealers or corrupt officials.

Some homes are bought by trusts. It’s extremely difficult for the public to know who controls them. You just have to trust that the lawyers who set them up did their due diligence.

As we saw in the Panama Papers, there’s a temptation for incorporation law firms to think money first, due diligence second. Plus, law firms don’t face the strict “know your customer” and “source of funds” rules that banks must comply with.

U.S. authorities could ask more of incorporation law firms. Federal and local governments could take measures to require ownership disclosure for LLCs. Authorities have started asking title companies to disclose the LLC owners in $1 million-plus deals in Miami and $3 million-plus deals in Manhattan

Until authorities start taking aggressive measures to promote disclosure, it’s clear they aren’t serious about addressing this problem.

It’s not so easy, though. Miami, New York and many other international cities are enjoying windfalls of foreign cash that have spurred building booms. That’s created jobs and increased property taxes, although some argue it’s also made real estate less obtainable for working families. I have a feeling that some, or perhaps most, Miami condo projects would fall apart if these loopholes were closed.

Should we start turning money away because we don’t trust the source? Or do we turn a blind eye?

Posting assault on victim's Facebook page backfires for these two

Most Facebook users have probably had the experience of a person something on their page they'd rather not share with the world - a drinking face, bad hair day, the ex you were supposed to be done with. Delete! A video of you curled up in the fetal position getting beaten would be a most unwelcome addition to your Facebook page.

That's exactly what two (alleged) assailants did to Frankie Santana, a Detroit resident with cerebral palsy, which restricts his movements. The two 20-year-olds stole his phone, recorded his beating on it and then posted it all over Facebook, including on the victim's page.

See a snippet of what they did from this report via Fox 2 in Detroit.

 It certainly wasn't hard to catch them and prosecutors should have no problem finding enough evidence.

As I've highlighted in my novel Famous After Death, it's not enough for bullies and killers to hurt their victims physically, they want to shame them emotionally. Social media has become their weapon of choice.


Hopefully next time someone tags Mr. Santana on Facebook, the message will be more uplifting.

My radio interview: What drives teenagers to murder?

Cyrus Webb interviewed me for his ConversationsLIVE show on Blog Talk Radio this week. After reading my novel Famous After Death and writing a glowing review of the book, he asked me in-depth questions where the story came from.

Here’s a sample of what went down on the air:

When did you first have the seed planted that this was a book that you wanted to write?

I started working on it in 2010. I had the initial idea that I wanted to write about teenagers who were putting their crimes on the internet to get attention for it. I knew this was beginning to happen and I wanted to understand. These were teenagers who were smart enough to do it anonymously. And real life sort of beat be to the punch. You had a freshman at Rutgers jump to his death after his roommate filmed him making out with another man and his roommate put it on his Facebook page to bully him. There was a column by Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald who wrote about how people are using the internet to bully people and to trash them here and the internet can bring out the ugliness with us. And that stuck with me. That was the point of my novel to show how people are using social media in the wrong way.

There was something that I was not expecting that came up in this book and that was the family element. Did you know going in that you wanted to make these young people more than just savage, that you wanted to show us the human side of them by letting us see their family?

I felt it was important to understand all of them got into a situation where they were juvenile delinquents, where they wanted to play pranks on people online, not really caring if the people got hurt. This doesn’t happen randomly. There’s a reason. The lead character Jorge, he’s very much a loner. He’s trying to make friends. He wears big black trench coats in Miami and doesn’t fit in. His mother is sort of OCD and so he is trying to get attention from the other boys. He wants to use his intelligence only to act like he’s cool and fit in.

Kelso is from a wealthy family where his dad is a motocross star and his younger brother is really the big guy in the family because he’s a great skater. He’s a better skater than Kelso. His brother always finishes first and Kelso is finishes distance. So he’s trying to show that he’s the man, that he can get a lot of hits from his videos. He feels like he’s passed over for his brother.

And Chris, who acts in a mean way toward everybody, he’s from a broken home where his father left his mother and started a modeling agency, and he’s with all the models. So he’s feels that angry inside that his family was broken and he’s angry at both parents and wants to take it out on everyone else.

Go here to listen to the full interview with Cyrus Webb.

Book it! I've lined up two great author events

I'm excited to announce two upcoming author events in support of my second novel "Famous After Death."

Come see me at Books and Books - Publishers Weekly's Bookstore of the Year in 2015. I'll be speaking at the 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables store on Monday August 17 at 8 p.m. I've been practicing an animated read of an explosive chapter from "Famous After Death."

Here are the details of the event. You can also purchase the novel directly from Books and Books now. Wouldn't you rather shop with a local businessman like Mitchell Kaplan than Jeff Bezos?

The Miami Book Fair International has confirmed me as a speaker on Sunday November 22 at Miami-Dade College's downtown campus. Details will be worked out later. This will be my second speaking engagement at the country's largest book fair. It's a must-go festival for book lovers.

Finally, if you want a preview of what I will likely discuss at events, check out my guest post on Criminal Element about "The Top 8 Crimes That Went Viral." Can you believe that people promote their crimes on social media? It's not just fiction.

If you comment on my Criminal Element story before July 30, you are entered in a sweepstakes to win a free copy of "Famous After Death". So let me hear you!