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Whats missing from this facebook statement is - Why would you not ban/tempban/"deplatform" users for sharing/replicating/liking this on Facebook? This is pret

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.
  - jquery 8y ago
    I agree, but would you make it illegal to show the images? These are being blocked at the ISP level (in NZ) which is extreme.
- vl 8y ago
  Even better question if currently well-known leaked video of US gunship firing and killing children among others and now hosted on YouTube should be taken down. How YouTube and Facebook should know which videos to take down?
  - ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
    I think that is a different category again. The US govt. didn't share that video to profit from it in terms of driving recruitment, etc. That video was shared in criticism of them.
ikeboy 8y ago
There's nothing illegal about sharing this, unlike child pornography.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Which doesn't mean Facebook couldn't ban them anyway.
- Rychard 8y ago
  A company can ban users from their platform for any reason, though.
- avh02 8y ago
  IIRC the content is illegal in New Zealand - remember reading a mention of it's possession being banned due to the video being objectionable content or something
- RIMR 8y ago
  We're not talking about legal compulsion - we're talking about doing what's right. In the grand scheme of things, the murder of 49 people is objectively worse than the rape of a single child. Facebook shouldn't have a problem getting rid of people who upload this, as anyone who would do so is not the kind of person that Facebook should want as users. But at the end of the day, Facebook only cares about money.
  - ng12 8y ago
    Facebook bans people who violate the TOS. I don't know why you think they don't.
    - WhatIsDukkha 8y ago
      Because there is zero indication of it in this statement.
- amanzi 8y ago
  This content was classified as illegal in NZ and so Facebook needs to comply with NZ law if they wish to continue operating here.
panarky 8y ago
There's a peculiar "Facebook style" in their public communications. On the surface, their words appear simple, straightforward and open, as if there's nothing to hide. But when you read closely, their words obscure the truth and distort reality. They quote highly specific and heavily lawyered facts that may be technically true, while remaining silent on facts that would give real insight. Facebook's words support their strategy to "delay, deny and deflect" [0]. Here are a few examples from this post. > We removed the attacker’s video within minutes of their outreach to us The word "their" refers to the New Zealand Police. This is Facebook's deflection strategy in action. Facebook is responsible for what they disseminate on their platform, not the NZ police. Facebook doesn't disclose exactly how long they continued to distribute this poison, from start to end. Instead they hide behind the NZ police, shirking their own responsibility for their own platform. The truth is that Facebook continued to disseminate this material for many hours, not mere "minutes" as they would have us believe. > Including the views during the live broadcast, the video was viewed about 4000 times in total before being removed from Facebook Seems straightforward but it's anything but. Facebook wants uncritical journalists to quote "4000 times" but that's a meaningless number if "the video" only refers to the original livestreamed video. Facebook's carefully worded statement may be technically true but it's highly misleading. What about the hundreds of thousands of copies that Facebook disseminated? How many views did they get, almost certainly orders of magnitude greater than 4,000. And what is the definition of a "view"? Is Facebook getting tricky with definitions, so it only counts as a view if the user watched 20% or 50% or 100% of it? > 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 So 300,000 copies were NOT blocked. Facebook doesn't tell us how many views the copies got because they want you to assume it's only 4000. Facebook doesn't disclose long it took to identify and remove the copies because they want us to anchor on misleading stats like "4000" and "minutes". > Before we were alerted to the video, a user on 8chan posted a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site. Deflection. See, it's an industry-wide problem, it's not just Facebook. > This incident highlights the importance of industry cooperation More deflection. Don't regulate Facebook, even though we're responsible for 90% or more of the weaponization of social media. Instead, waste more years searching for "industry-wide" solutions and self-regulation. > We identified abusive content on other social media sites Even more deflection. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...
Glyptodon 8y ago
My issue with it is that we live in a world of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Scrubbing stuff like this from everywhere is just going to make people invent conspiracy theories about it being fake or suppressed to hide stuff "the government" doesn't want you to know, etc. So I don't see how hiding the artifacts of evil from the public helps anything beyond creating a Streisand-type effect. Likewise, I don't think it's correct to assume that everyone sharing something like this has ill intent. Many people feel like the media is trying to hide the truth of events like this from them. My own Grandmother constantly asks me how I know what's true when there seem to be multiple stories and versions of everything because what she sees is mostly people telling her a (slanted) version of events and yelling at each other, maybe with a carefully selected 5 second soundbite, or stock footage, and not the event itself. Now I'm not saying I think the footage should be plastered everywhere. I'm not saying I think it should shared all over the place on FB or YouTube, etc. But I think we live in an era where attempts at gate-keeping and information control, even when well intentioned, just add to the poison rotting the public sphere. So all of the above said, I'm not entirely certain what the best and most appropriate response is. I'm just fairly sure that trying to bury everything isn't the greatest plan -- the worst case is that the kind of people who'd be prone to lionizing its contents find it anyway, whether from file sharing sites, niche forums, torrents, FireFox share links, the dark web, etc., and get more radicalized and more prone to do doing something similar, while the larger public, absent knowledge of some potentially evocative and significant moment that could become a rallying cultural touchstone against hate, kind of just muddle on with business as usual. (Now obviously I don't know if there's any such evocative moment in the footage, but if there is... well, nobody's really seeing it.) It seems a bit similar to how many people tended to always believe police stories about "resisting arrest" until police started getting caught on camera just plain beating or shooting people. We don't really want to be seeing people get beat and shot by police on camera, and sure, there are people who do take grotesque pleasure in it, but by and large it has to come out somehow for people to see the problem and come around to wanting changes or reforms. I also think the expectations being bandied around for internet sites and social networks are quite extreme. I heard NPR interviewing some expert advocating for people to be required to have licenses and use their real names in order to live stream anything not one or to days later and it was another "is this real life" moment (of many in the last few years). Not to mention the idea that things of this nature could always be peremptorily detected and blocked, which I have the impression there are people advocating for, seems beyond what's realistically possible. In any case, I don't have the answers, but as seems to be common, everyone always wants things to be simple and black and white with some sort of simple and obvious blanket policy that will be magic, especially when something has emotional resonance. And I just don't think we live in that world.
comex 8y ago
Well, the creation of the video involved a horrific crime, but now that it's been created, there isn't necessarily additional harm in sharing it. Admittedly, there are potential harms: the more popular the video becomes online, the more it may inspire future terrorists, both to commit terrorism in the first place and to livestream it. On the other hand, though, it's always been true that regular news coverage of terrorism and the resulting wide public attention can inspire future terrorism, yet nobody has proposed clamping down on that. At most, some propose to avoid saying the killer's name in order to make the infamy less personal, but that's a half-measure at best. In particular, I bet the livestream made more impact on the public through the news using it as an additional gruesome detail to talk about than through people actually watching it. (Counterpoint: If platforms hadn't censored it as heavily, more people would have watched it, and if they had more effectively blocked reuploads, fewer.) There's also the factor that the killer knew his video would be shared and that that probably formed part of his motivation for committing the crime in the first place; regardless of its effect on future crimes, sharing his video sort of retroactively justifies his decision to commit this one, and indeed may make him more satisfied while in custody. But I don't particularly care about the killer's present level of satisfaction, and the presence or absence of retroactive justification will not affect the past. Then on the opposite side, what's the benefit of sharing it? Not much, to be sure. But some people have morbid curiosity. Personally, I vaguely considered watching it just to test how I'd react to a real-life version of the kind of violence I've seen so many times in fiction: whether I'd be able to maintain a similar emotional detachment (knowing that the horror was real, but also that my watching it or not wouldn't change what happened), or whether I'd get overwhelmed have to shut it off. I said I vaguely considered it: I quickly decided that such an experiment would be really ill-advised, given that even minor psychological harm to myself would vastly outweigh the trivial benefit of satisfying my curiosity. See also Andy Carvin's account of actually being diagnosed with PTSD after years of watching horrific videos in his role as a reporter: https://medium.com/dfrlab/dont-watch-the-new-zealand-mosque-attack-video-just-don-t-e7d30c7ca96a https://medium.com/dfrlab/dont-watch-the-new-zealand-mosque-... ...And yet part of me preferred to be able to make that choice for myself, and I wouldn't judge anyone for making the opposite decision. As for child pornography, the situation does have some parallels – creating the photo or video is generally (see later in paragraph) a horrific crime, sharing it not quite as much. One large difference is that if the victim is still alive (whether or nor they're still a child), additional people watching further victimizes them. Partly because it may end up affecting their lives in the future, if any of those people go on to interact with them, but partly because they just have an inherent privacy right not to have people getting titillated at them, regardless of whether it directly affects them. In that respect it's similar to revenge porn, where the original creation of the photos/videos may have been done with the subject's knowledge and consent, in which case it's not morally wrong at all, but weaponizing them by posting them publicly is wrong (and a crime in an increasing number of jurisdictions). Same may apply to photos/videos of children which were created [supposedly] without sexual intent but later shared with it (the reason I said "generally" before). If the victim is dead, it's a bit more morally thorny, but still quite different: unlike with terrorism, you don't have the news as a legitimate 'side channel', so the connection is less attenuated between sharing child pornography and others being inspired to make more of it.

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.
- jquery 8y ago
  I agree, but would you make it illegal to show the images? These are being blocked at the ISP level (in NZ) which is extreme.
vl 8y ago
Even better question if currently well-known leaked video of US gunship firing and killing children among others and now hosted on YouTube should be taken down. How YouTube and Facebook should know which videos to take down?
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
  I think that is a different category again. The US govt. didn't share that video to profit from it in terms of driving recruitment, etc. That video was shared in criticism of them.

ikeboy 8y ago

There's nothing illegal about sharing this, unlike child pornography.

skybrian 8y ago
Which doesn't mean Facebook couldn't ban them anyway.
Rychard 8y ago
A company can ban users from their platform for any reason, though.
avh02 8y ago
IIRC the content is illegal in New Zealand - remember reading a mention of it's possession being banned due to the video being objectionable content or something
RIMR 8y ago
We're not talking about legal compulsion - we're talking about doing what's right. In the grand scheme of things, the murder of 49 people is objectively worse than the rape of a single child. Facebook shouldn't have a problem getting rid of people who upload this, as anyone who would do so is not the kind of person that Facebook should want as users. But at the end of the day, Facebook only cares about money.
- ng12 8y ago
  Facebook bans people who violate the TOS. I don't know why you think they don't.
  - WhatIsDukkha 8y ago
    Because there is zero indication of it in this statement.
amanzi 8y ago
This content was classified as illegal in NZ and so Facebook needs to comply with NZ law if they wish to continue operating here.

panarky 8y ago

There's a peculiar "Facebook style" in their public communications. On the surface, their words appear simple, straightforward and open, as if there's nothing to hide. But when you read closely, their words obscure the truth and distort reality. They quote highly specific and heavily lawyered facts that may be technically true, while remaining silent on facts that would give real insight. Facebook's words support their strategy to "delay, deny and deflect" [0]. Here are a few examples from this post. > We removed the attacker’s video within minutes of their outreach to us The word "their" refers to the New Zealand Police. This is Facebook's deflection strategy in action. Facebook is responsible for what they disseminate on their platform, not the NZ police. Facebook doesn't disclose exactly how long they continued to distribute this poison, from start to end. Instead they hide behind the NZ police, shirking their own responsibility for their own platform. The truth is that Facebook continued to disseminate this material for many hours, not mere "minutes" as they would have us believe. > Including the views during the live broadcast, the video was viewed about 4000 times in total before being removed from Facebook Seems straightforward but it's anything but. Facebook wants uncritical journalists to quote "4000 times" but that's a meaningless number if "the video" only refers to the original livestreamed video. Facebook's carefully worded statement may be technically true but it's highly misleading. What about the hundreds of thousands of copies that Facebook disseminated? How many views did they get, almost certainly orders of magnitude greater than 4,000. And what is the definition of a "view"? Is Facebook getting tricky with definitions, so it only counts as a view if the user watched 20% or 50% or 100% of it? > 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 So 300,000 copies were NOT blocked. Facebook doesn't tell us how many views the copies got because they want you to assume it's only 4000. Facebook doesn't disclose long it took to identify and remove the copies because they want us to anchor on misleading stats like "4000" and "minutes". > Before we were alerted to the video, a user on 8chan posted a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site. Deflection. See, it's an industry-wide problem, it's not just Facebook. > This incident highlights the importance of industry cooperation More deflection. Don't regulate Facebook, even though we're responsible for 90% or more of the weaponization of social media. Instead, waste more years searching for "industry-wide" solutions and self-regulation. > We identified abusive content on other social media sites Even more deflection. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...

Glyptodon 8y ago

My issue with it is that we live in a world of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Scrubbing stuff like this from everywhere is just going to make people invent conspiracy theories about it being fake or suppressed to hide stuff "the government" doesn't want you to know, etc. So I don't see how hiding the artifacts of evil from the public helps anything beyond creating a Streisand-type effect. Likewise, I don't think it's correct to assume that everyone sharing something like this has ill intent. Many people feel like the media is trying to hide the truth of events like this from them. My own Grandmother constantly asks me how I know what's true when there seem to be multiple stories and versions of everything because what she sees is mostly people telling her a (slanted) version of events and yelling at each other, maybe with a carefully selected 5 second soundbite, or stock footage, and not the event itself. Now I'm not saying I think the footage should be plastered everywhere. I'm not saying I think it should shared all over the place on FB or YouTube, etc. But I think we live in an era where attempts at gate-keeping and information control, even when well intentioned, just add to the poison rotting the public sphere. So all of the above said, I'm not entirely certain what the best and most appropriate response is. I'm just fairly sure that trying to bury everything isn't the greatest plan -- the worst case is that the kind of people who'd be prone to lionizing its contents find it anyway, whether from file sharing sites, niche forums, torrents, FireFox share links, the dark web, etc., and get more radicalized and more prone to do doing something similar, while the larger public, absent knowledge of some potentially evocative and significant moment that could become a rallying cultural touchstone against hate, kind of just muddle on with business as usual. (Now obviously I don't know if there's any such evocative moment in the footage, but if there is... well, nobody's really seeing it.) It seems a bit similar to how many people tended to always believe police stories about "resisting arrest" until police started getting caught on camera just plain beating or shooting people. We don't really want to be seeing people get beat and shot by police on camera, and sure, there are people who do take grotesque pleasure in it, but by and large it has to come out somehow for people to see the problem and come around to wanting changes or reforms. I also think the expectations being bandied around for internet sites and social networks are quite extreme. I heard NPR interviewing some expert advocating for people to be required to have licenses and use their real names in order to live stream anything not one or to days later and it was another "is this real life" moment (of many in the last few years). Not to mention the idea that things of this nature could always be peremptorily detected and blocked, which I have the impression there are people advocating for, seems beyond what's realistically possible. In any case, I don't have the answers, but as seems to be common, everyone always wants things to be simple and black and white with some sort of simple and obvious blanket policy that will be magic, especially when something has emotional resonance. And I just don't think we live in that world.

comex 8y ago

Well, the creation of the video involved a horrific crime, but now that it's been created, there isn't necessarily additional harm in sharing it. Admittedly, there are potential harms: the more popular the video becomes online, the more it may inspire future terrorists, both to commit terrorism in the first place and to livestream it. On the other hand, though, it's always been true that regular news coverage of terrorism and the resulting wide public attention can inspire future terrorism, yet nobody has proposed clamping down on that. At most, some propose to avoid saying the killer's name in order to make the infamy less personal, but that's a half-measure at best. In particular, I bet the livestream made more impact on the public through the news using it as an additional gruesome detail to talk about than through people actually watching it. (Counterpoint: If platforms hadn't censored it as heavily, more people would have watched it, and if they had more effectively blocked reuploads, fewer.) There's also the factor that the killer knew his video would be shared and that that probably formed part of his motivation for committing the crime in the first place; regardless of its effect on future crimes, sharing his video sort of retroactively justifies his decision to commit this one, and indeed may make him more satisfied while in custody. But I don't particularly care about the killer's present level of satisfaction, and the presence or absence of retroactive justification will not affect the past. Then on the opposite side, what's the benefit of sharing it? Not much, to be sure. But some people have morbid curiosity. Personally, I vaguely considered watching it just to test how I'd react to a real-life version of the kind of violence I've seen so many times in fiction: whether I'd be able to maintain a similar emotional detachment (knowing that the horror was real, but also that my watching it or not wouldn't change what happened), or whether I'd get overwhelmed have to shut it off. I said I vaguely considered it: I quickly decided that such an experiment would be really ill-advised, given that even minor psychological harm to myself would vastly outweigh the trivial benefit of satisfying my curiosity. See also Andy Carvin's account of actually being diagnosed with PTSD after years of watching horrific videos in his role as a reporter: https://medium.com/dfrlab/dont-watch-the-new-zealand-mosque-attack-video-just-don-t-e7d30c7ca96a https://medium.com/dfrlab/dont-watch-the-new-zealand-mosque-... ...And yet part of me preferred to be able to make that choice for myself, and I wouldn't judge anyone for making the opposite decision. As for child pornography, the situation does have some parallels – creating the photo or video is generally (see later in paragraph) a horrific crime, sharing it not quite as much. One large difference is that if the victim is still alive (whether or nor they're still a child), additional people watching further victimizes them. Partly because it may end up affecting their lives in the future, if any of those people go on to interact with them, but partly because they just have an inherent privacy right not to have people getting titillated at them, regardless of whether it directly affects them. In that respect it's similar to revenge porn, where the original creation of the photos/videos may have been done with the subject's knowledge and consent, in which case it's not morally wrong at all, but weaponizing them by posting them publicly is wrong (and a crime in an increasing number of jurisdictions). Same may apply to photos/videos of children which were created [supposedly] without sexual intent but later shared with it (the reason I said "generally" before). If the victim is dead, it's a bit more morally thorny, but still quite different: unlike with terrorism, you don't have the news as a legitimate 'side channel', so the connection is less attenuated between sharing child pornography and others being inspired to make more of it.