Greater vigilance urged to stop livestreamed violence
The mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket last weekend, which killed 10 people and wounded three, shows that tech platforms still respond too slowly to hate-filled, violent live videos – and to the video clips that appear in their wake – quickening the spread of horrific images and traumatizing communities, critics say.
Considered alongside other livestreamed shootings including the Easter killing of a 74-year-old Cleveland grandfather in 2017 and New Zealand mosque shootings in 2019, some are asking what will spur technology companies to take stronger measures.
“Technology companies need to get serious about the implications of their platforms for enacting crime and violence,” said Desmond Upton Patton, a professor with the Columbia School of Social Work and the department of sociology.
Patton condemned tech platforms for allowing livestreamed mass murders to remain easily accessible “without transparent and clear discussions around the implications of the live streaming for filming murder.”
He also called on companies to hire “chief social workers” at the highest levels of livestreaming companies whose job it would be to safeguard users.
Eleven of the 13 people who were shot Saturday at the Tops Friendly Markets were Black, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia.
The hate-fueled shooting rampage was streamed online through the livestreaming platform Twitch, primarily used to share clips from video games.
In a statement emailed to USA TODAY, Twitch officials said they removed the stream less than two minutes after the violence started.
“Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against violence of any kind and works swiftly to respond to all incidents,” the service said in a statement. “The user has been indefinitely suspended from our service, and we are taking all appropriate action, including monitoring for any accounts rebroadcasting this content.”
At a news conference following the attack, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said social media companies must be more vigilant in monitoring what happens on their platforms. She said she found it inexcusable that the livestream wasn’t taken down “within a second.”
“The CEOs of those companies need to be held accountable and assure all of
“The CEOs of those companies need to be held accountable and assure all of us that they’re taking every step humanly possible to be able to monitor this information.”
Kathy Hochul Governor of New York
us that they’re taking every step humanly possible to be able to monitor this information,” Hochul said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “How these depraved ideas are fermenting on social media – it’s spreading like a virus now.”
Livestreaming has become a powerful tool for would-be terrorists, said Emerson Brooking, resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and co-author of “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.”
“They create a contemporaneous record of atrocity,” he said. “Livestreams enable lone wolf terrorists to publicize their attacks without the need for accomplices. Terrorists seek publicity so that they can become famous and inspire other copycat attacks in turn.”
That tool has only become more powerful as its reach grows. Livestreaming has become “an integral part of modern digital life,” Brooking said in an email.
“In 2021, Twitch alone had a higher number of active viewers than Fox News and CNN combined,” he said. “Millions of people use these services: only a tiny fraction use them to spread hate and violence.”
According to his statement, the Buffalo shooter chose to stream the attack on Twitch because of the platform’s slow response to the 2019 terror attack in Halle, Germany, which remained on the servers for an hour.
Brooking said the platform’s response to the Buffalo rampage was different.
“It appears that Twitch identified and removed the livestream of the attack while it was still in progress,” he said.
Even so, Twitch and other livestream platforms must invest more in content moderation and develop better and quicker tools to flag hate and violence, said Brooking, who noted that “firearms were clearly visible in the video for several minutes before the attack began.”
He also condemned Discord as a staging ground for the Buffalo shooter, who kept a “to do” list that included his statement in a private channel. The Buffalo shooter mirrored the attack on his personal Discord server.
“It appears that he relied on his Discord community to preserve and circulate video of the attack,” Brooking said.
In a statement to USA TODAY, Discord said hate and violence have no place on their platform.
“We are doing everything we can to assist law enforcement in the investigation,” the company said.
Twitch has an added responsibility because, unlike Facebook, its core product is livestreaming, according to Syracuse University associate professor Jennifer Grygiel, who studies social media.
“Twitch needs to invest and improve its systems to try to prevent its platform from being used to commit violent acts,” they said. “Society does not need to accept livestreamed massacres and the myth that nothing can be done to prevent it.”
Tech giants that host livestreaming told USA TODAY they were working diligently to keep live violence off users’ screens.
In a statement emailed Monday to USA TODAY, Twitter said it was working to “proactively identify and take action on violations” of its rules. The company said it was also removing media and videos related to the incident as well as “other content produced by perpetrators.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, designated the rampage as a “violating terrorist attack,” starting a process to remove the identified gunman’s account and any content he posted, said the company in a statement. Any copies of the video or other content will also be removed.
Reddit said in a statement that it would remove any content sharing the video.
“In line with our policies, we are removing any content sharing the video in question,” the platform said. “We will continue to enforce our policies across the platform.”
YouTube “identified and quickly removed” content filmed by the gunman, and was “prominently surfacing videos from authoritative sources in search and recommendations,” the platform in a statement.