On Tuesday evening, a well-known celebrity blogger, best known by the nom de plume Perez Hilton, opened up his TikTok account and began a livestream from his Miami home. What unfolded over the next 30 minutes horrified all who witnessed it — and should force the rest of us to take a very sober look at the ways social media can harm.
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On Tuesday evening, a well-known celebrity blogger, best known by the nom de plume Perez Hilton, opened up his TikTok account and began a livestream from his Miami home. What unfolded over the next 30 minutes horrified all who witnessed it — and should force the rest of us to take a very sober look at the ways social media can harm.
On Tuesday evening, a well-known celebrity blogger, best known by the nom de plume Perez Hilton, opened up his TikTok account and began a livestream from his Miami home. What unfolded over the next 30 minutes horrified all who witnessed it — and should force the rest of us to take a very sober look at the ways social media can harm.
Until just a few nights ago, Hilton was not, to many who knew of him, a very sympathetic figure. He’d risen to fame through the first decade of the 2000s on the back of his eponymous blog, which offered a constant drip of scandalous — or just plain embarrassing — paparazzi photos, mocking commentary and purported insider gossip.
Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira Jr., wasn’t the first blogger to seize on celebrity gossip as a way to build fame, but he was the most vicious. His digs at actors — including minor-age teens — were often cruel and shockingly invasive. When celebrities publicly struggled with addiction, he didn’t hesitate to kick them when they were down.
Still, he was also a symbiotic part of the celebrity ecosystem, feeding a constant supply of attention to those whose careers depended on such notoriety. (Much of Kim Kardashian’s rise happened on Hilton’s blog.) It’s a dynamic that would, as the social internet matured, erupt into a full-blown attention economy; and Hilton profited immensely.
But in recent months the blogger had become increasingly erratic. Earlier this year he was hospitalized for nearly a month with a severe septic infection; he survived, but when he came back online, he showed signs of escalating mental illness. He spoke strangely, and professed a sudden religiosity. Some followers grew concerned.
On Tuesday night, those warning signs escalated into a terrifying crisis. As hundreds of thousands of people watched live, Hilton, standing naked, grabbed a knife and began to slice at his own flesh over and over, cutting until he was completely covered in blood. He declared a desire to be killed by police, and stated this was what his viewers wanted.
On Reddit, many who witnessed the crisis were left traumatized. “I have a high tolerance and it was truly one of the worst videos I’ve ever seen,” one user wrote. As clips of the livestream circulated widely on other social media sites, one witness warned others “to not watch it because it will scar you. I can’t get the image out of my head.”
Despite how high-profile the incident was, it took more than 15 minutes for TikTok to take the livestream down. (The company later stated this was due to a “moderator error.”) Many witnessed it accidentally, as they scrolled through their otherwise unremarkable feeds — and given TikTok’s youthful audience, this undoubtedly includes many children.
Thankfully, according to statements from police and the blogger’s family, Hilton will survive. After several hours of contact with police, he was taken by ambulance to hospital. He remained there as of Thursday morning receiving treatment.
In most cases, such a catastrophic mental-health crisis should remain private. People deserve a chance to heal and not have the stigma of a major mental-health incident follow them forever. For that reason, I debated using his name here; yet in this case, there’s no point in withholding it. He’s simply too famous, the crisis too public and too widely seen.
But if we can’t offer him the dignity of full privacy after this incident, perhaps we can learn from it.
Source: Read the original article on www.winnipegfreepress.com