Digital Life
The appalling murders in New Zealand in March were made even more dreadful by the killer wearing a camera and broadcasting live on his Facebook page.
That’s unspeakable enough, but the aftermath was awful, too. Even though Facebook removed the video within minutes, 4,000 people did see it and, only 24 hours later, Facebook said it had already removed or blocked 1.5 million copies of the video, and no doubt has removed millions more since then.
I think we should understand how this sort of mass replication, often called ‘going viral’, happens and how hard it is to stop.
The gunman clearly knew his way around the online world. Very shortly before the attack began, a post appeared on a little-known, online, political message board, probably from him, announcing the livestream and including links to it. This would have alerted some people with similar political views, who tend to look at that site.
After the livestream started, the man shouted ‘Pewdiepie’, which is the name of the most popular Youtube channel, with more than 90 million followers. It’s an innocent affair, concerned with computer games and other puerile pursuits, but we can assume that the name was taken in vain to provoke a big online reaction. It did. The owner said on Twitter that he was ‘absolutely sickened’ to have been mentioned. This, of course, added to the publicity.
While the original video was online, it was copied, forwarded and re-posted by many people on different platforms, and those broadcasts were themselves re-posted by many more, and then again, and so on. It’s probably still happening.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have some automatic techniques for spotting this sort of thing, but they rely on human users to report sightings. And, of course, it was also being posted on many sites that are nothing to do with Facebook, with no public status to maintain.
As well as re-broadcasting the original video, many people filmed it using their phones and then re-broadcast those videos; this makes it even harder to spot automatically. So you see how this sort of thing can spread, and how hard it is for the platforms to prevent it. Once the cat is out of the bag, it stays out.
Their choice is stark: they either allow people to post whatever they want, or they don’t. That sounds simple enough, but the moral and financial considerations are directly opposed. If they do allow free publication, the users are both happy and numerous and the site is attractive to advertisers.
If they don’t allow people to post what they want, they’ll have to check every entry before it is published. Facebook has more than two billion users; most post regularly and expect instant publication. Imagine how many editors Facebook would need to monitor them all. Even if that were possible, most users would not welcome a delay and would quickly move elsewhere, taking the advertising revenue with them.
It’s a problem that strikes at the heart of any social media site’s raison d’être. But they don’t always help themselves. Days after the event, I found that, if I typed just ‘New Zealand’ into Twitter or Google, suggested search terms included ‘New Zealand shootings full video’. You really would have thought that they could at least have stopped that happening.