Ten people were murdered this weekend in a racist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The eighteen-year-old white extremist gunner live-streamed his attack on Twitch, the video game streaming platform owned by Amazon. Although Twitch removed the video two minutes after the violence began, it’s still too late – for now, terrorist terror footage is being circulated publicly on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, even after the attacks began. The company announced that the video was taken down.
On Facebook, some users who flagged the video were told that content does not violate its rules. The company told TechCrunch that this was a mistake, adding that it has teams working around the clock to remove videos of the shooting as well as links to videos hosted on other websites. Facebook said it was also taking down copies of the racist shooter and content that glorified him.
But when we search for a simple phrase like “buffalo footage” on Facebook, one of the first results shows 54-second screen footage of the terrorist. TechCrunch encountered the video an hour after it was uploaded and reported it immediately. The video was not taken down until three hours after posting, when it had been viewed more than a thousand times.
In theory, this shouldn’t happen. A Facebook representative told TechCrunch that it has added multiple versions of the shooter’s videos, as well as racist posts, to its database of infringing content, which helps the platform identify, remove and block such content. We asked Facebook about this particular incident, but they did not provide further details.
“We will continue to learn and improve our processes to ensure that we can detect and remove infringing content faster in the future,” said Facebook VP of Integrity Guy Rosen said in response to a question about why the company struggled with deleting copies of the video during an unrelated call on Tuesday.
Reposts of the shooter’s stream are also easy to find on Twitter. In fact, when we typed “buffalo video” into the search bar, Twitter suggested searches like “buffalo video full video graphics,” “leaked buffalo video,” and “buffalo video graphics.” .
Image credits: Twitter, screenshot by TechCrunch
We came across multiple videos of the attack that went viral on Twitter over two days. One such video had more than 261,000 views when we reviewed it Tuesday afternoon.
In April, Twitter issue a policy ban individual perpetrators of violent attacks from Twitter. According to this policy, the platform also reserves the right to remove multimedia content related to the attacks, as well as language from the terrorist’s “manifesto”.
“We are taking down the videos and media related to the incident. Additionally, we may remove tweets that disseminate manifesto or other content created by perpetrators,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. The company called the content “hateful and discriminatory” as “harmful to society.”
Twitter also claimed that some users were trying to bypass the takedown request by uploading altered or manipulated content related to the attack.
By contrast, videos of the weekend’s tragedy are relatively hard to find on YouTube. The basic search terms for Buffalo video are mostly brought up from mainstream news sites. With similar search terms we used on Twitter and Facebook, we were able to identify a handful of YouTube videos with thumbnails of footage that were actually unrelated content after clicking through. On TikTok, TechCrunch identified a number of posts that directed users to websites where they could watch videos, not finding actual footage on the app in our searches.
Twitch, Twitter, and Facebook have announced that they are working with the Global Internet Forum to Combat Terrorism to limit the spread of videos. Twitch and Discord have also confirmed that they are working with government agencies that are investigating the situation. The gunman detailed his shooting plan in a private Discord server before the attack.
According to documents reviewed by TechCrunch, the Buffalo shooter decided to broadcast his attack on Twitch because of a 2019 anti-semiotic shooting at Halle Synagogue that is still live-streaming on Twitch for more than thirty minutes before it was taken down. The gunman considered going live to Facebook, but chose not to use the platform because he thinks users need to be logged in to watch the live streams.
Facebook has also inadvertently organized mass shootings to avoid detection by the algorithm. In the same year as the Halle Synagogue shooting, 50 people were killed in a shooting Islamism attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, streaming for 17 minutes. At least three culprits of the mass shootings, including the Buffalo suspect, cited the live-streamed Christchurch massacre as an inspiration for their racist attacks.
Facebook noted the day after the Christchurch shootings that it had removed 1.5 million videos of the attack, 1.2 million of which were blocked on upload. This, of course, raises the question of why Facebook couldn’t immediately detect 300,000 of those videos, marking one 20% failure rate.
Judging by how easy it is to locate buffalo shooting videos on Facebook, it seems the platform still has a long way to go.
