Why The New Zealand Shooting Video Keeps Circulating

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Publish Date:
March 21, 2019
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The Atlantic
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Summary

The past six days have been an all-out war between social-media giants and the people who hope to use their platforms to share grisly footage of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings. It hasn’t always been clear who’s winning. YouTube described an “unprecedented” rush to upload video of the attack over the weekend, peaking at one attempted upload per second. In a blog post Thursday, Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos in the first 24 hours after the attack, 1.2 million of which were blocked before being uploaded to the site, which means 300,000 videos were able to slip past its filtering system. These companies have blocked uploads, deleted videos, and banned users—but people are still outsmarting the technology intended to block the footage from spreading on social media.

A Facebook spokesperson told Wired the company was adding each video it found “to an internal database which enables us to detect and automatically remove copies of the videos when uploaded again.” But in the company’s blog post, Facebook’s vice president of product management, Guy Rosen, noted that the “proliferation of many different variants of the video” frustrated attempts to filter out uploads. These attempts, he writes, were driven by “a core community of bad actors working together to continually re-upload edited versions of this video in ways designed to defeat our detection.” (Representatives for Facebook and YouTube didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Ultimately, the use case for purely AI-driven content moderation is fairly narrow, says Daphne Keller, the director of intermediary liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, because nuanced decisions are too complex to outsource to machines.

“Ultimately, you need human judgment,” Keller said. “Or else, you need to make a different kind of decision and say, ‘Getting rid of this is so important, and sparing humans from trauma is so important, that we’re going to accept the error of having legal and important speech disappear.’”

“One critique is to say, ‘That’s not what people want. You shouldn’t reward the urge to stare at an accident,’” Keller said. “Another response is to say, ‘I don’t care if people want that. Don’t give it to them, because it’s bad for them.’”

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