NEW YORK (AP) — Social platforms have learned to remove violent videos of extremist shootings more quickly in recent years. It is clear that they are evolving fast enough.
Police said that when a white gunman killed 10 other people and wounded 3 others, most of them black, in a shootout against “a racially motivated violent extremist” in Buffalo on Saturday, he streamed the attack live on amazon-owned gaming platform Twitch. He didn’t stay there long; a Twitch spokesperson said it removed the video in less than two minutes.
That’s significantly faster than the 17 minutes it took Facebook to delete a similar video posted through a self-proclaimed white supremacist who killed 51 other people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019. But versions of the buffalo shooting video are still temporarily spreading to other platforms, and they didn’t disappear temporarily.
In April, Twitter enacted a new “perpetrators of violent attacks” policy to remove accounts maintained through “individual perpetrators of terrorist attacks, violent extremists or mass violence,” as well as tweets and other content produced through the perpetrators of such attacks. As of Sunday However, excerpts of the video were still circulating on the platform.
A clip purporting to show a first-person view of the shooter moving around a supermarket shooting at other people was posted on Twitter at 8:12 a. m. m. , Pacific time and is still seen more than four hours later.
Twitter said Sunday it is running to remove elements similar to the shooting that violate its rules. But the company added that when other people share the means to condemn them or offer context, sharing videos and other elements of the shooter would not be a violation. of the rules. In those cases, Twitter said it covered the photographs or videos with a canopy of “sensitive material” that users have to click on to view.
But later Sunday, Twitter replaced the course on how it treated curtains similarly to the shooting. In an upcoming email, the company said it was “removing videos and media similar to the incident” and that it “may delete” tweets that convey the shooter’s writings. Previously, the company said it “can” remove the curtains produced by the authors.
“We that the hateful and discriminatory perspectives conveyed in the content produced by the authors are destructive to society and that their dissemination deserves to be limited to prevent the authors from spreading their message,” Twitter said in a statement.
At a press conference following the attack, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said social media corporations needed to be more vigilant in tracking what was happening on their platforms and found it unforgivable that the live stream wouldn’t be removed “in a second. “
“The CEOs of those corporations will have to be accountable and make sure they take all humanly feasible steps to be able to monitor this information,” Hochul said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week. “- now it is spreading like a virus. “
Hochul said he blamed corporations for “fomenting” racist views. ” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press. “
A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that investigators were also reviewing a tirade the attacker had posted online, which purports to describe the attacker’s racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic beliefs, adding the preference to expel all non-Europeans from the United States.
Police said the alleged shooter, known as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, New York, shot dead 11 black and two white patients at a Buffalo supermarket, echoing a fatal attack on a German synagogue that also aired on Twitch in October 2019.
Twitch is popular among video game players and has played a key role in the spread of esports. A spokesman for the company said the company had a “zero tolerance policy” against violence. So far, the company hasn’t revealed any major points about the user page or live stream, adding how many other people were watching it. The spokesman said the company had disconnected the account and tracked down anyone else who could relay the video.
In Europe, a senior European Union official tasked with overseeing the virtual affairs of the 27-nation bloc said Sunday that the live stream on Twitch showed a desire for directors to continue working with online platforms so that any long-term broadcasts of killings can be temporary. detainee.
But Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of the European Commission, also said it would be a huge challenge to eliminate those emissions.
“It’s hard to make sure it’s absolutely waterproof, to make sure it never happens and that other people will shut down the moment they start something like this. Because there are a lot of live streams which, of course, are one hundred percent. legitimate,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“Platforms have done a lot to get to the root of this. They are still there,” he added. But they keep painting and we will keep painting. “
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said Sunday that it temporarily called the shooting a “terrorist attack” on Saturday, triggering an internal procedure that identifies the suspect’s account, as well as copies of his writings and any copies or links to a video of his attack.
The company said it removed the video from the filming from the platform, adding that the instances in which it was still shared were through links to streaming sites. These links, in turn, are blocked and “blocked” through the company, meaning they may no longer be downloadable.
But new links created when other people upload copies to external sites are blocked separately in a cat-and-mouse game, unless the company decides to block an entire streaming site from its platform, which is unlikely.
Jared Holt, a resident researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Investigation Laboratory, said moderation of live content remains a major challenge for businesses. He noted that Twitch’s reaction time is smart and the company is smart about tracking its platform for potential downloads.
“It would be up to other video platforms to be aware of this content to the extent that it may have been recorded; you can also repost on your own products,” Holt said.
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Barbara Ortutay, an AP reporter, contributed to this article from Oakland, California; AP journalist John Leicester contributed from Paris.
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