Another shooter live streams an attack. When will it stop?
Social media has failed us again as yet another shooting rampage was shared online to an audience of thousands. If the platforms can’t moderate safely, live streaming must end, writes Jen Dudley-Nicholson.
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Another murderous rampage played out live on social media overnight.
More innocent people lost their lives in front of an online audience of thousands.
And another anti-immigration, anti-women, anti-Semitic manifesto was published on the internet to inspire others to kill more people.
No one can say they didn’t see this coming, but why can’t we stop it?
If social networks cannot be trusted to identify when they’re hosting live terrorist attacks, why should they continue hosting live videos?
In many ways, the latest shooting confirmed exactly what we feared.
As New Zealand Chief Censor David Shanks told me during the eSafety 19 conference, the moment he saw the manifesto from the alleged Christchurch shooter online, he knew it was designed to recruit others to his dangerous cause.
“I looked at that and thought, ‘this is a how-to manual and a package that is going to be hugely appealing to some people’,” he said.
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Published on 8chan, the manifesto blamed feminism, immigration, and multiculturalism for Western society’s ills … and for the subsequent alleged murders of 51 people.
And the document possibly reached as far as Germany, where we saw the latest outbreak of racist, murderous terrorism today.
The alleged killer in this case was incredibly well armed and prepared.
The alleged killer published a manifesto on an online message board, as spotted by the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence.
And the alleged killer streamed footage from a body camera directly to social media; in this case Amazon-owned Twitch.tv.
Twitch typically hosts video game streams, and footage from esports tournaments. It has a record of removing questionable, family-unfriendly content. But it did not act fast enough in this case.
Harrowing video of the German attack was watched by five people as it played out, but the 35-minute video reached another 2200 people on Twitch after the event.
Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against hateful conduct, and any act of violence is taken extremely seriously. We worked with urgency to remove this content and will permanently suspend any accounts found to be posting or reposting content of this abhorrent act.
— Twitch (@Twitch) October 9, 2019
And, if Twitch’s statement is to be believed, most of those users watched the extreme violence and chose not to report it.
It was only 30 minutes later that a user flagged the video with Twitch, which removed it.
RELATED: How Australia plans to block terrorism and extreme violence online
Predictably, the horrifying footage is now available across social media. It has popped up on YouTube and still available on Twitter, where one segment has already been watched more than 120,000 times.
Messaging platforms such as Telegram are also being used to spread the video, reportedly to at least 10 white supremacist groups.
This is an outrageous misuse of an online platform but it’s one of which social networks should acutely aware.
If live videos cannot be appropriately vetted by the company which hosts them, they shouldn’t be hosted. I cannot stress this enough.
Social media moderators, whether human or digital, should be able to identify when a live video has appeared with a cache of guns, a first-person video filmed from the barrel of a gun, or a shooting in progress.
If reviews of this kind cannot be achieved in real-time, digital platforms should delay hosting videos until they can at least verify the type of content they’re hosting.
It’s not good enough for murderous rampages to continue to play out on the internet; it’s not good enough for the victims, for their traumatised families, or for the haunted public.
And, perhaps most importantly, ending the broadcast of active terrorist attacks would hurt the ambitious of racist, misogynist, murderous perpetrators who rely on them for worldwide notoriety and recruitment.
Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson is News Corp Australia’s national technology editor.
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