Father seeks votes to end web giants’ profit from murder

Andy Parker, a Democrat hopeful in November, has been fighting to have footage of his daughter’s murder removed from online.

Alison Parker and Adam Ward were killed in an attack at Bridgewater Plaza in Moneta, Virginia on August 26, 2015. Picture: AFP

Andy Parker, a Democrat who is hoping to win Virginia’s fifth congressional district in November, does not have designs on the White House, but his ambitions are no less noble.

On August 26, 2015, his daughter Alison, a 24-year-old television news reporter, was shot dead live on air alongside her cameraman, Adam Ward, by a disgruntled former colleague.

“We learnt what had happened from her boyfriend. He called early that morning and told us that shots had been fired towards Alison so we knew something was terribly wrong … but we didn’t know anything more for an hour; we were in purgatory,” Parker, 68, said. “I just had this sixth sense that it was bad, but the longer it went on the more the dread built, so when we finally got the call we were standing in the kitchen. I just collapsed to the floor.”

If his daughter’s killing were not bad enough, Parker’s torment, and that of his wife, Bar­bara, continues each day because it is still possible to find footage of Alison’s death online. He says Facebook, Google and other platforms have done nothing to take the videos off their sites.

“I have been fighting Facebook and Google for six years to get the video of Alison’s murder removed and it’s still there,” he said. “These companies make money from this content and they don’t want to remove it.

“They have the ability to remove it but they choose not to. They have a recorded message they roll out every time: ‘We have made every effort,’ and so on, but it’s the same bullshit I’ve been hearing for the last six years.”

Google and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, reject the criticism. “We remain committed to removing violent footage filmed of Alison Parker’s murder, and we rigorously enforce our policies using machine learning technology and human review,” said Jack Malon, of YouTube, owned by Google. “We’ve removed thousands of videos of this tragic incident and we’ll continue to stay vigilant and improve our policy enforcement.”

A spokesman for Meta said: “These videos violate our policies and we are continuing to remove them from the platform as we have been doing since this disturbing incident first occurred.

“We are also continuing to proactively detect and remove visually similar videos when they are uploaded.”

There are other things Parker thinks are nonsense, and he hopes enough voters agree with him. He is highly critical of the Republicans’ economic policies and is horrified by the divisions in US society caused by Donald Trump’s presidency.

Perhaps for understandable reasons, though, Parker believes most strongly that the US has got it wrong when it comes to free speech and gun control, two rights enshrined by amendments to the US constitution. “The free speech folks, I get it, ‘You can’t do this, nothing should be off limits,’ they say, but that’s wrong, there are limits to free speech,” he said. “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a theatre. Guns are the same: for good reasons you can’t own a bazooka. We have to be more sensible about these things.”

It would be easy to dismiss Parker as a one-trick political pony. Plenty of people stand for election to highlight causes, gripes and annoyances, and simply want the publicity. Not Parker, who says he is confident of winning the Democratic primary and then taking the seat from the sitting Republican, Bob Good, a Trump supporter whom Parker describes as “batshit crazy”. “I’m not tilting at windmills, we’ve done an awful lot,” he said. “Good barely won in 2020 and so I can beat this guy. The moderate Republicans know they are being damaged by this hard right agenda.”

It is difficult not to admire his optimism but he faces an uphill struggle. Virginia elected a Republican governor in November, the first for a decade, and with President Joe Biden’s approval at little more than 40 per cent there are few credible analysts predicting anything other than a tough midterms for the Democrats.

The Times