Why the New Zealand Shooting Video Keeps Circulating
The past six days have been an all-out war between social-media giants and the people who hope to use their platforms to share grisly footage of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings. It hasn’t always been clear who’s winning. YouTube described an “unprecedented” rush to upload video of the attack over the weekend, peaking at one attempted upload per second. In a blog post Thursday, Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos in the first 24 hours after the attack, 1.2 million of which were blocked before being uploaded to the site, which means 300,000 videos were able to slip past its filtering system. These companies have blocked uploads, deleted videos, and banned users—but people are still outsmarting the technology intended to block the footage from spreading on social media.
A Facebook spokesperson the company was adding each video it found “to an internal database which enables us to detect and automatically remove copies of
