18 ms·

Update on New Zealand

56 points by tareqak 8y ago

temprunberkdk 8y ago
> No users reported the video during the live broadcast. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but why do you need to state that. It’s not the users jobs to report the videos. They aren’t getting paid. I might be reading this too much but somehow this sentence stands out as a sore thumb for me.
- avh02 8y ago
  I'd take it as an indication that those watching knew what they were watching and wanted to be watching - I.e, fb didn't immediately receive thousands of reports on the video that was clearly watched because those watching it were not reporting it Edit: to add it's basically "cover your ass" , because a third party would implicitly assume watchers of despicable content would report it, and then it would look like Facebook failed to act
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  >> No users reported the video during the live broadcast. > I don’t mean to be pedantic, but why do you need to state that. It’s not the users jobs to report the videos. They aren’t getting paid. There's an idea floating out there that internet companies shouldn't be responsible for doing anything to mitigate social ills on their platforms that can't be accomplished with a staff-light approach [1], so it's somehow exculpatory if a user or their algorithm failed to flag it. [1] a staff-light approach, in Facebook's case, could still entail a staff numbering in the tens of thousands.
- yarosv 8y ago
  It may not be a users' job, but responsible users should report it. Like responsible person should report a crime. Police doesn't know if someone robed your house. Officer can not live in your house and watch it 24/7, because "they are getting paid".
  - massivecali 8y ago
    Responsible people did report it to the proper authorities, which is not Facebook. Reporting it to Facebook so they can take it down and prevent people from knowing what is happening is not responsible.
    - drilldrive 8y ago
      Yeah, if I for whatever reason stumbled on a live broadcast like this one, I would immediately go to the police, not Facebook. I wouldn't want to risk Facebook deleting potential evidence of the crime.
    - bryan_w 8y ago
      Funny you should have this reply. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435955 where someone makes the case that it _isn't_ the police job to notify Facebook. Facebook doesn't seem to be able to win here
      - panarky 8y ago
        > Facebook doesn't seem to be able to win here I own a store that has power tools that could hurt people. As a business owner, it's my responsibility to keep my property secure, and to ensure people on my property don't use my tools to hurt themselves or others. I install security cameras and I hire guards. I closely supervise customers when they use my power tools. If I didn't do these things and someone used my tools to hurt people, I would be liable. If I thought a crime had been committed, I would call the police. But it's not the responsibility of the police to patrol my store. The police aren't responsible to supervise my customers on my property while they use my tools. That's my responsibility. If someone uses my power tools in my store to hurt someone, I don't say "pat me on the back, I cut the power to the tools within minutes of the police notifying me". If I did that, I'd be guilty of gross negligence and reckless disregard for human life, because I could reasonably anticipate my tools could be used this way and I did nothing to stop it. In many jurisdictions that's a criminal charge sometimes known as involuntary manslaughter.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > It’s not the users jobs to report the videos. That depends on how you feel about censorship. Do you think platforms should proactively and unilaterally censor content that has - at the time of submission - not been the subject of user reports or any other external signal? Would you feel that way if it happened to content you were submitting, that you felt was perfectly legitimate? Because if not, then yes, the system does depend to some degree on user reports.
- seniorsassycat 8y ago
  I read this as a fact, or a defense, not a condemnation of the users. What if a viewing user had reported the issue? Would Facebook been able to intervene? What if a user had reported it and Facebook did not act, or did not act quickly?
- ng12 8y ago
  What is Facebook supposed to do? Constantly monitor literally every piece of media uploaded to their site? I'm pretty sure that's impossible purely from a logistical standpoint. As long as they deleted/filtered the video as soon as they became aware of it that's all we should ask of them.
- erentz 8y ago
  I agree. Reporting it would be an very odd expectation for such an event. We're not talking about a video of someone pooping or something. You are going to have: 1. Users who want to watch it. They won't report it. 2. Users who are in shock at watching a horrific event unfold and unable to mentally do anything. 3. Users who will be watching a crime happen, and will call the police. Facebook by saying this are saying they expect the response to be: "Oh, horrible mass murder crime is happening, I better just "flag" this video so I don't see it and it gets removed." Heck. Flagging it for removal might even be evidence tampering in a funny kind of way. How do I know if it gets removed early some evidence of this crime isn't lost? I wouldn't want to make that decision. Whoever wrote that at FB has drunk the "blame the users not the platform" cool aid a bit too much.
- RIMR 8y ago
  The terrorist posted a link to 8chan right as he started streaming. 200 people watched the shooting live. Nobody reported the video until ~15 minutes after the stream ended. That means that EVERY person who viewed this video live did so without feeling the need to report it as objectionable, and the vast majority of those people arrived via 8chan. It illustrates exactly what kind of person frequents the web communities that the terrorist did.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  This entire post is Facebook's way of saying "there's no way we could have prevented people from watching this, and we're doing everything in our power to aid in the situation, therefore NZ shouldn't be taking any action against us".
save_ferris 8y ago
I take the viewing metrics they provided with a huge grain of salt, given their history for playing fast and loose with the truth. Maybe I'm just down on Facebook, but this deflects pretty hard on the main point of this whole terrible story: given a free platform to broadcast live video, there's just no feasible way (at the moment) to prevent someone from using said platform to broadcast horrific events. Content moderation has always, always, always been an afterthought, and these major platforms don't really seem to have an interest in truly solving this problem. Massive teams of poorly-paid contractors supplemented with ML tools seems like an overly optimistic solution to a much harder problem.
- Diederich 8y ago
  I don't mean to sound harsh by asking this question, truly. What do you suggest at this point?
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    I deeply question the value of FB's existence in its current form for many reasons, but given its size and influence, I'm not so naive to think that it's going away anytime soon. I chose years ago to stop using Facebook and encouraging others to do the same. I truly believe the absolute best thing FB could do for society would be to dissolve, but that's not realistic.
    - CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
      So... you propose nothing, then? Or at least, you didn't really answer the question that was asked. What would you suggest as a solution to the problems stated? These problems are larger than just Facebook.
      - save_ferris 8y ago
        Choosing not support or engage with such an ethically compromised platform is a solution. Why do we carry around this mentality that everything can just be fixed? When did the idea of "maybe X thing shouldn't exist in our society" become such a foreign idea? Facebook is only valuable because people use it.
CharlesColeman 8y ago
> The video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast. No users reported the video during the live broadcast. Including the views during the live broadcast, the video was viewed about 4000 times in total before being removed from Facebook. > The first user report on the original video came in 29 minutes after the video started, and 12 minutes after the live broadcast ended. How long did it take them to react to that initial report and remove the video? It's notable that they included so many statistics, but left that one out.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Nition 8y ago
  It sounds like they didn't respond to the reports on the original video at all: > We removed the attacker’s video within minutes of [the New Zealand Police's] outreach to us. They don't say how long it was until NZ police contacted them though, it could have been right after the reports came though.
  - CharlesColeman 8y ago
    > it could have been right after the reports came though. If they reacted quickly, I think they'd have said so. Their evasiveness and omissions lead me to think it took them an embarrassingly long time to react.
  - panarky 8y ago
    > They don't say how long it was until NZ police contacted them This is Facebook's deceptive spin. It's not the responsibility of NZ police to control Facebook's platform, yet Facebook acts as if they have zero responsibility until they're notified. The important numbers here are: (1) how many minutes from the beginning of the livestream until the last re-uploaded copy was removed? (2) how many Facebook users viewed even part of the livestream or any of the re-uploaded copies? The answers are likely (1) thousands of minutes and (2) millions of views. Naturally these two numbers are not to be found anywhere in Facebook's deceptive explanation.
monochromatic 8y ago
I have no desire to search for or watch this particular video, but I’m guessing the Streisand Effect is out in full force already.
- CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
  It was promptly shared on horrible sites like 8chan and KiwiFarms, and then a Torrent was shared to alleviate the bandwidth pressure on those websites. It was in full force before I even heard about the shooting.
  - tungwaiyip 8y ago
    It truly horrifies me when I learned there are groups who celebrate mass murder by posting video to Internet. They go out of their way to mutate their posting in order to evade Internet service's detecting. Who are these people? I never know this dark side of humanity exist and it horrifies me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/18/inside-youtubes-struggles-shut-down-video-new-zealand-shooting-humans-who-outsmarted-its-systems/?utm_term=.54c5e0ad55af&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/18/inside-...
    - CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
      > Who are these people? I never know this dark side of humanity exist and it horrifies me. Here you go: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-... They're terrible people who largely manage to avoid doing illegal (merely unethical) things as a hobby.
      - Taniwha 8y ago
        BTW Kiwi-farms has NOTHING to do with New Zealand, the name is a sick pun by sick people
    - matz1 8y ago
      I'm glad it shared. Just because you find it horrifies doesn't mean other will feel the same. I want to see it just for curiosity.
minikites 8y ago
>No users reported the video during the live broadcast. This line would be suspect coming from YouTube or Snapchat, but Facebook has lied so many times that it's become impossible to believe them.
- judge2020 8y ago
  I'm predicting "Whoops! Someone reported it, but our ML service detected it as a false flag so no human was able to review the report. Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, and we will make an effort in the future to prevent this from happening again."
- Throwway32 8y ago
  Facebook moderation is badly broken. After pressure from governments,they seem to have been revising a significant number of reports that they previously closed as being non-infringing. I wouldn’t trust them either, at this point.
Taniwha 8y ago
It should be noted that this video has been rated the video as 'objectionable', a technical term making it illegal to share, possess or distribute. Note that NZ law is written so that this means it was always in this state from its creation (not just from the point of classification). People found doing so could face up to 14 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine, there's already one person in jail for doing this. NZ ISPs are blocking the IP addresses of websites that are hosting this video.
- roenxi 8y ago
  > a technical term making it illegal to share, possess or distribute. This crosses a line between discouraging horrific material being easily available by pressuring Facebook, which practically speaking makes sense because people who wouldn't want to see it might see it, and a ban on facts. If they can ban this video, could they also ban videos of police or military abuses of power produced by a private citizen? It isn't even an obviously good idea socially, that video (which I have not seen) is presumably one of the most pro-Muslim and pro-gun-control pieces of propaganda to be produced in the last 30 years. There is no pressure group that supports gunning down peaceful people at prayer time.
  - erentz 8y ago
    > If they can ban this video, could they also ban videos of police or military abuses of power produced by a private citizen? In theory no. The censor operates independently under strict legislation and decisions can (I believe based on memory of previous instances) be challenged in court. So such an example as above wouldn't be censored because it wouldn't be injurious to the public good. Quite the opposite, such a video would be for the public good. Banning it would require some kind of authoritarian capture of both the censor's office and the the judicial system to enforce. Certainly if somehow NZ became an authoritarian state then the censor could be used to those ends, but by that point authoritarian states don't exactly care about law or process or political interference when it comes to censorship anyway.
    - tathougies 8y ago
ng12 8y ago
What makes this video so special? Is it because of NZ law? Forget the dark web or BT, you can find lots of videos of violent terrorist attacks on the mainstream web (YouTube, Twitter, et al).
- RIMR 8y ago
  It's a first-person video of someone slaughtering dozens of unarmed civilians for fun, and it was streamed live. There is no other video like this one in the world. There's plenty of gory videos out there, but this one crosses a line nothing else I have ever seen has.
  - megous 8y ago
    There are videos of mass executions (similar to this, in that the guns are used) recorded by the perps. I mean yeah, shooting people is horrible, but it's pretty tame to what other stuff is out there, that I've seen and just couldn't finish watching. And I'm pretty desensitized by now. I've seen some Shabiha torture videos, and those are much much worse on the emotions.
    - Balgair 8y ago
      Both the government forces and terrorist forces (al-shabab, etc) of lower Somalia live-stream/broadcast/record their executions on Twitter from time to time. Though I've not seen it done on Twitch, I'd be very surprised if that hasn't been done yet. Typically this is by firing squad. https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+kismayo+city+execution&oq=twitter+kismayo+city+execution&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.10747j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+kismayo+city+executi... (it should be the first link, I'd rather not directly link to the images out of courtesy to others) Look, I'm not going to get into the issues around the death penalty, but the fact remains that a lot of governments and semi-governments use SV tech just as they would use any radio/TV station/newspaper that is under their jurisdiction. Death is horrible, no question. But it's not like these events are being hidden away on sketchy websites that you have to hunt for. In many parts of the world, such types of death are celebrated and proudly posted to as many 'legitimate' news sites as possible by 'official' semi/governmental agencies. It's been less than 100 years since the US has had 'strange fruit' herself. I mean, we literally sold postcards with the results on them.
WhatIsDukkha 8y ago
Whats missing from this facebook statement is - Why would you not ban/tempban/"deplatform" users for sharing/replicating/liking this on Facebook? This is pretty directly against the "public interest" just like child pornography. This isn't a grey area, it was the murder of 50+ people. Why would you not just flat ban and forward the accounts of anyone forwarding this video, again just like child pornography?
- jquery 8y ago
  Honest question: what's the difference between this and, say, 9/11 videos? Is it the shooter's intent? If so, I want to point out that 9/11 was orchestrated so that it would be covered by major news networks. >This isn't a grey area, it was the murder of 50+ people. And 9/11 was the murder of 3000 people. Are you in favor of censoring videos of 9/11?
  - panarky 8y ago
    Honest question: what's the difference between this and, say, ISIS beheading videos? Are you in favor of Facebook freely disseminating ISIS recruitment material?
    - jquery 8y ago
      Until this event, Reddit was happily sharing loads of beheading ISIS beheading videos, so was Facebook and Twitter but I never joined those communities. Should videos/images of intentional death be banned? In my opinion, no, I don’t see the common good served by such a law, unless we have a head of USA censorship deciding which videos of death are ok and which are not. This is only being censored because the shooter clearly wished it to be shared... and in doing so the censors are making sure every curious person takes a look. Ironic.
  - a-saleh 8y ago
    In my opinion, the 24/7 coverage that was fueled by the tragic images was a mistake.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
skybrian 8y ago
I'm wondering if there's any way to know how many people are involved in uploading this millions of times. (Apparently this also happened on YouTube.) Is this like a denial-of-service attack where a few people have lots of automation? Are there "booter" services? Maybe Krebs will write about it someday.
OkGoDoIt 8y ago
I haven't actually seen the video in question, but on a general level I'm confused why everyone is so up in arms here. Do we really want Facebook to be even more aggressive in censorship of its content? Do we want them to use realtime ML to automatically determine if a livestreem video is bad? [1] They removed the video promptly after receiving reports about it. They also proactively block people from uploading copies. What more do we want? Maybe we are misdirecting our anger about the violence? [1] "Bad" is a very loose term that changes over time. When advocating for this kind of tech and strict content rules, we are also codifying a set of moral standards to define "bad", so we should tread carefully. Not everything is as clearcut bad as this video, and it's not a huge jump to apply this to other "objectionable" media, which is not the world I want to be pushing for.
- quink 8y ago
  Yes, yes, ban more groups (including flat earth, climate denial and anti-vaxxers) while also killing the filter bubbles and no. These questions aren’t as hard as you think.
  - secfirstmd 8y ago
    Well they get harder when certain governments abuse that power to stifle legitimate activists and journalists though: https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/fac...
  - godzillabrennus 8y ago
    Where do you stop? Who decides what is banned? That seems like a hard question.
    - sampo 8y ago
      For example, there is an equally strong scientific consensus that GMO crops (and food) are safe, as there is about climate change being real. But there are lots of users right here in HN who would get upset if their anti-GMO opinions were banned the same as climate change denial and anti-vaxxer opinions.
sketchthat 8y ago
> In the first 24 hours, we removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack globally. More than 1.2 million of those videos were blocked at upload, and were therefore prevented from being seen on our services. Would this be bots uploading the video or are there 1.5 million individuals trying to re-upload the video to FB? If so are they also having their accounts banned for praising / supporting terror attacks?
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  > are they also having their accounts banned for praising / supporting terror attacks? doubt it was just bots. I followed the topic as it was trending on twitter and many of the accounts that re-uploaded it were accounts with Muslim names - often accompanied by a message such as (paraphrasing) "let the world see what terrors are inflicted by white man". They wanted to ensure the world sees what white man are capable of. For many it was a moment of "look at what they are doing to our brothers and sisters". I think they felt it was an injustice that the information is removed in this case (yet when the attacks were carried out by Islamist's nobody cared). There was also a lot of outrage because some MSM's were not immediately calling it a terrorist act. I can understand quite well why they wanted this to be seen in all its gory detail. If my family were among the dead I too would wanted to make sure people know the truth. In fact my pain would be so big that I would want to show everyone in the hope that maybe somebody gets radicalized enough and hits back by blowing up a place where such types hang out. I'm not glorifying revenge or violence, but if you feel yourself into that kind of situation (that pain), it would take a lot of strength not wanting to retaliate (or shout out to those who might).
Jedi72 8y ago
I didlike Facebook immensely but this isn't their fault. They are a huge victim in this case. If the shooter had set ten open-source video stream boxes around the globe instead (seems possible) who would we be getting mad at then? The powers that be are rushing to look like they're doing something, and apparently 4chan and 8chan are now blocked in Australia. Same day that Vladimir Putin introduced sweeping internet cencorship laws in Russia...
thrwynm 8y ago
Email and Usenet include metadata, and no one really complains about an infringement of their liberty. Social media networks are more anonymous than either, harder to police, and they are far larger in scale than any other websites. Some form of metadata may curb anonymous abuse. In the case of repressive countries, it could be masked. And before anyone talks about VPN and Tor...try posting to HN from a Tor browser and see what happens to your post...blacklists exist. And the average shitposter isn’t going to go to the trouble. The Arab Spring is widely seen as a triumph of social media over repression, but its effects were short-lived and those who posted were often tracked down and persecuted.
lancewiggs 8y ago
Nothing in that statement takes responsibility for Facebook being a fermenting ground for hate, disinformation and isolation of perspectives that promotes extremism. And other social media sites are equally to blame.

56 points by tareqak 8y ago

> No users reported the video during the live broadcast. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but why do you need to state that. It’s not the users jobs to report the videos. They aren’t getting paid. I might be reading this too much but somehow this sentence stands out as a sore thumb for me.

avh02 8y ago
I'd take it as an indication that those watching knew what they were watching and wanted to be watching - I.e, fb didn't immediately receive thousands of reports on the video that was clearly watched because those watching it were not reporting it Edit: to add it's basically "cover your ass" , because a third party would implicitly assume watchers of despicable content would report it, and then it would look like Facebook failed to act
CharlesColeman 8y ago
>> No users reported the video during the live broadcast. > I don’t mean to be pedantic, but why do you need to state that. It’s not the users jobs to report the videos. They aren’t getting paid. There's an idea floating out there that internet companies shouldn't be responsible for doing anything to mitigate social ills on their platforms that can't be accomplished with a staff-light approach [1], so it's somehow exculpatory if a user or their algorithm failed to flag it. [1] a staff-light approach, in Facebook's case, could still entail a staff numbering in the tens of thousands.
yarosv 8y ago
It may not be a users' job, but responsible users should report it. Like responsible person should report a crime. Police doesn't know if someone robed your house. Officer can not live in your house and watch it 24/7, because "they are getting paid".
- massivecali 8y ago
  Responsible people did report it to the proper authorities, which is not Facebook. Reporting it to Facebook so they can take it down and prevent people from knowing what is happening is not responsible.
  - drilldrive 8y ago
    Yeah, if I for whatever reason stumbled on a live broadcast like this one, I would immediately go to the police, not Facebook. I wouldn't want to risk Facebook deleting potential evidence of the crime.
  - bryan_w 8y ago
    Funny you should have this reply. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435955 where someone makes the case that it _isn't_ the police job to notify Facebook. Facebook doesn't seem to be able to win here
    - panarky 8y ago
      > Facebook doesn't seem to be able to win here I own a store that has power tools that could hurt people. As a business owner, it's my responsibility to keep my property secure, and to ensure people on my property don't use my tools to hurt themselves or others. I install security cameras and I hire guards. I closely supervise customers when they use my power tools. If I didn't do these things and someone used my tools to hurt people, I would be liable. If I thought a crime had been committed, I would call the police. But it's not the responsibility of the police to patrol my store. The police aren't responsible to supervise my customers on my property while they use my tools. That's my responsibility. If someone uses my power tools in my store to hurt someone, I don't say "pat me on the back, I cut the power to the tools within minutes of the police notifying me". If I did that, I'd be guilty of gross negligence and reckless disregard for human life, because I could reasonably anticipate my tools could be used this way and I did nothing to stop it. In many jurisdictions that's a criminal charge sometimes known as involuntary manslaughter.
notacoward 8y ago
> It’s not the users jobs to report the videos. That depends on how you feel about censorship. Do you think platforms should proactively and unilaterally censor content that has - at the time of submission - not been the subject of user reports or any other external signal? Would you feel that way if it happened to content you were submitting, that you felt was perfectly legitimate? Because if not, then yes, the system does depend to some degree on user reports.
seniorsassycat 8y ago
I read this as a fact, or a defense, not a condemnation of the users. What if a viewing user had reported the issue? Would Facebook been able to intervene? What if a user had reported it and Facebook did not act, or did not act quickly?
ng12 8y ago
What is Facebook supposed to do? Constantly monitor literally every piece of media uploaded to their site? I'm pretty sure that's impossible purely from a logistical standpoint. As long as they deleted/filtered the video as soon as they became aware of it that's all we should ask of them.
erentz 8y ago
I agree. Reporting it would be an very odd expectation for such an event. We're not talking about a video of someone pooping or something. You are going to have: 1. Users who want to watch it. They won't report it. 2. Users who are in shock at watching a horrific event unfold and unable to mentally do anything. 3. Users who will be watching a crime happen, and will call the police. Facebook by saying this are saying they expect the response to be: "Oh, horrible mass murder crime is happening, I better just "flag" this video so I don't see it and it gets removed." Heck. Flagging it for removal might even be evidence tampering in a funny kind of way. How do I know if it gets removed early some evidence of this crime isn't lost? I wouldn't want to make that decision. Whoever wrote that at FB has drunk the "blame the users not the platform" cool aid a bit too much.
RIMR 8y ago
The terrorist posted a link to 8chan right as he started streaming. 200 people watched the shooting live. Nobody reported the video until ~15 minutes after the stream ended. That means that EVERY person who viewed this video live did so without feeling the need to report it as objectionable, and the vast majority of those people arrived via 8chan. It illustrates exactly what kind of person frequents the web communities that the terrorist did.
anonytrary 8y ago
This entire post is Facebook's way of saying "there's no way we could have prevented people from watching this, and we're doing everything in our power to aid in the situation, therefore NZ shouldn't be taking any action against us".

save_ferris 8y ago

I take the viewing metrics they provided with a huge grain of salt, given their history for playing fast and loose with the truth. Maybe I'm just down on Facebook, but this deflects pretty hard on the main point of this whole terrible story: given a free platform to broadcast live video, there's just no feasible way (at the moment) to prevent someone from using said platform to broadcast horrific events. Content moderation has always, always, always been an afterthought, and these major platforms don't really seem to have an interest in truly solving this problem. Massive teams of poorly-paid contractors supplemented with ML tools seems like an overly optimistic solution to a much harder problem.

Diederich 8y ago
I don't mean to sound harsh by asking this question, truly. What do you suggest at this point?
- save_ferris 8y ago
  I deeply question the value of FB's existence in its current form for many reasons, but given its size and influence, I'm not so naive to think that it's going away anytime soon. I chose years ago to stop using Facebook and encouraging others to do the same. I truly believe the absolute best thing FB could do for society would be to dissolve, but that's not realistic.
  - CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
    So... you propose nothing, then? Or at least, you didn't really answer the question that was asked. What would you suggest as a solution to the problems stated? These problems are larger than just Facebook.
    - save_ferris 8y ago
      Choosing not support or engage with such an ethically compromised platform is a solution. Why do we carry around this mentality that everything can just be fixed? When did the idea of "maybe X thing shouldn't exist in our society" become such a foreign idea? Facebook is only valuable because people use it.

CharlesColeman 8y ago

> The video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast. No users reported the video during the live broadcast. Including the views during the live broadcast, the video was viewed about 4000 times in total before being removed from Facebook. > The first user report on the original video came in 29 minutes after the video started, and 12 minutes after the live broadcast ended. How long did it take them to react to that initial report and remove the video? It's notable that they included so many statistics, but left that one out.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Nition 8y ago
It sounds like they didn't respond to the reports on the original video at all: > We removed the attacker’s video within minutes of [the New Zealand Police's] outreach to us. They don't say how long it was until NZ police contacted them though, it could have been right after the reports came though.
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > it could have been right after the reports came though. If they reacted quickly, I think they'd have said so. Their evasiveness and omissions lead me to think it took them an embarrassingly long time to react.
- panarky 8y ago
  > They don't say how long it was until NZ police contacted them This is Facebook's deceptive spin. It's not the responsibility of NZ police to control Facebook's platform, yet Facebook acts as if they have zero responsibility until they're notified. The important numbers here are: (1) how many minutes from the beginning of the livestream until the last re-uploaded copy was removed? (2) how many Facebook users viewed even part of the livestream or any of the re-uploaded copies? The answers are likely (1) thousands of minutes and (2) millions of views. Naturally these two numbers are not to be found anywhere in Facebook's deceptive explanation.

monochromatic 8y ago

I have no desire to search for or watch this particular video, but I’m guessing the Streisand Effect is out in full force already.

CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
It was promptly shared on horrible sites like 8chan and KiwiFarms, and then a Torrent was shared to alleviate the bandwidth pressure on those websites. It was in full force before I even heard about the shooting.
- tungwaiyip 8y ago
  It truly horrifies me when I learned there are groups who celebrate mass murder by posting video to Internet. They go out of their way to mutate their posting in order to evade Internet service's detecting. Who are these people? I never know this dark side of humanity exist and it horrifies me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/18/inside-youtubes-struggles-shut-down-video-new-zealand-shooting-humans-who-outsmarted-its-systems/?utm_term=.54c5e0ad55af&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/18/inside-...
  - CiPHPerCoder 8y ago
    > Who are these people? I never know this dark side of humanity exist and it horrifies me. Here you go: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-... They're terrible people who largely manage to avoid doing illegal (merely unethical) things as a hobby.
    - Taniwha 8y ago
      BTW Kiwi-farms has NOTHING to do with New Zealand, the name is a sick pun by sick people
  - matz1 8y ago
    I'm glad it shared. Just because you find it horrifies doesn't mean other will feel the same. I want to see it just for curiosity.

minikites 8y ago

>No users reported the video during the live broadcast. This line would be suspect coming from YouTube or Snapchat, but Facebook has lied so many times that it's become impossible to believe them.

judge2020 8y ago
I'm predicting "Whoops! Someone reported it, but our ML service detected it as a false flag so no human was able to review the report. Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, and we will make an effort in the future to prevent this from happening again."
Throwway32 8y ago
Facebook moderation is badly broken. After pressure from governments,they seem to have been revising a significant number of reports that they previously closed as being non-infringing. I wouldn’t trust them either, at this point.

Taniwha 8y ago

It should be noted that this video has been rated the video as 'objectionable', a technical term making it illegal to share, possess or distribute. Note that NZ law is written so that this means it was always in this state from its creation (not just from the point of classification). People found doing so could face up to 14 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine, there's already one person in jail for doing this. NZ ISPs are blocking the IP addresses of websites that are hosting this video.

roenxi 8y ago
> a technical term making it illegal to share, possess or distribute. This crosses a line between discouraging horrific material being easily available by pressuring Facebook, which practically speaking makes sense because people who wouldn't want to see it might see it, and a ban on facts. If they can ban this video, could they also ban videos of police or military abuses of power produced by a private citizen? It isn't even an obviously good idea socially, that video (which I have not seen) is presumably one of the most pro-Muslim and pro-gun-control pieces of propaganda to be produced in the last 30 years. There is no pressure group that supports gunning down peaceful people at prayer time.
- erentz 8y ago
  > If they can ban this video, could they also ban videos of police or military abuses of power produced by a private citizen? In theory no. The censor operates independently under strict legislation and decisions can (I believe based on memory of previous instances) be challenged in court. So such an example as above wouldn't be censored because it wouldn't be injurious to the public good. Quite the opposite, such a video would be for the public good. Banning it would require some kind of authoritarian capture of both the censor's office and the the judicial system to enforce. Certainly if somehow NZ became an authoritarian state then the censor could be used to those ends, but by that point authoritarian states don't exactly care about law or process or political interference when it comes to censorship anyway.
  - tathougies 8y ago

ng12 8y ago

What makes this video so special? Is it because of NZ law? Forget the dark web or BT, you can find lots of videos of violent terrorist attacks on the mainstream web (YouTube, Twitter, et al).

RIMR 8y ago
It's a first-person video of someone slaughtering dozens of unarmed civilians for fun, and it was streamed live. There is no other video like this one in the world. There's plenty of gory videos out there, but this one crosses a line nothing else I have ever seen has.
- megous 8y ago
  There are videos of mass executions (similar to this, in that the guns are used) recorded by the perps. I mean yeah, shooting people is horrible, but it's pretty tame to what other stuff is out there, that I've seen and just couldn't finish watching. And I'm pretty desensitized by now. I've seen some Shabiha torture videos, and those are much much worse on the emotions.
  - Balgair 8y ago
    Both the government forces and terrorist forces (al-shabab, etc) of lower Somalia live-stream/broadcast/record their executions on Twitter from time to time. Though I've not seen it done on Twitch, I'd be very surprised if that hasn't been done yet. Typically this is by firing squad. https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+kismayo+city+execution&oq=twitter+kismayo+city+execution&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.10747j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+kismayo+city+executi... (it should be the first link, I'd rather not directly link to the images out of courtesy to others) Look, I'm not going to get into the issues around the death penalty, but the fact remains that a lot of governments and semi-governments use SV tech just as they would use any radio/TV station/newspaper that is under their jurisdiction. Death is horrible, no question. But it's not like these events are being hidden away on sketchy websites that you have to hunt for. In many parts of the world, such types of death are celebrated and proudly posted to as many 'legitimate' news sites as possible by 'official' semi/governmental agencies. It's been less than 100 years since the US has had 'strange fruit' herself. I mean, we literally sold postcards with the results on them.

WhatIsDukkha 8y ago

Whats missing from this facebook statement is - Why would you not ban/tempban/"deplatform" users for sharing/replicating/liking this on Facebook? This is pretty directly against the "public interest" just like child pornography. This isn't a grey area, it was the murder of 50+ people. Why would you not just flat ban and forward the accounts of anyone forwarding this video, again just like child pornography?

jquery 8y ago
Honest question: what's the difference between this and, say, 9/11 videos? Is it the shooter's intent? If so, I want to point out that 9/11 was orchestrated so that it would be covered by major news networks. >This isn't a grey area, it was the murder of 50+ people. And 9/11 was the murder of 3000 people. Are you in favor of censoring videos of 9/11?
- panarky 8y ago
  Honest question: what's the difference between this and, say, ISIS beheading videos? Are you in favor of Facebook freely disseminating ISIS recruitment material?
  - jquery 8y ago
    Until this event, Reddit was happily sharing loads of beheading ISIS beheading videos, so was Facebook and Twitter but I never joined those communities. Should videos/images of intentional death be banned? In my opinion, no, I don’t see the common good served by such a law, unless we have a head of USA censorship deciding which videos of death are ok and which are not. This is only being censored because the shooter clearly wished it to be shared... and in doing so the censors are making sure every curious person takes a look. Ironic.
- a-saleh 8y ago
  In my opinion, the 24/7 coverage that was fueled by the tragic images was a mistake.

deleted 8y ago

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skybrian 8y ago

I'm wondering if there's any way to know how many people are involved in uploading this millions of times. (Apparently this also happened on YouTube.) Is this like a denial-of-service attack where a few people have lots of automation? Are there "booter" services? Maybe Krebs will write about it someday.

OkGoDoIt 8y ago

I haven't actually seen the video in question, but on a general level I'm confused why everyone is so up in arms here. Do we really want Facebook to be even more aggressive in censorship of its content? Do we want them to use realtime ML to automatically determine if a livestreem video is bad? [1] They removed the video promptly after receiving reports about it. They also proactively block people from uploading copies. What more do we want? Maybe we are misdirecting our anger about the violence? [1] "Bad" is a very loose term that changes over time. When advocating for this kind of tech and strict content rules, we are also codifying a set of moral standards to define "bad", so we should tread carefully. Not everything is as clearcut bad as this video, and it's not a huge jump to apply this to other "objectionable" media, which is not the world I want to be pushing for.

quink 8y ago
Yes, yes, ban more groups (including flat earth, climate denial and anti-vaxxers) while also killing the filter bubbles and no. These questions aren’t as hard as you think.
- secfirstmd 8y ago
  Well they get harder when certain governments abuse that power to stifle legitimate activists and journalists though: https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/fac...
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Where do you stop? Who decides what is banned? That seems like a hard question.
  - sampo 8y ago
    For example, there is an equally strong scientific consensus that GMO crops (and food) are safe, as there is about climate change being real. But there are lots of users right here in HN who would get upset if their anti-GMO opinions were banned the same as climate change denial and anti-vaxxer opinions.

sketchthat 8y ago

> In the first 24 hours, we removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack globally. More than 1.2 million of those videos were blocked at upload, and were therefore prevented from being seen on our services. Would this be bots uploading the video or are there 1.5 million individuals trying to re-upload the video to FB? If so are they also having their accounts banned for praising / supporting terror attacks?

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
> are they also having their accounts banned for praising / supporting terror attacks? doubt it was just bots. I followed the topic as it was trending on twitter and many of the accounts that re-uploaded it were accounts with Muslim names - often accompanied by a message such as (paraphrasing) "let the world see what terrors are inflicted by white man". They wanted to ensure the world sees what white man are capable of. For many it was a moment of "look at what they are doing to our brothers and sisters". I think they felt it was an injustice that the information is removed in this case (yet when the attacks were carried out by Islamist's nobody cared). There was also a lot of outrage because some MSM's were not immediately calling it a terrorist act. I can understand quite well why they wanted this to be seen in all its gory detail. If my family were among the dead I too would wanted to make sure people know the truth. In fact my pain would be so big that I would want to show everyone in the hope that maybe somebody gets radicalized enough and hits back by blowing up a place where such types hang out. I'm not glorifying revenge or violence, but if you feel yourself into that kind of situation (that pain), it would take a lot of strength not wanting to retaliate (or shout out to those who might).

Jedi72 8y ago

I didlike Facebook immensely but this isn't their fault. They are a huge victim in this case. If the shooter had set ten open-source video stream boxes around the globe instead (seems possible) who would we be getting mad at then? The powers that be are rushing to look like they're doing something, and apparently 4chan and 8chan are now blocked in Australia. Same day that Vladimir Putin introduced sweeping internet cencorship laws in Russia...

thrwynm 8y ago

Email and Usenet include metadata, and no one really complains about an infringement of their liberty. Social media networks are more anonymous than either, harder to police, and they are far larger in scale than any other websites. Some form of metadata may curb anonymous abuse. In the case of repressive countries, it could be masked. And before anyone talks about VPN and Tor...try posting to HN from a Tor browser and see what happens to your post...blacklists exist. And the average shitposter isn’t going to go to the trouble. The Arab Spring is widely seen as a triumph of social media over repression, but its effects were short-lived and those who posted were often tracked down and persecuted.

lancewiggs 8y ago

Nothing in that statement takes responsibility for Facebook being a fermenting ground for hate, disinformation and isolation of perspectives that promotes extremism. And other social media sites are equally to blame.