There is plenty of coverage everywhere you look about how Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon have announced plans to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer who shot up Fort Hood, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. There is plenty of debate about the moral atrocity that is a firing squad execution and plenty of comparison to the botched lethal injection execution in Tennessee last week. This is not the place for such discussions, other than to make it clear that the entire concept here — no matter how terrible Hasan is or no matter how terrible his crime — of the state putting people to death is a barbaric practice that should be ended.
But there is one angle here that we can talk about that most other places won’t: whether hosting the livestream would violate the platforms’ own rules — and whether they’ll simply ignore (or rewrite) those rules to do it anyway. While it’s probably perfectly legal in the US to stream the execution, it still might violate the various platform rules that most sites have set up for themselves. (Hosting it globally may also create legal headaches in countries with stricter rules on violent, extremist, and terrorist content, but that’s a separate question.)
