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Recently, Jean Pormanove, a Frenchman whose real name was Raphaël Graven, was streaming live on Kick, an Australian-based live video platform. There was nothing abnormal in this—Pormanove was a regular streamer—and sometimes, he would be shown doing normal things, like playing video games. The videos in which Pormanove appeared, however, were often notable for their violence: two other streamers, known by the aliases Naruto and Safine, would do things like throttle him, hit him over the head, or subject him to electric shocks, sometimes as part of what were styled as extreme challenges, other times seemingly gratuitously. This most recent stream had been going on for twelve days or so. At one point, Naruto could be seen reading out a message that Pormanove purportedly sent to his mother, in which he claimed that the game was “going too far,” and that he felt like a “prisoner” within a “shitty concept.” In another clip, according to CNN, Pormanove’s mother could be heard berating her son. “They are treating you like shit,” she said.

Eventually, people viewing the stream noticed that Pormanove had stopped moving while he was asleep, and appeared to be lying in a strange position. He was later pronounced dead. He was forty-six. The news sparked revulsion, in France and beyond. Sarah El Haïry, the French children’s commissioner, described it as “horrifying”; Clara Chappaz, a French minister whose portfolio includes AI and digital affairs, agreed, adding that Pormanove had been “humiliated and mistreated for months live on Kick.” In a news article, the French newspaper Le Monde likened the story to the “most chilling episodes” of the dystopian TV satire Black Mirror; a journalist at Reuters pointed out that Pormanove subjecting himself to online humiliation echoed the actual plot of one of them. There were comparisons, too, to La Mort en Direct‚ a French sci-fi film known in English as Death Watch (though the title translates more literally to “Death, Live”), in which a woman with a terminal illness is filmed for a reality-TV show. A Le Monde editorial suggested that reality had surpassed fiction.

The streams involving Pormanove had been a subject of controversy in France for a while: late last year, Mediapart, an investigative news site (modeled in part on ProPublica), ran a story about them, noting the abuse of Pormanove and another streamer who is disabled; after the story appeared, a French prosecutor opened an investigation on a range of grounds, and Naruto (real name: Owen Cenazandotti) and Safine (real name: Safine Hamadi) were briefly detained, but they were released and have not yet faced any charges. (The investigation is reportedly ongoing.) The participants in the streams—including Pormanove—denied to the authorities that any crimes were being committed; indeed, they styled their streams as humor, with Naruto reportedly once saying, “We know what makes people laugh and what doesn’t.” Apparently, they also knew what made people pay, with viewers enticed to chip in, in part, by the promise of more extreme stunts; at the time of Pormanove’s death last week, an on-screen ticker suggested that the stream had raised over forty thousand dollars. A lawyer for Naruto has since insisted that the streams were all staged (including segments with Pormanove’s mother); a lawyer for Safine acknowledged to a French TV station that the violence was not always “simulated,” but insisted that it was all consensual. Both Naruto and Safine have publicly paid tribute to Pormanove. “My brother, my sidekick, my partner,” Naruto wrote online. “We will miss you terribly.” He also urged people not to share the footage depicting Pormanove’s last moments.

As Le Monde noted, these words were very different from how Naruto and Safine sometimes spoke about Pormanove during their streams together. In one older clip that circulated online after Pormanove’s death, Naruto could be heard asking him to affirm, live on camera, that if he were to suddenly drop dead, it wouldn’t be due to their conduct, but to his “shitty health” and “forty-six years of shabby living”; after initially refusing, per Le Monde, Pormanove agreed that if anything happened to him during a stream, it would be entirely his responsibility. After this came to pass, the authorities quickly launched an investigation into whose responsibility it actually was. On Thursday, a prosecutor said that, following an initial autopsy, it appeared that Pormanove’s death was not caused by any physical trauma inflicted by a third party, and was more likely the result of “medical and/or toxicological” factors. (Pormanove may have had a heart condition, the prosecutor said, and had received treatment for a thyroid problem.) Further tests were ordered. A source close to the investigation told Le Monde that while Pormanove’s death was not caused by the beatings he received, some questions remained unresolved, such as whether the conditions in which the stream occurred—inducing sleep deprivation, for example—may have caused a heart attack.

The news of the autopsy did little to quell the uproar around the incident; whatever Pormanove’s cause of death, the videos in which he appeared were disturbing in themselves. Much of the attention has focused, predictably, on Kick, the platform that hosted the videos. Kick was founded in 2022 as a competitor to Twitch, the Amazon-owned leader in the streaming field, offering more lucrative deals that lured talent including the rapper Drake and Adin Ross, the media personality who would later be credited with helping Donald Trump return to the presidency as part of the broader “manosphere.” In 2023, the New York Times described Kick as “something of a loss leader” for its owner, an online crypto casino. Already, at that point, the site had come under scrutiny for content-moderation standards that many critics perceived as shockingly lax: Ross hosted figures like the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate, and at one point streamed pornography; while a different pair of streamers were filming a man’s encounter with a sex worker (whom the man apparently tried to prevent from walking out after she learned that the influencers were watching from a different room in the same apartment), Ed Craven, Kick’s CEO, posted laughing emojis in an accompanying chat and made a donation to the streamers. The Times described the platform as “the Wild West of livestreaming.”

In 2023, Craven told the Times that he regretted the incident involving the sex worker, and suggested that the platform was figuring out how to improve its moderation standards and where to draw the line. (“I think people are realizing the more controversial they are, the more shock factor involved in their content, the more viewers they get,” he said, “and it can sometimes be a dangerous mix in that regard.”) Following Pormanove’s death last week, Kick expressed its sadness, said that it would review its French-language content, and banned the streamers involved; on Thursday (the same day that the results of the autopsy became public), officials from the platform reportedly met with a French broadcast regulator and pledged full cooperation and a thorough review of its moderation practices. The company has continued to face criticism, however. Not long after the meeting, Kick apparently unblocked Pormanove’s channel; the platform reportedly claimed that it was trying to facilitate investigators’ access to the content, but the regulator condemned the decision. (The channel was soon re-blocked.) On Friday, Chappaz, the digital minister, told a French radio station that officials had had an “extremely tense exchange” with Kick, adding, scathingly, “We are facing people on the other side of the world, on video calls, in T-shirts, slumped over, who have absolutely no idea what is happening and who have no answers.” Shortly before this newsletter went to press, it was reported that Chappaz had initiated legal proceedings against Kick.

All of this, of course, ties into a much broader global debate as to how best to regulate the internet that I assessed recently in this newsletter, in the context of the UK beginning to enforce provisions of an online-safety law implementing age-verification requirements around certain types of content; as I noted, the legislation was intended to protect young people from pornography, suicide forums, and other such material, but appeared to have had the early unintended effect of censoring public-interest information, among other concerns around privacy and enforcement. The sort of content that Pormanove was making was, to put it exceedingly mildly, not in the public interest. But the same sorts of questions around how best to clamp down on it apply. Unlike the UK, France is still a member of the European Union, and thus bound by its Digital Services Act (which my colleague Jem Bartholomew wrote about for CJR in 2023); this and other laws bind foreign platforms that are available in Europe, and include provisions around not only moderation, but things like transparency and legal representation. According to the Times, however, Kick isn’t big enough to fall under the DSA’s most stringent requirements; last week, Chappaz claimed that the company did not have a designated legal representative in Europe prior to Pormanove’s death (it reportedly now has one in Malta) and also acknowledged limits to her own power: “As a minister,” she said, “you cannot decide to shut down a site.” And so, as I noted has also been the case around the UK law, some French politicians have suggested cracking down even harder. Gabriel Attal, a former prime minister, suggested testing young people for screen addiction, limiting screen time for older children (including by mandating that images become black-and-white after half an hour of continuous use), and a full social media ban for those under fifteen. This last proposal is similar to an impending law in Kick’s home country of Australia, which is preparing a ban for those under sixteen, and where regulators have also taken aim at Kick in the wake of Pormanove’s death.

The ensuing blame game, however, has stretched wider than the pointing of fingers at one online platform or The Internet in nebulous terms. Mediapart noted that it asked Chappaz to comment on its earlier investigation of the violent stream, and that she did not respond. (She said last week that she took the story seriously but that due process needed to be observed.) In an article for Le Monde, the sociologist Julie Alev Dilmaç wrote that—amid the scrutiny applied to the other streamers, Pormanove himself, and regulators—some have suggested that Pormanove’s viewers bear responsibility for supporting the streams with their attention and cash; Dilmaç added that the episode “invites us to question our contemporary relationship with humiliation and the multiple meanings it takes on.” On Substack, the US tech commentator Max Read (whom Camille Bromley interviewed recently for this newsletter) took aim at Kick for actively promoting Pormanove’s channel while he was alive—the platform “needs to be destroyed,” Read wrote—but also pointed out, smartly, that this violent, bullying style of content has “ample precedent in pre-internet media, at least in the US, where exploiting eccentrics and other vulnerable people was for decades common practice on daytime TV, drive-time radio, and the reality television boom at the turn of the millennium.” Also writing in Le Monde, Nathalie Tehio was among those who referenced La Mort en Direct, noting that its message denounced “voyeurism and the society of spectacle”—and that it came out in 1980. Before that, there were circus games and public executions. People have always loved violence, or, at least, struggled to look away.

If, as Read notes, the media has been complicit in this reality, there are things that the news media can do to fight it, from itself treating all people with basic dignity to bringing infringements thereon to wider public attention, as Mediapart did in the case of Pormanove—even if, as Tehio suggests, it shouldn’t have taken a media storm for officials to act in this case. As the French newspaper Libération noted over the weekend, the story of Pormanove’s death has been amplified all over the world. One US journalist told the paper that the story’s appeal likely lies in its salacious nature, adding: “We have to remember that the media is more or less one more form of entertainment for the public.” But others viewed the attention that people have paid to the episode in more hopeful terms. It was, at least, universally shocking. “You don’t need to understand French to understand that a man is lying inanimate in bed in the middle of a livestream,” a journalist with the Associated Press said.

Still, in this day and age, the media’s power is limited, not least by the Wild West nature of the internet; if journalists have more power within this realm than many of them seem to think, it remains an anarchic place, and one that, in many corners, is openly hostile to our work. Le Monde reported yesterday that many fans of Pormanove’s have slammed the media’s coverage of his death in online chat forums; on Sunday night, Pormanove’s mother went live on TikTok and insisted that her son had been “happy,” whatever the media might now say. (“When people go to work, do they bring their work home with them?” she said, according to Le Monde. “No, they leave it there.”) Read noted in his newsletter that in his final stream, and despite his purported messages to his mother about the challenges going too far, Pormanove had defended them against “haters.” At one point, Naruto told Pormanove to say on camera that it was all a game, and that if he was convincing, Naruto would hit him more gently. Pormanove complied. “Shitty Mediapart,” he said.

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