

The site uses a combination of user reports, algorithms and moderators to detect and remove any violence that occurs on the platform. 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. “It seems darker and more cynical,” she said of the attempts to spread the shooting video in recent days. Tech companies would have needed to use “more fancy algorithms” to detect those partial matches, Squire said. That’s created problems, such as when some internet forums users remade the Buffalo video with twisted attempts at humor. This time, the platforms generally seemed to coordinate better, particularly by sharing digital “signatures” of the video used to detect and remove copies.īut platform algorithms can have a harder time identifying a copycat video if someone has edited it.

In 2019, the Christchurch shooting was streamed live on Facebook for 17 minutes and quickly spread to other platforms. “I think I reported about 100 pages on Sunday because every time I got on Facebook it was either pictures or the video was right there,” she said. Then I watched the video on social media.”ĭanielle Simpson, the girlfriend of Chaney’s grandson, said she reported dozens of sites after the video kept appearing over and over in her Facebook feed and she worried that Chaney’s family would see them. “I found out in a Facebook picture that my mom was gunned down. “I didn’t find out, nobody knocked on my door like the usual process,” he said. Celestine Chaney’s son, Wayne Jones, found out his mother had been killed when someone sent him a video screenshot from the livestream. That was little consolation to family members of the victims.
