The New Zealand shooting video was seen live around 200 times — and nobody reported it
In a statement released late Monday, Facebook provided a range of updates into its handling of Friday's Facebook Live-streamed New Zealand mosque shooting, in which 50 people were killed. Among its most disturbing revelations: that though the video was viewed approximately "200 times during the live broadcast," nobody reported it to the service for 29 minutes, or a full 12 minutes after it ended — by which time it had been "viewed about 4,000 times."
Facebook also said that it had removed a staggering 1.5 million videos of the shooting in the first 24 hours after the attack, 1.2 million of which had been "blocked at upload." Despite this, The Washington Post notes that the video nonetheless spread to other platforms, including YouTube, in the hours after the massacre.
The shooting — the third such incident to be broadcast on Facebook Live since the feature's public debut in 2016 — has led to widespread criticism of Facebook and other social media platforms, including by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. "We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published," said Ardern on Tuesday that. "This cannot be a case of all profit, no responsibility."
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Facebook said that "We remain shocked and saddened by this tragedy and are committed to working with leaders in New Zealand, other governments, and across the technology industry to help counter hate speech and the threat of terrorism."
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Jacob Lambert is the art director of TheWeek.com. He was previously an editor at MAD magazine, and has written and illustrated for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, and The Millions.
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