Perez Hilton and Our Live-Streaming Nightmare

Last week, the celebrity-gossip blogger Perez Hilton went live on TikTok and, for about fifteen minutes, appeared to cut himself. Naked and bleeding, he moaned as he moved a knife across his body, swaying unsteadily before the camera. (TikTok’s A.I. and human moderators failed to end the recording in a timely fashion—technical difficulties, apparently.) At one point, he added three people to his live stream, who, mortified, begged him to stop. He told his viewers that this was what they wanted, and said that he was doing this for his young children, who had apparently fled the house with Hilton’s sister during what his family, in a statement, called a “severe mental health crisis.”