Tech industry’s hard lessons from mass killings

Mass shooters including the one now held in the Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket attack don’t stop with planning out their brutal attacks.

They also create marketing plans while arranging to livestream their massacres on social platforms, in hopes of fomenting more violence.

Sites including Twitter, Facebook and now the game-streaming platform Twitch have learned painful lessons from dealing with the violent videos that often accompany such shootings.

But experts are calling for a broader discussion around livestreams, including whether they should exist at all, since once such videos go online, they are almost impossible to erase completely.

The self-described whitesupremacist gunman who police say killed 10 people, all of them Black, at a Buffalo supermarket Saturday had mounted a GoPro camera to his helmet to stream his assault live on Twitch, the video-game streaming platform used by another shooter in 2019 who killed two people at a synagogue in Halle, Germany.

He had previously outlined his plan in a detailed but rambling set of online diary entries that were apparently posted publicly ahead of the attack, although it is not clear how may people might have seen them.

His goal was to inspire copycats and spread his racist beliefs.

After all, he was a copycat himself.

He decided against streaming on Facebook, as yet another mass shooter did when he killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, three years ago. Unlike Twitch, Facebook requires users to sign up for an account in order to watch livestreams.

‘Did pretty well’

Still, not everything went according to plan. By most accounts, the platforms responded more quickly to halt the spread of the Buffalo video than they did after the 2019 Christchurch shooting, said Megan Squire, a senior fellow and technology expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Another Twitch user watching the live video likely flagged it to the attention of Twitch’s content moderators, she said, which would have helped Twitch pull down the stream less than two minutes after the first gunshots, per a company spokesperson.

Twitch has not said how the video was flagged. In a statement about the shooting Tuesday, the company expressed thanks “for the user reports that help us catch and remove harmful content in real time.”

“In this case, they did pretty well,” Squire said. “The fact that the video is so hard to find right now is proof of that.”

In 2019, the Christchurch shooting was streamed live on Facebook for 17 minutes and quickly spread to other platforms.

This time, the platforms generally seemed to coordinate better, particularly by sharing digital “signatures” of the video used to detect and remove copies.

But platform algorithms can have a harder time identifying a copycat video if someone has edited it. That has created problems, such as when some internet forums users remade the Buffalo video with twisted attempts at humor.

Tech companies would have needed to use “more fancy algorithms” to detect those partial matches, Squire said.

“It seems darker and more cynical,” she said of the attempts to spread the shooting video in recent days.

Twitch has more than 2.5 million viewers at any given moment; roughly 8 million content creators stream video on the platform each month, according to the company. The site uses a combination of user reports, algorithms and moderators to detect and remove any violence that occurs on the platform.

The company said that it quickly removed the gunman’s stream, but hasn’t shared many details about what happened on Saturday, including whether the stream was reported or how many people watched the rampage live.

A Twitch spokesperson said the company shared the livestream with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a nonprofit group set up by tech companies to help others monitor their own platforms for rebroadcasts.

But clips from the video still made their way to other platforms, including the site Streamable, where it was available for millions to view. A spokesperson for Hopin, the company that owns Streamable, said Monday that it was working to remove the videos and terminate the accounts of those who uploaded them.

MATT ROURKE — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A memorial outside the scene of a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., on Sunday, the day after 10 Black people were killed. Tech companies are dealing with violent videos that often accompany such attacks.