Twitter Needs a Pause Button

As a shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, set about massacring dozens of worshippers at two mosques on March 15, his body cam beamed live footage to social media. Soon after, Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, learned that it was being uploaded to the platform. The company put thousands of human beings and a pile of algorithms to work finding and removing the snuff footage. It was already too late. As The Economist recounted not long ago, “Before she went to bed at 1am Ms Wojcicki was still able to find the video.” And no wonder: It was being uploaded as often as once every second, a dispersal “unprecedented both in scale and speed,” as a YouTube spokesperson told The Guardian. Facebook, also scrambling, removed the video from users’ pages 1.5 million times in the first 24 hours after the shooting. Yet nearly two months later, CNN reported still finding.