Buffalo mass shooting: How should platforms respond to violent livestreams?
Global News
A livestream of the Buffalo mass shooting was removed within minutes of the broadcast. But as platforms try to address problematic content online, censorship concerns are rampant.
A livestream of the mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y. over the weekend was taken down in under two minutes, according to Amazon’s gaming platform, Twitch, where it was hosted.
The stream was taken down much faster than some previous shootings. A Facebook stream of the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people was live for 17 minutes before being removed, for instance.
Though Twitch removed the primary stream quickly, other users had time to proliferate clips and images of the attack to other social media sites, with varying response rates to remove the footage.
Experts say that in incidents like this where every second counts, much of what determines how quickly these sites address content is in the hands of the platforms themselves.
But whether to pull footage down immediately or subject it to review is at the heart of a debate on content moderation that’s concerned tech leaders and policymakers alike.
Clips have been slow to disappear online of the shooting in Buffalo on Saturday, where police say a white gunman killed 10 people and wounded three others, most of them Black.
On Twitter, for instance, footage purporting to display a first-person view of the gunman moving through a supermarket firing at people was posted to the platform at 8:12 a.m. PT on Sunday, and was still viewable more than four hours later.
Twitter said Sunday it was working to remove material related to the shooting that violates its rules.