Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube have reportedly struggled to stop an alleged video of the New Zealand mosque massacre on Friday.
According to CNN Business, the social networks are “struggling to halt the spread” of the nearly 17-minute video allegedly showing the massacre, which was also livestreamed on Facebook without interference because “Facebook’s artificial intelligence tools and human moderators were apparently unable to detect the livestream of the shooting.”
Facebook’s Director of Policy for Australia and New Zealand, Mia Garlick, claimed in a statement, “New Zealand Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooter’s Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video,” though according to CNN Business, the social network “declined further comment on when exactly it took down the video.”
Twitter also reportedly suspended a user “related to the shooting,” and “is working to remove the video from its platform,” while YouTube reportedly took action against the video as well.
CNN Business reported, however, that “copies of the gruesome video continued to appear on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” hours after the massacre, “raising new questions about the companies’ ability to manage harmful content on their platforms.”
“While Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter all say that they’re cooperating and acting in the best interest of citizens to remove this content, they’re actually not because they’re allowing these videos to reappear all the time,” declared Counter Extremism Project Senior Adviser Lucinda Creighton. “The tech companies basically don’t see this as a priority, they wring their hands, they say this is terrible… But what they’re not doing is preventing this from reappearing.”
Upon investigation, Breitbart Tech discovered that the video was still available on Twitter as of Friday afternoon, with some copies of the video having been up for over 7 hours.
Facebook’s livestreaming service has previously been used to publish live video of rape, torture, murder, suicide, and shootouts with police.
In January 2017, four people were arrested for livestreaming themselves torturing a mentally disabled 18-year-old man, who was reportedly tied up for up to 5 hours.
During the livestream, they could be heard shouting, “Fuck white people,” and “Fuck Trump,” and they removed part of the victim’s scalp with a knife.
Later that same year, in June, a mass shooting in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was also livestreamed on Facebook.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter, or like his page at Facebook.
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