French Police Investigate Teen's Suicide Live-Streamed On Periscope
PARIS (CBS / AP) -- French authorities opened an investigation Wednesday after a teenage woman allegedly live-streamed video of her suicide on the popular app Periscope.
The local prosecutor said the young woman threw herself under a commuter train in the suburban Egly station, south of Paris.
The woman, whose name was not released, allegedly sent a text message to a close relation minutes before she killed herself Tuesday, prosecutor Eric Lallement said in a statement.
"She allegedly also made declarations to Internet users, through the Periscope application, to explain her act," Lallement said.
The statement said the woman was born in 1997, meaning she was 18 or 19.
The video has been removed from the app, but YouTube users posted what they said were excerpts, not including the apparent suicide scene. They show a young woman with long, dark hair saying: "The video I'm filming right now is not intended to make a buzz. It is intended to make people react, to open minds, nothing else."
It was not possible to confirm the woman in the excerpts was the one who killed herself in the Egly station.
Periscope, owned by Twitter, did not publicly comment.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media companies say they work hard to block or remove posts that glorify violence. But the fast pace of new technology, especially services that let people stream live video from anywhere, means it's difficult to control everything, everywhere.
Extremist groups have especially taken advantage of such technology to spread their violence. But it has also been used for isolated acts.
In Ohio earlier this year, prosecutors said a 17-year-old was raped by a man with whom she had been drinking and her 18-year-old female friend live-streamed the attack on Periscope.
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