Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built! An Australian who murdered dozens in New Zealand on Friday livestreamed the deaths on Facebook, spinning a spotlight onto the abject failure of social media to control harmful content. The 28-year-old shooter, whose name isn't worth publishing, fired on defenseless people attending prayers at two Christchurch mosques, killing …
"As to the rest - since I don't have to pay YouTube $20 to put a video on their site, of course they can't afford to pay a human being to review each and every video posted. They may make millions in ad revenue, but it's pennies off each video."
'It conflicts with my business model' is not a reason not to require YouTube to do something. If they cannot make it work, they can shut down. But their pleas should be worth absolutely nothing in deciding what protections (if any) should be built into such systems.
"If the shooter – and the ones that will come after him – couldn't be sure that his video would ever make its way to the public, that there was a very high likelihood that it would be flagged during the upload process and stopped – would he had been sufficiently driven to carry out his actions?"
Who knows? Some would, some wouldn't. There's a long history of atrocities being carried out without live streaming. On the whole the probability is that he would. What's more concerning is the incentive to copy-cats and a general lowering of the mental barriers that prevent people from doing this. It's not so much that preventing the upload would have discouraged him but it might have prevented others.
One thing is clear. Some nutters are apt to advertise their mental state in the ways the article points out. It might be more productive to devote resources to these more than on profiling on the basis of appearance anyone who happens to walk in from of some CCTV camera to "predict" whether they're going to commit a crime or on trying to hoover up everyone's business. It's not as if they're hiding what they're doing.
"a platform with 1bn+ people just descend into Mad Max territory."
You missed the important bit:
"a platform with 1bn+ people just descend into Mad Max territory <<<while such platforms and their 'leaders'/'directors' are allegedly worth $$$$billions>>>
Who can explain to readers why it is that the 'people' (I use the term loosely) at the top are personally and individually rewarded with gigabonuses when things 'go well', and yet are never responsible and definitely never personally and individually accountable when things go badly?
Sort that, and a lot of other things might magically also sort themselves.
The author wrote "The shooter appeared to have spent as much time planning for the social media impact of his actions as the actual actions themselves."
There you have it. "social" media is the cesspit and like all cesspits that is where all the sh#t ends up. Those who indulge are therefore simply sh#t themselves.
I guess this is a question that only the 'social' media platforms would be able to answer: I wonder what adverts were being shown around the original and subsequent copy videos and pictures of the crime - and what the owners think of their adverts being shown in that context. If I were an advertising customer I would want to know. A vain hope, I fear; I expect the platforms would strongly resist publishing those stats.
The multi-layer contracts selling screen space probably preclude the advertisers (the platforms' actual customers) suing the platforms but if we (Joe Public) could be told that (say) XYZ company's adverts were shown to 10% of people who viewed the crime then XYZ's directors might be interested in reputation damage limitation and bring additional pressure to bear.
Although I completely agree with every single point of the article I believe that the social media platforms have a further responsibility which they are not taking responsibility for and niether is any government. The right to free speech does not give the right to hate speech, It is now many hours on, and thanks to the very brave police officers this "man" has been arrested rather than martyred. This person wanted fame, that is quite clear that he needed to feel like he belongs to something no matter if it's right or wrong, and that to me is the bigger problem.
How did he link up with a white supremissist movement or at least the cowards who influenced him? I am not blaming governments / security services for not joining the dots but I will blame them for not taking the right action at the right time. Like in the 60s -> 80s there were groups of pedophiles, we all know of some quite harrowing accounts of people turning blind eyes to this, because those perputrators could ruin their careers or because they felt they wouldn't be believed by the authorities. (I'm not talking the victims here, who were ignored).
Facebook and the alike have "abuse" policies etc.... but they are only enforced when enough people complain or when media outlets highlight the problem. These social media platforms try to remove themselves from what people say but if they deeply cared they would take less profit and employ more people to check what people are saying or live streaming.
In individual person should not be penalised by restricting social media too much, but perhaps what each individual should do, is try to force social platforms into properly channeling resources into the problem. My recommendation would be to only use the platforms once in the next week/next month until responsibility is taken, everyone writes just one message, all the same. Don't "like" anything, don't post anything, don't PM anyone, don't tweet. If everyone did that it would force them to listen because the only thing the big companies truely care about is the profit and loss sheets.
Most importantly, I hope people can remember, is that most people do not go looking for trouble, most people despise this and most people are good hearted,kind and don't give a shite about what religion or race you are.
.. and as such should be subject to the same laws and legal liabilities as newspaper and book publishers.
Facebook will argue its current status as a common carrier is correct. But the telephone company does not listen to my calls and interrupt a conversation about barbecues with suggestions that I buy a new Weber. The fact that Facebook scans your posts and sells this data to advertisers should be enough to revoke its common carrier status and get it classified as a publisher which it so obviously is.
"Facebook will argue its current status as a common carrier is correct. "
That's the Cubby vs Compuserve defense - which falls down flat because Facebook engages in moderation and runs bang, straight into Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. territory.
is what i'll call "the peppa pig problem"
In that i can be streaming something tottally innocent, like say an on-line gaming stream or peppa pig video, then cut the stream straight to an ISIS video of some poor bastard having his head cut off.
An hrs delay defeats the purpose of a 'live' stream, and yet how does the platform provider censor the stream if some ass hat does that.
And then theres always the 'echo chamber' effect of the internet where some disturbed person only ever seeks out opinions that match their own, are we to censor those opinions too... and how long before the censorship spreads?
Or maybe we could blame the camera manufacturers, or the makers of the kit that can link a camera to your livestream.
Or how about , blaming the neo-nazi fuckhead who will rightfully spend every day of the rest of his life in jail.
That is a problem that is difficult to solve without fundamentally changing Facebook - though funnily enough not a problem major, professional broadcasters have. Wonder why that is.
Facebook needs to grow up and realize what its platform is being used for. And it's not just livestream murders. It's anti-vaxx, flat earth, conspiracy theory nonsense that is suddenly given an immense platform.
I don't like any form of government censorship, heavy handed moderation, and similar - which is part of the reason why we try to push boundaries with headlines and writing.
On the other hand, it's not a black and white issue of freedom or no freedom. It's one thing to share stuff with friends or small groups privately that others may or may not like. It's quite another to have access to a huge potential audience.
Do I have the answers? No, no one has. Though, thinking about it, maybe one approach would be tiered moderation. After the first 10,000 views, it's flagged up for increasing levels of moderation as the views increase in stages (10k, 50k, 100k).
C.
Wait... the problem is, you are letting your kids watch "pepper pig" on facebook/youtube on an unofficial channel.
You'd not let the kids eat out the back of a garbage can just because it had "pepper pig garbage, honest gov!" written on the back. How people still trust the internet in this day and age, or go for the "free" garbage, when actual free content is next door (iplayer/CITV for example for kids) is insane.
What is wrong with parents?
Quote
Facebook needs to grow up and realize what its platform is being used for. And it's not just livestream murders. It's anti-vaxx, flat earth, conspiracy theory nonsense that is suddenly given an immense platform.
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And this is where education comes into it, teaching people that just because something is on the internet and endorsed by a C-list celebrity, it does not make it true.
How many ads do we see for 'de-tox your liver' which sells some expensive supplement to your diet, which after you look through the ingredients, does nothing at all apart from drain your wallet. oh and your liver keeps on de-toxing because thats its job in your body.
As for the anti-vaxx people, they should be confined to one town or region where there can fail to immunise their kids to their hearts content (and expand the children's section of the local graveyard)
It is education that is key to this, that its not a good idea to let little 4 yr old sally look for peppa pig videos on youtube by herself, or that conspiracy theories are usually ranted by people with tendencies towards paranoia
But none of this cuts it with the people in charge, its much easier to blame facebook et al for the spread of such views/videos because its a quick and convienent target that satisifies the general media/concerned population's for a quick and easy answer to a very difficult problem.
And if you wish to go down the censorship route, who decides what is allowed and what isn't?
"As for the anti-vaxx people, they should be confined to one town or region where there can fail to immunise their kids to their hearts content (and expand the children's section of the local graveyard)"
I think there's a problem with that solution.
"And this is where education comes into it, teaching people that just because something is on the internet and endorsed by a C-list celebrity, it does not make it true."
And as P.T. Barnum claimed, there's a sucker born every minute, and these suckers can take the rest of us with them. So what do you do when education doesn't work?
"conspiracy theories are usually ranted by people with tendencies towards paranoia"
OK. Devil's advocate time: what about Snowden-style revelations, which for a long time were dismissed as tinfoil hat stuff. Till they were revealed as reality, and the establishment folks who had been dismissing them as tinfoil hattery either disappeared or changed tune to "everybody knew it was happening but we couldn't admit it in public."
See also:
"a quick and convienent target that satisifies the general media/concerned population's desire for a quick and easy answer to a very difficult problem"
24x7 rolling news channels relying on cheap live coverage of meaningless live interviews and speculation, while having almost no meaningful fact-based analysis of topics, has a lot to answer for.
Major broadcasters don't have this problem because they can dedicate a member of staff to monitor each stream being broadcast. They typically have a couple of seconds delay and can cut the feed if something unacceptable happens.
I agree that facebook should be held accountable but I can't see a realistic solution without killing the live streaming feature which is used by many users for legitimate purposes. Is it possible to have moderators watching all livestreams? How many livestreams are typically running on facebook at any one time, thousands, tens of thousands?
"That is a problem that is difficult to solve without fundamentally changing Facebook - though funnily enough not a problem major, professional broadcasters have. Wonder why that is."
Limited inputs. They only take in so much footage a day: mostly from already-trusted sources like their own reporters, established news feeds, etc.
Expand that scope to the unwashed masses and you hit a major problem of scale.
The internet makes it technically possible to livestream anything. You could buffer videos, but then people would find another way, perhaps one less amenable to censorship.
In the end, I'm an optimist. If an adult wants to show something horrible, they will: we cannot in the end stop it being viewed by another. But we can all judge the poster, and I suspect the shock of seeing something like this (no, I haven't seen it, but I'm making a reasonable assumption) is liable to turn more people off this guy's "manifesto". Saying you hate Muslims is one thing, but watching them shot is quite another.
Anyone can broadcast anything from any IP address they have access to, but getting it under people's eyeballs is where Facebook et.al. come in. Social Media as the notification and sharing platform is the issue, what/where/how the content is transmitted is a red herring.
Is it? What happened when torrent sites got busted and shut down? New ones sprang up in their place. There's a strong demand for stuff like this. Facebook was simply the "first in" regarding it, but if they make themselves untenable, odds are something else will rise to take its place: possible in the Darknet where they don't worry so much about laws.
I think we are arguing the same side from different angles. :-) Yes, content cannot practically be suppressed, and people who really really want to see it will, but the potential audience that is prepared (or technically able) to access it outside the comfort of their mainstream web-for-dummies social-media interface is very significantly reduced.
For any society and for the whole of humanity, the treatment of minorities is not a matter like many others; It is, along with the treatment of women, the elderly and children, one of the most revealing data ethical progress or retrogression. A world that respects every day human diversity, where everyone can express themselves in the language they prefer, profess in peace their creeds and quietly assume their origins without exposing themselves to hostility and vilification or the authorities or of the majority population.
30 years ago if someone started spouting crap at the pub, the presence of other people would keep it mostly in check. "Dont be a twat Johnny" Over time police would be called in. It wouldn't grow into a monster, or less likely too perhaps.
People feel anonymous using the Internet, they can drown themselves in others extreme thoughts. And here we are with Christchurch.
Remove tax from beer, turn Internet off.
A risk of getting stabbed or getting liver failure, but you could stay at home and read a book, or go to church. I'm hoping they cancel the Internet, turn it off, and encourage small friendly pubs with tax free beer, and very fast self driving e-motorbikes lined up outside.
It's not going to happen I know. So perhaps raise the bar or ban public ownership of semi-automatic guns/rifles. Plus encourage people to be a little more moderating of people they mix with, gotta be strong to do that.
So perhaps raise the bar or ban public ownership of semi-automatic guns/rifles. Plus encourage people to be a little more moderating of people they mix with, gotta be strong to do that.
Actually, with a lot more of the latter, there probably wouldn't be much of a need for the former. The same family who taught my to shoot and how to kill animals also taught me a lot more than most about respecting animals, caring for them, caring for the land and so on. They also taught me a lot about respecting others and how to 'play nice' even when you really hate the other person and every thing they stand for.
More teaching people how to play nice with others, getting people out into social realms and social norms and modelling what is good. When role models are Bruce Willis and the like, where the "hero" murders unarmed surrendering crims (DH3, scene near the end where a guy raises his hands and shouts "don't shoot" in German), well I can understand modern man being a little mixed up. I enjoy "action movies" from time to time, but I'd also like to see more modelling of decent actions, even in the worst of circumstances.
That said, a friend watches a lot of old "western" movies. Ones where the idea of killing someone over some tiny imagined slight is romanticised heavily. I'm starting to wonder if the distance between us from modern tech is really such a bad thing after all :)
"That said, a friend watches a lot of old "western" movies. Ones where the idea of killing someone over some tiny imagined slight is romanticised heavily."
I got news for you. Those really did happen quite a bit in the late 19th century. The Wild West's population was predominantly male and tended to be troublemakers, many on the run. Texas alone recorded over 100 shootouts in the late 19th century. Most were triggered by grudges.
"That said, a friend watches a lot of old "western" movies. Ones where the idea of killing someone over some tiny imagined slight is romanticised heavily."I got news for you. Those really did happen quite a bit in the late 19th century.
No shit Sherlock! But I do fail to see where I said it didn't happen.
The rest of your post falls very much under "[citation needed]", and completely misses the point of my post, as per usual :)
As I recall, alcohol also removes inhibitions, meaning plenty of times "Don't be a twat Johnny," would be met with a right hook, a "Fuck off!" and soon a pub riot.
And that's a major problem too?
Pub riots are relatively low-key affairs, might be the occasional death or two and a maiming, but unlikely to be the likes 50 deaths, as it is less likely someone would off home to collect their automatic rifle and set up a social media stream for the event.
I remember that in 1990, when I watched the Football Worldcup, the camera would occasionally show scantily-clad female fans whenever a team from South-America was playing (Brazilian fans being the worst "offenders". Commentators would often point out that while the matches were broadcast in IRan, too, it wasn't live, but "live +5s". During these 5s, a gentleman in the IBC working for the Iranian government would switch the stream to a different camera so that his fellow citizens wouldn't have to get an eye full.
A couple of years later, we got "Nipplegate" and US television took a page from the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and also adopted that "live +5s" broadcasting, for basically the same rationale as in Iran.
I certainly don't want a multi-billion dollar US company (nor a multi-billion dollar Chinese company) to decide what I can see and what not or what is good and not good for me. I think it was the Cloudflare CEO who has in the past remarked that he hated even being in the position to be able to decide something like this.
In this single isolated case, that may actually align with what I and many others think.
But as they say: even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I don't even have a Facebook account (the whole premise of the platform is absurd).
That said, it didn't really surprise me that somebody would stream a shooting. In fact, it surprised me that it took so long. The technology has been here for years. All it took was for someone to go all the way to the end.
"That said, it didn't really surprise me that somebody would stream a shooting. In fact, it surprised me that it took so long. The technology has been here for years. All it took was for someone to go all the way to the end."
There are many more documented cases of "live" criminal acts on the likes of Periscope too.
May I suggest--purely as a Devil's advocate--that free speech is more important than hand-wringing over censoring unpleasant information.
I find it unlikely that censorship (or lack of) from Facebook might have made a material difference to what happened. No matter how much the video is shut down, it will be reposted somewhere else. In fact, such action may even trigger a fight-back where the video that some can't stomach is reproduced in every possible medium.
I present an alternate view: all speech is good. Meaning, everyone gets to decide what they choose to say, read or see. Anyone who is deeply offended by seeing such incidents can choose not to watch the video.
This eliminates the sense of martyrdom on which perpertrators of many such atrocities rely (which might further popularise their material): "facebook took down my video. What happened to freedom of speech? You can find the video here, here and here. Fight the repressors!"
FWIW government-level censorship is a terrible thing, and stripping unpleasant stuff from the internet is not great - OTOH it would be nice if FB took some responsibility for the content they are disseminating.
I highly suspect a lot of Register headlines would be deemed unpleasant by a large number of people and I'd hate for us to be thrown off the internet as a result. OTOH if The Reg had the same reach as Facebook, I don't think our headlines would be quite the same.
C.
"May I suggest--purely as a Devil's advocate--that free speech is more important than hand-wringing over censoring unpleasant information."
Freedoms are not absolute. They conflict. My freedom to extend my fist conflicts with yours not to be punched in the nose. As soon as we accept this simple fact we are in a position to start thinking sensible what the trade-offs are. If we fail to realise trade-offs are needed then we will repeatedly get things wrong.
If you want a Devil's advocate position here's one: whilst I hope we may agree that the people in the mosque had a right not to get shot did they also have a right not to have their being shot livestreamed? If so how does this rank against the shooter's right to free speech?
"If we fail to realise trade-offs are needed then we will repeatedly get things wrong."
Therein lies your problem. Some people DON'T get and never will. And they will protest violently and in fact thing they're in an existential war for survival. How do you deal with such a nutcase without him/her triggering violence?
TBH I beilieve the only way you get the likes of Facebook and Youtube to behave is to threaten to offficially sinkhlole all DNS records referring to the organisations for a period of time.
A lot of advertisers made a fuss recently about boycotting YT over the supposed paedo problem (though I suspect many of them got back to their normal practise the moment we were focused on something else).
Perhaps pointing out to these advertisers (as publicly as possible) that by using FB they are associating their brand with a firm that promotes terrorist videos and murdering children will get their attention, and get them to go elsewhere.
Whilst I don't particularly like Facebook - but I don't think they're to blame for this pool of excrement murdering a lot of innocent people.
Maybe more pertinently (or naively) I can't believe that anybody who saw this video would be swayed to join his cause - In much the same way I doubt watching an ISIS beheading would inspire us all to all go off and fight for the caliphate.
"Think of the Children!" is a worn out trope, and can't just be appropriated from ridicule when handy to your current thinking.
A lot of current news-stories seem to be covering "ironic-racism" as a 'cover', a 'gateway', a 'tactic' to win people over - and my own view is that hiding/censoring/whatever information plays into this strategy. Just show the scum. Show everything. Make people watch and pick a side (we all know once sides are picked, we become inoculated to argument).
When I become benevolent dictator of the planet, the day after a similar act, your facebook landing page will run this footage in the centre of your screen. Maybe on one side it'll show the 'lolz and memes' of the shooter, and the other, on every f'in shot it will pause and play back one of those saccharine auto-montages of the life that was just taken.
Facetious, yes, and I wish I had a cleverer way of presenting my point - but telling the world "49 people are dead" misses the point.
Something Facebook might actually be good at doing - show that these weren't "49 deaths". Show these were 49 individuals, with even more than a name, a religion and a stock-photo. People posting pictures of their cats, planning a cinema trip, trying to get more than 4 people to turn at at a place at a time and all the rest of the banality that is actually relatable to.
I loved that when you wrote this story you deliberately didn't mention the fuckers name. Next step on this path is to mention every name of all those he killed - and give them the voice that he took (even if it is a picture of their cat pulling a silly face).
- Show everything. Make people watch and pick a side (we all know once sides are picked, we become inoculated to argument) -
Not showing the horror of what this evil was leads people to treat it as less than it was.Time to wake people up and show them the full brutal truth of what such hate amounts to.Time to radicalise the good guys.No more hiding.
I agree fully with the latter, but still like un-moderated media such as El Reg. I keep in touch with a wide portion of family and friends, and have only had one friend complain that I don't use FB.
Of course, El Reg sometimes has every post moderated, and I think sometimes they use a trust system as well (ie I don't rank highly enough or am too annoying a twat so on some threads my posts will be moderated, whereas you rank higher/are more likeable and on the same thread your posts are allowed through unhindered). But for the most part, we're allowed to chat amongst ourselves and only see the mods appear should a post be reported.
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