The horrific White Nationalist attack on Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed at least 50 people and wounded dozens more on March 15, was broadcast globally via a live-stream uploaded to Facebook by the shooter.
It spread like wildfire across Facebook and onto other platforms to the point where it was near impossible to use social media on Friday without the confronting video of the Islamophobic mass murder autoplaying.
And yet, what we saw spread online was still a fraction of the attempted uploads of the Christchurch attack live-stream footage. Facebook revealed that in the first 24 hours, they removed 1.5 million videos of the attack globally, with over 1.2 million of those blocked at point of upload.
In the first 24 hours we removed 1.5 million videos of the attack globally, of which over 1.2 million were blocked at upload…
— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) March 17, 2019
The problem is, though Facebook may have blocked most uploads, the original footage should never have been able to be broadcast. There were at least 17 minutes of the attack live-streamed on Facebook.
Plus, the approximately 300 thousand uploads that did get through were watched, shared and engaged with on an extreme scale, including across YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit. The number Facebook has given does not represent the reach of the footage and how many views the videos racked up.
These numbers are vanity metrics unless they’re shown alongside engagement and video views from the live stream. This is bordering on misinformation which gives us no way of understanding the true scale of distribution and amplification.https://t.co/6dgRc7KiVj
— Mark Rickerby (@maetl) March 17, 2019
Facebook’s complicity in the dissemination of such graphic content is being questioned by the public, authorities, and world leaders everywhere. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is set to discuss how this was able to happen with Facebook officials.
The excuse that major tech companies like Facebook use in these incidents is almost always that their huge scale makes immediate content control difficult, if not impossible. But authorities are becoming less and less satisfied with this as a valid excuse.
This horrific event could be the catalyst for a crackdown on major social media platforms side-stepping responsibility for enabling the spreading of violent imagery and ideology.
In the mean time, Facebook has promised that they are working “around the clock” to remove violating content through a combination of people and technology, and that edited versions of the video that do not show graphic content will also be removed out of respect.