[Maggie Lake:] Markets on Wall Street stage a strong rally to start the week. It's Monday, the 18th of August. This hour, President Obama will address the crisis in Iraq, as well as the civil unrest in Missouri. It follows the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer. The curfew is off, but the National Guard has been called. We'll examine the role social media is playing in the protests. I'm Maggie Lake, this is QUEST MEANS BUSINESS. Good evening. Tonight, we're awaiting critical developments on stories we'll following in the United States and the Middle East. At the White House, President Obama is expected to speak momentarily about the situation in Iraq and Ferguson, Missouri. We're also expecting to hear developments from cease-fire talks in Cairo. With less than one hour left before a truce between Israel and Gaza expires, we're getting conflicting reports about whether or not a deal has been reached. We begin tonight's program in the US city of Ferguson, Missouri. We are hearing conflicting reports of events that led to the shooting and killing of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer. For the first time, CNN has verified an account of the officer's side of the story given by a woman identified as "Josie," who called a St. Louis radio station. She said, in effect, that Brown rushed officer Darren Wilson before shots were fired.
[Ktfk, St. Louis, Missouri:] So, he goes in reverse back to them, tries to get out of his car. They slam his door shut violently, I think he said Michael did. And then, he opened his car again, tries to get out. And as he stands up, Michael just bum-rushes him, just shoves him back into his car, punches him in the face, and then, of course, Darren grabs for his gun, and Michael grabs the gun. At one point, he got the gun totally turned against his hip, and Darren shoves it away, and the gun goes off. Well, then, Michael takes off with his friend, they get to be about 35 feet away, and Darren of course, protocol is to pursue. So, he stands up and yells, "Freeze!" Michael and his friend turn around, and Michael starts taunting him, "Oh, what are you going to do about it? You're not going to shoot me!" And then he said all of a sudden, he just started to bum rush him, he just started coming at him full speed, and so he just started shooting, and he just kept coming. So, he really thinks he was on something, because he just kept coming. It was unbelievable. And then so he finally ended up, the final shot was in the forehead, and then he fell about two, three feet in front of the officer.
[Lake:] Hours ago in a press conference, an attorney for Michael Brown's family said an independent autopsy report provides ample evidence to support the arrest of the officer who shot him. Violence raged in Ferguson Sunday night as clashes with police ended in an intensified display of force form law enforcement. Protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at police, and several businesses were vandalized. For more on this, let's go to Don Lemon, who is live in Ferguson, Missouri. And Don, I have been watching you talking to residents there all day, and it seems the situation is still very tense, the people feel that they are being boxed in, and authorities are concerned that we'll have yet more violence.
[Don Lemon, Cnn Correspondent:] Absolutely. And you can hear some of it now.
[Lemon:] These are people who are just driving down the street honking, and what they are saying is in solidarity, Maggie, with the protesters who are standing here along the side of this road. You remember that I'm sure you've been reporting to your viewers that Quik Trip, and that is where that one was burned out and some of the looters and the rioters set that on fire, and it's really just a burned-out shell now. That had been, really, the meeting point for all of the protesters. Since then, I guess about two hours ago, Maggie, they moved everyone out of that area, and they moved them down to this area, and they're telling people here that they can still peacefully assemble, but they can't congregate. So, if you're walking and you're marching, that's fine, but if you're just standing around, you stand the possibility of being arrested. There had been some tensions because of the findings of the second autopsy and also because the National Guard is being brought in, the Governor, Jay Nixon, here in Missouri is bringing the National Guard in, and they should arrive at any moment. Also, as you said, the president of the United States is going to speak at any moment on this as well. It's really a tinder box here. Everyone is hoping that there isn't any more violence like there was last night, but every little thing any little thing can set someone off here, Maggie.
[Lake:] All right, Don. And you absolutely hear that in the voices of the people that you've been speaking to. Don Lemon for us in Ferguson, Missouri.
[Lemon:] Right.
[Lake:] The protests are continuing on social media, not only where Don is, but on social media. This is a map showing how the world has been tweeting about the shooting since it happened on August 9th. The hash tags act like a battle cry. "Hands Up Don't Shoot" echoes the chants of protesters on the ground in Ferguson, referring to claims that Michael Brown's hands were up in surrender when he was shot by a police officer. Hash tag "If I Was Gunned Down" was created by teens who shared misleading pictures of themselves that might be used if they had been the victim. NMOS14 calls for a national moment of silence for the Michael Brown shooting, and hash tag "I Got the Talk" was used by black people to share their experience talking with their parents about how they need to behave around police officers because of the color of their skin. CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter joins me now. And Brian, what's striking in this case is it's not just the news of the incident, which frankly, we've all gotten very used to with social media. The entire dialogue surrounding this is really playing out on social media, first and foremost.
[Brian Stelter, Cnn Senior Media Correspondent:] It's the debates that start as a result of this shooting that you see play out on Twitter and Facebook. Particularly Twitter, and it's worth highlighting the fact that there's a disproportionate number of African-American users in the United States on Twitter. I'm going to show you Pew data from last year. Among 18 to 29-year- olds who are Internet users, about 28 percent of whites use Twitter, 40 percent of blacks use Twitter.
[Lake:] Why? That's fascinating? Why is that?
[Stelter:] And it's a whole concept, actually, known as Black Twitter, a very active group online informally, not an actual group but people that use the hash tag called Black Twitter
[Lake:] A community.
[Stelter:] A community is probably the best word for it. That's where I personally first learned of the shooting and then of the protest afterward. I do think the traditional media outlets, like CNN, were alerted and informed about the shooting and the protests in part through social media. And every night, as we have seen the tensions between police and protesters, it has been sparked it has been seen in real time online, and then it eventually comes to television.
[Lake:] Brian, this is interesting because especially when we're focusing in on Twitter, it's 140 characters. This is an incredibly complex case legally, it is complex socially, it brings up these very sort of emotional issues. Is that an effective platform for this to be dominating? And are you surprised it's sticking there, as opposed to not jumping over into longer format areas.
[Stelter:] I'm struck that Facebook hasn't emerged as a more powerful organizing tool in this particular case. What I've been most struck by about Facebook is how there's been misleading content there. There have been fake profiles created of people involved in this case. There was a very nasty fake Facebook account for a woman who was alleged to be the wife of the Ferguson police chief. Well, it was fake, but the comments on it were very ugly, and it got a lot of attention before it was confirmed to be a hoax. Twitter, on the other hand, because of its real time nature, allows people to feel like they're there and feel like they're participating. It's one thing to hear a television anchor say that non-lethal rounds are being used, like rubber bullets. It's another thing to see the wound from the rubber bullet in a man's neck, to see the bloody injury. And that kind of image can be shared on Twitter instantaneously, assuming, of course, there's Internet or AT&T or Verizon or some sort of cell phone access. It's somewhat similar to what we saw during the Occupy Wall Street movement a couple of years ago. The difference now, of course, is that even more people are using these social networking sites.
[Lake:] And it's interesting for us, because from a business perspective, we've seen Twitter struggle to define itself to Wall Street, to business community. It has no trouble doing that in these events. People really understand the power of the hash tag
[Stelter:] You're absolutely right
[Lake:] and turn to Twitter.
[Stelter:] want to put an advertisement in the middle of all these debates and conversations. It might not be the best place to put an ad for your shampoo or for your sneakers. But it is a place where people can organize, and I think that hash tag, "If They Gunned Me Down" is especially reflective of that.
[Lake:] Absolutely. Brian, thank you so much.
[Stelter:] Thank you.
[Lake:] Now, people in Ferguson have been using camera phones and a service called Livestream to broadcast the events on the ground in real time. Now, these people can go where the traditional media, with their trucks and heavy cameras, can't always go, directly into the center of the action. Max Haot is the co-founder and CEO of Livestream, and he joins me now. Max, thank you so much for being with us. It's a pleasure to meet you. This has sort of been an extraordinary week, I'm sure for you, too. This is a technology that was necessarily intended to be used in this type of event, is it?
[Max Haot, Ceo, Livestream:] Well, we our mission is to democratize live video for events, anything from sports, a conference, to even religious events. And sometimes, we find that breaking news is a great use case for the technology we bring. And what's very different about Livestream is that everybody knows Skype and Hangout for one-on-one live video. But with Livestream, if you use our iPhone app or one of these products that you can attach to any camera, you can broadcast to one or two people, but we have the scale that if a hundred thousand, a million people want to see that video, our service will allow you to deliver that. So, it's democratizing what, for example, CNN does within this reach, and if there's really compelling content, and with the power of Twitter and Facebook to spread the word very quickly, you can easily reach audiences that are bigger or as big as television. But also we can report where sometimes a television crew cannot go, because we don't have a full TV truck
[Lake:] Right.
[Haot:] but something much smaller.
[Lake:] Which is what we've seen in this case, and in Ferguson, they have, in fact, been limiting the movement of traditional journalists, penning them in. You saw Don there, before. They're restricting where press credentialed press can go, but it's very hard for them to do that when citizens are armed with this type of technology. We've covered your company before, we talked about it in the context of concerts. I thought we I think we had a feeling that professionals would somehow be using it. But we're seeing people who don't have that much experience pick this up and be able to use it.
[Haot:] Yes, it's a great story. It's actually a radio station that brought the first live coverage from Ferguson a few days ago, and they'd actually bought the equipment to do concerts, to cover different concerts that they had in their community. And then, they decided to use it and go out there. The first night, they actually used the Livestream iPhone app, and they switched to the night shot filter, and they were able to bring some incredible reporting right from the ground, and obviously, the media were being stopped. But with an iPhone, it's very hard to stop somebody being there.
[Lake:] Yes.
[Haot:] And they decided to upgrade their coverage, so now they're covering a press conference, different events in the community, at church, and they use this type of camera that has a zoom and this little box that Livestream provides. And it's literally a full TV truck, but it allows them to bring this live coverage to millions, but within this form
[Lake:] And we talk about technology being disruptive, and this is certainly an example of how that is the case. Is there a danger or risk, here we're talking about people who are in a situation, perhaps an emotionally fraught situation, and even if you take it out of Ferguson, there is the danger of one side of a story or a particular angle that we don't know the whole context of the story. Is there a sort of down side or risk you worry about if everybody is a Livestreamer?
[Haot:] Ultimately, it's no different than Twitter or blogging. And these people are not creating new content. They literally are just capturing what is happening there. So, they're very rarely editorializing it, which is, I think, where the danger can be, and actually bringing you a first view that you couldn't get. Livestreaming is all about bringing you to the event, you can't be there, you'd like to be there to actually know what really is going on not in this case, because of the safety issue. And with live video, you can feel like you're there and make your own opinion about what is happening there. We've had many movement, including Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and democratizing live video is especially important where democracy is not there. Obviously, in countries where the only way to broadcast live is through state-controlled television, we've seen many use case where this is really important to empower the people to broadcast and again, not to one or ten people, but millions of people if there is an interest in that stream and people can find it.
[Lake:] That's where we talk about changing the game. Quickly, Max, before we go, because we are waiting for the president to speak live, price point on these? If you already have an iPhone, what would this cost someone?
[Haot:] Our service is free with the iPhone and Android, and you can download the Livestream app from the app store. And then, these cameras are usually a few hundred dollars, and this device, called a broadcaster, is $495. So, for a few hundred dollars, you can have something that looks really compelling with zoom and great audio. Citizen journalism and journalists or people that want to cover events can just start with their phone, and it's all about democratizing and bringing events to people that wish they were there, and they can't be there, breaking news, or sport, and many other events.
[Lake:] That's right. Well, it's wide use, but we're certainly seeing it playing out in an extraordinary way in Ferguson. Thank you so much, Max Haot, for being with us.
[Haot:] Thank you for having me, Maggie. Thank you.
[Lake:] We are still waiting, as I mentioned, for President Obama to address the situation in Ferguson. He's due to speak any minute now in Washington. In the meantime, after the break, market worries about the crisis in Ukraine show signs of easing following progress in cease-fire talks