Russian Teenager Accidentally Hangs Self While Shooting Home Viral Video

Svetlana Gladkova from Profy brings our attention today to a tragic freak accident in the online video world. A 16-year-old Russian boy was making a video he reportedly intended to post on Russian video-sharing site RuTube that included a fictional hanging. With filmmaking tools as accessible as they are today, the young man took on the dual roles of director and actor. So when his staged hanging went awry — apparently the chair he was standing on broke — nobody else was present, and he died.

It’s reminiscent of another teenager’s filmed death, under very different circumstances — that of Abraham Biggs, in which online video chatroom participants egged him on before and possibly during his own live-broadcasting of his suicide.

The Russian teen’s video thankfully didn’t make it online, but it did portray what happened to him for police who came to investigate what at first seemed like a suicide. But where he once might have hoped for fame from his real-looking video portrayal, unfortunately it didn’t end up that way.

“This is a totally terrifying example of what the desire to reach online popularity can result in and I do hope that popular video hosting websites will come up with some guidelines for teenagers to shoot their movies in a risk-free manner,” writes Gladkova. While she has a point, I don’t see how a terms of service change could possibly ensure that people are safe while they have a camera turned on. Hopefully this was just an isolated incident.

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