NZ attacks highlight social media failings
Politicians around the world have again seized on the failings of big tech companies, such as Facebook and YouTube, over their inability to contain video footage of Friday’s terror attacks in Christchurch.
Facebook has repeatedly been criticised for Facebook Live, its online broadcasting tool, which has been used to stream live graphic and uncensored footage of police shootings and suicides. YouTube has also been scrutinised for its apparent inability to prevent its own algorithms from bringing to the surface extremist videos and other disturbing content.
The suspected Christchurch shooter allegedly broadcast what appeared to be live footage of the attack using Facebook. After initially removing the footage, both Facebook and YouTube moderators battled throughout the day to stop users uploading thousands of copies online.
“You really need to do more @YouTube @Google @facebook @Twitter to stop violent extremism being promoted on your platforms,” said Sajid Javid, the UK’s home secretary, in a tweet on Friday. He was responding to YouTube’s pledge to keep “working vigilantly to remove any violent footage” following the Christchurch attacks.
“Take some ownership,” Javid said. “Enough is enough.”
Yet, despite the focus on Silicon Valley companies, the online community in which the alleged shooter publicised his plans is a littleknown forum that exists far below the radar of most politicians.
A supposed “manifesto” posted
online by the alleged shooter is steeped in the iconography and “memes” that circulate on anonymous messageboard 4chan, and its more extreme splinter site, 8chan.
Tim Squirrell, a PhD candidate studying alt-right online communities, said: “The entirety of his manifesto was published to gain as much attention as possible. It is littered with injokes and memes targeting a specific audience. It’s lowquality bait and you can’t take any of it at face value.”
The use of these more obscure forums points to a wider trend troubling western lawmakers and security chiefs — that, even as the big US tech groups do more to weed out terror content online, more extremists are shifting to smaller sites that are harder to monitor.
Though these chaotic and largely unregulated communities have spawned many mainstays of internet humour, they have also hosted “hacktivist” groups such as Anonymous, the cult-like conspiracy theorists of Qanon and the political extremism known as the alt-right.
Squirrell described 8chan as “an incubator for the worst of the worst”.
8chan was founded in 2013 as an unfettered and unfiltered alternative to the long-running messageboard 4chan. When 4chan’s typically lighttouch moderators banned discussion of the controversy known as Gamergate in 2015, a group of its more libertarian users decamped to 8chan.
In its short existence, 8chan’s decentralised grouping of message boards has been periodically kicked offline or banned from Google search results for hosting child pornography, targeted bullying, and perpetuating conspiracy theorists.
If 8chan is intended to be a “haven” for the internet’s “terrible things”, as its creator has reportedly called it, that stands in contrast to the scrambles behind the scenes at Twitter, YouTube and Facebook on Friday. The internet companies each said they had removed accounts associated with the alleged shooter and were reviewing and removing copies of his video as fast as they could.
YouTube said it had used “smart detection technology” to delete thousands of such videos.
But for some in the security services, that is still not fast enough.
“We continue to work with social media providers to take down terrorist content,” said the UK’s head of counterterror policing, assistant commissioner Neil Basu, in a statement. “But it is apparent that companies need to act more quickly to remove this content from their platforms.”
Unlike Islamist terror groups such as Isis and al-Qaeda, which have exploited the internet to spread their message and co-ordinate attacks across borders, right-wing extremists have traditionally been seen as splintered and disorganised.
Yet Jonathan Stevenson, from the think-tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the landscape could be changing.
“Such groups appear to be using the internet and in particular social media liberally and inventively, as the jihadis have, to encourage attacks across a fairly wide geographical range, making their threat at least nascently transnational,” he said.
Reporters covering tragedies such as Friday’s events in Christchurch have become familiar with the online confusion and misinformation that often surrounds terrorist attacks. Yet most are still unfamiliar with the impenetrable culture that 8chan trades in — and then relies on Facebook and YouTube to distribute.
“For a long time, these platforms have taken advantage of the fact that most journalists are not particularly wise to internet culture, making up outrageous lies with the knowledge they’ll be reported in good faith,” Squirrell said.
“The ‘joke’ is the media will take what he’s saying seriously.”