Man charged with beheading his father and showing the severed head on YouTube

Warning: Graphic content

New York: A graphic video from a Pennsylvania man accused of beheading his father that circulated for hours on YouTube has put a spotlight yet again on gaps in social media companies’ ability to prevent horrific postings from spreading across the web.

Justin Mohn, 32, has been charged with first-degree murder and abusing a corpse after he allegedly beheaded his father, Michael, in their Bucks County home and publicised it in a 14-minute YouTube video that anyone, anywhere, could see.

Justin Mohn, 32. is accused of beheading his father in suburban Philadelphia and posting a gruesome video on social media Credit: AP

News of the incident — which drew comparisons to the beheading videos posted online by Islamic State militants nearly a decade ago — came as the chief executives of Meta, TikTok and other social media companies testified in front of federal lawmakers frustrated by what they see as a lack of progress on child safety online. YouTube, which is owned by Google, did not attend the hearing despite its status as one of the most popular platforms among teenagers.

The disturbing video follows other horrific clips broadcast on social media in recent years, including US mass shootings livestreamed from Louisville, Kentucky; Memphis, Tennessee; and Buffalo, New York — as well as carnage filmed in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the German city of Halle.

Middletown Township Police Captain Pete Feeney said the Pennsylvania video was posted about 10pm Tuesday local time and remained online for about five hours. The time-lag raises questions about whether social media sites are delivering on moderation at a time when it might be needed more than ever, amid wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and an extremely contentious US presidential election.

The home where the alleged murder took place.Credit: AP

“It’s another example of the blatant failure of these companies to protect us,” said Alix Fraser, director of the Council for Responsible Social Media at the nonprofit advocacy organisation Issue One. “We can’t trust them to grade their own homework.”

A YouTube spokesperson said the video was removed, Mohn’s channel deleted, and the company was tracking and removing any re-uploads that might pop up. The video-sharing site says it uses artificial intelligence and human moderators to monitor its platform, but did not respond to questions about how the video was caught or why it wasn’t done sooner.

Major social media companies moderate content using powerful automated systems, which can often catch prohibited content before a human can. But that technology can sometimes fall short when a video is violent and graphic in a way that is new or unusual, as it was in this case, said Brian Fishman, co-founder of the trust and safety technology startup Cinder.

That’s when human moderators are “really, really critical,” he said. “AI is improving, but it’s not there yet.”

Roughly 40 minutes after midnight US Eastern time on Wednesday, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) – a group set up by tech companies to prevent extreme and graphic videos spreading online – said it alerted its members about the video.

GIFCT allows the platform with the original footage to submit a “hash” – a digital fingerprint corresponding to a video – and notifies nearly two dozen other member companies, so they can restrict it from their platforms.

But hours later, the video had already spread to X, where a graphic clip of Mohn holding his father’s head remained on the platform for at least seven hours, receiving 20,000 views.

The company, formerly known as Twitter, did not respond to a request for comment.

Experts in radicalisation say social media and the internet have lowered the barrier to entry for people to explore extremist groups and ideologies, allowing any person predisposed to violence to find a community that reinforces those ideas.

In the video posted after the killing, Mohn described his father as a 20-year federal employee, espoused a variety of conspiracy theories, and ranted against the government.

AP