On Saturday, May 14 a mass shooting took place in Buffalo, New York. This tragic event where an 18-year-old white male shot and killed at least 10 people was reportedly planned on Discord and livestreamed on Twitch.
Twitch pulled the livestream from their site within about two minutes of it going live. However, that was still enough time for people to pull recordings of the footage and moving it on to other platforms. Some of those platforms include Facebook and Streamable.
A statement from a Twitch spokesperson issued a statement to Kotaku about the incident.
Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against violence of any kind and works swiftly to respond to all incidents. The user has been indefinitely suspended from our service, and we are taking all appropriate action, including monitoring for any accounts rebroadcasting this content.
Streamable did eventually get around to pulling the clip, saying that it violated their terms of service.
Meanwhile, Facebook let the video of the shooting circulate for over 9 hours on the platform. The New York Times reports that many users that flagged the video on Facebook for harmful content eventually received a message saying that the content did not violate their terms of service. A spokesperson from Facebook says that they are actively trying to remove the content from their platform, but they were unable to say why those that reported the content were essentially told it was fine.
Axios says that they were still able to view the video of the shootings on Facebook as late as 11:30PM (ET) on Sunday night.
Social media platforms are under increased fire now for their role in spreading the video and even the ease in which the gunman was able to stream in the first place.
Social media and content moderation experts said Twitch’s quick response was the best that could reasonably be expected. But the fact that the response did not prevent the video of the attack from being spread widely on other sites also raises the issue of whether the ability to livestream should be so easily accessible.
“I’m impressed that they got it down in two minutes,†said Micah Schaffer, a consultant who has led trust and safety decisions at Snapchat and YouTube. “But if the feeling is that even that’s too much, then you really are at an impasse: Is it worth having this?â€
“I’m impressed that they got it down in two minutes,†said Micah Schaffer, a consultant who has led trust and safety decisions at Snapchat and YouTube. “But if the feeling is that even that’s too much, then you really are at an impasse: Is it worth having this?â€
