The NZ shooting shows how YouTube and Facebook spread hate and violence - yet again

Friday’s slaughter in two New Zealand mosques played out as a dystopian reality show delivered by some of the biggest technology companies. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter all had roles in publicizing the violence and, by extension, the hate-filled ideology behind it. These companies - some of the richest, most technologically advanced in the world - failed to rapidly quell the spread of troubling content as it metastasized across platforms, bringing horrific images to internet users worldwide.

The shooter also released a 74-page manifesto denouncing Muslims and immigrants that spread widely online. He left behind a social media trail on Twitter and Facebook that amounted to footnotes to his manifesto. Over the two days before the shooting he posted about 60 of the same links across different platforms, nearly half of which were to YouTube videos. The alleged shooter used Facebook to live-stream his assault. Many hours later some internet users still were uploading and re-uploading the video to YouTube and other online services. A search of keywords related to the event surfaced a long list of videos, many of which were lengthy and uncensored views of the massacre. The almost instantaneous spread of online images from Friday’s shooting underscored how deeply entwined social media platforms have become, with savvy users moving content back and forth across platforms faster than the platforms can react. It also was a reminder of the repeated inability of YouTube, the world’s biggest video site, to detect and remove some types of violent content, even though it has for years automatically flagged nudity and copyrighted music.