NZ massacre videos still on Facebook

FACEBOOK’S “fallible” AI systems have allowed videos of the Christchurch terror attack – and death threats to a leading MP – to remain on its site for weeks, the company has admitted.

Videos of the live-streamed attack in which a white supremacist killed 50 people in New Zealand were found on Facebook and Youtube five weeks after the attack.

Some were dated from the day of the shootings but had not been blocked, while others were more recently uploaded. One had more than 720,000 views.

Yvette Cooper, chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, questioned executives from the social media firms at a committee hearing yesterday, asking: “Why have your systems failed so badly in this case?”

Neil Potts, Facebook’s policy director, admitted the AI systems were not “infallible”, saying people edited, spliced or filtered the images to try to outwit the technology. The videos were found by Eric Feinberg, of the Global Intellectual Property Enforcement Centre, who said most appeared to have escaped detection because the code had been translated into Arabic.

Ms Cooper also revealed that she had been sent screenshots of posts on a closed “direct action” group with 30,000 users in which they were urged to shoot her and her family. She said: “It makes a reference to me and my family and says, ‘Just shoot them, criminals’.”

She accused Facebook of failing to spot them or take action as the comments had been up for weeks.

Mr Potts said: “We want to be hostile to those groups and … will make sure we remove that group.”