A mass shooting at a mosque in New Zealand left 49 people dead on Friday. The shooter live streamed everything on Facebook. The video was quickly removed by the social media giant. However, they were not able to delete it fast enough to prevent people from making copies of it. Since Friday, millions of people have posted the video of the carnage on all of the social media platforms. All of these companies have policies against posting offensive videos. Facebook is responsible for removing 1.5 million copies of the video. A total of 300,000 of these videos were able to be viewed by people. The rest were prevented from being uploaded.
Facebook is being heavily criticized in the wake of the tragedy for not catching the live stream of the event. The only reason they found out about it is because the police in New Zealand told them about it. At that point, they removed the video. It had already gone viral. The prime minister of New Zealand said that big tech companies need to have better safeguards in place to prevent violent video footage like the New Zealand mosque massacre from spreading. There are many people who believe that YouTube and Facebook pay more attention to stopping copyrighted material from being posted. New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern believes that these companies need to change their priorities.
US Senator Mark Warner is one of many high profile politicians who think that all of the social media companies should be held accountable in situations like this. However, he singled out YouTube for being very slow to put safeguards on their platform in order to prevent violent videos from spreading so fast in the future. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not made any public comments whatsoever about the New Zealand shooting. He has also not responded to requests for interviews from the media.
The issue of violent videos being posted on social media is going to be a big topic that these big tech companies are going to have to deal with in the near future. Software is in place to make it easier to catch these videos when they are being uploaded. This will prevent them from being seen. However, it is very obvious that some corrections will need to be made in the future. Twitter and YouTube have also not commented on why so many of the shooting videos were allowed to be posted.
Dil Bole Oberoi
