Is Social Media Safe? Facebook Live Gang Rape Video Ends With 3 Arrested In Sweden

A report of a gang rape in Sweden that was live streamed on Facebook led to the arrest of three men Sunday. Authorities, as well as other witnesses, confirmed they had viewed the recording.

The three alleged attackers, between 19 and 25-years-old, were apprehended at the scene of the crime after they assaulted a woman in an apartment. The live stream was broadcast in a closed group on Facebook that had several thousand members, the BBC reported.

“You have been raped,” one man said in the video, followed with a laugh. One of the viewers in the comments section of the post wrote, “three against one hahaha.”

The incident was reported by 21-year-old Josefine Lundgren after she viewed the video. Lundgren told Swedish tabloid Expressen that one of the attackers ripped the victim's clothes off and made an advance on her. The Facebook Live post revealed that at least 60 other people were viewing the broadcast at the same time she was.

Another witness said she saw 200 people viewing the video before the police arrived and the video stopped, RT reported.

Instances of rape and torture have been streamed or posted on social media in the recent past, putting the social media platforms in a poor spotlight. A 12-year-old girl in Georgia live-streamed her suicide in December 2016, with her family and authorities having a difficult time trying to take the video down.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have been highlighted for negative aspects, such as cyberbullying and harassment on social media being linked to depression in teenagers.

“I spoke to girls who said, ‘social media is destroying our lives,’” Nancy Jo Sales, author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, told the Huffington Post.

“‘But we can’t go off it, because then we’d have no life.’ There’s this whole perception that [teenage girls] love social media, but in many ways they hate it. But they don’t stop, because that’s where teen culture is happening,” Sales said.