>> I think censorship is not going to fix the issue, people have the right to see and face evil if they so wish to and have a strong heart.

It's the inadvertent exposure that's more of a problem. The access is just so easy. If you were browsing at the time it was happening, you almost couldn't not watch the video because it was so prevelant.

I'm imagining a 16 year old coming across it, and wondering how they process it.

I made a conscious choice/effort not to watch it and 99% succeeded. But there are moments I couldn't miss because they were everywhere.

By the way, that's not burying my head in the sand. It's more about respecting the dead and not needing to see it to understand the darkness in some people.

>I'm imagining a 16 year old coming across it, and wondering how they process it.

I saw ISIS propaganda videos at around the age of 16. The ones where they kill people in various ways. Nothing else in life has made me disgusted by other people as much as those videos did. I'm reminded of the videos when I read about ISIS. It strengthens my view that ISIS is a group that needs to be fought.

I'm curious, on what sites/services did you find the video so prevalent it was hard to avoid?

Clips were autoplaying in the live updates tab of twitter.

I'm a heavy user of the Twitter web and iPhone clients, and I'm not sure what you mean by "live updates" tab. Is that something in TweetDeck or another client?

If you (or parent poster ~TheTruth1234) found this unwanted, wouldn't unfollowing or blocking the source accounts be an adequate remedy?

(It is a embarrassing mess, but par for Twitter's lackadaisical approach software quality, that Twitter web often ignores their own settings' "don't autoplay" toggle, and has for many months.)

If you need to ask me that ... I congratulate you on your restrained use of social media.

I honestly consider myself somebody who uses social media perhaps too much, and yet I still didn't see anything like a video at all - I don't know if it's a social media bubble, or perhaps a feature of the country I'm in. I saw the news that the attack had happened almost instantly, but not even on places like reddit did I see videos of the event.

Are you saying that the video was being posted to social media as "shock videos" (ie. the viewer did not know that it was violent before watching it)? If so, why is censorship needed, rather than a NSFW/NSFL label?

I'm saying the video was readily available as "news".

I don't care how it's dealt with, but I prefer it not to be a part of my regular online diet.

So, how does having it be "available as 'news'", behind an intentional click or two for those who feel they want or even "need" to know, affect your online diet?

Can't you just pass it over without clicking, like with the hundreds/thousands of other offered-but-unwanted links one encounters in daily web/app usage?

"Intentional" ....

It was beneath the top trending hashtag on twitter. Initially, it was absolutely not obvious what the video was that kept appearing. Sometimes it would auto play.

Obviously rapidly it became clear what was going on ... and then it was a basic game to escape ... and then to just switch off social media.

Honestly ... there are some f@cking weird questions asked about this subject on HN.

Do you mind if I ask your age and general location? I'm really curious.

Thanks for the appreciation, but still wondering which specific sites/services presented you with images/video you didn't want to see.

(I'm a pretty heavy user of social media, especially Twitter & Facebook, but as none of my friends/followees/groups posted raw video, I only saw the headlines and generic 'aftermath' photos common on mainstream news sites.)

In the future, would you please add an additional sentence to comments like this one where you answer the question?

You think you understand, but until you really see something or someone go from living and breath to abruptly dead, you don't.

As for the 16 year old, it wasn't long ago that by 16 you'd have seen a few of your siblings and friends succumbed to illness or accident.

Death used to be part of life and we dealt with it.

I'm not saying we need to be in denial of death. I'm well versed, thanks.

But that doesn't mean I need or want to tune into the live-action progress of a disgusting, terrorist attack.

And I'm not saying it should be played in time square. But hiding it from the "normal" parts of the internet doesn't do anyone any favors.

What about the fact the he wanted the video viewed and his crap to be read? Not participating in something he wants is (another) motivation for avoiding his creations.

He's a terrorist, he intended to terrorize. Looking him in the eye and telling him to fuck off is the best thing you can do.

Should we assume that any view plays into the aims of the attack, or is there a way to view this footage that thwarts its goals? If there is a way, what can we do to increase the number of people who use it (given that they view the footage at all?)

If I open my browser, pop on to twitter, and the video is right there waiting under the top trending topic ... it might as well be Time Square.

So click "hide" and carry on.

Or Twitter can implement a "do not autoplay sensitive content" feature.

I wish they didn't autoplay anything.

I think you can turn that off in your account settings, actually (it may be called something like "data saver" or the like)

The fact that browsers, websites, and apps autoplay video, often with sound, doesn't help.

I've posted a ... friendly notice to Google about this.

A million times this.

Every public interaction you make is an excuse for Facebook to shove it in the face of your friends. If you see this and angry-like it, it pops up on a few hundred more feeds. Rinse, repeat. Viral.

Facebook is particularly bad because their moderation team appears to be staffed exclusively by a pile of libertarian twelve year olds. I've flagged local drug sales, sexually explicit content (no, not casual or functional nudity) many times and had my flags rejected.

Why do you think the reaction would be any different from any violent action movie? If you don’t know the context, you also don’t know that those people actually died.

I did know the context.

Then it cannot be “inadvertent exposure”.

From reading a lot of the anti censorship comments popping up around FBs activities here, it feels like it is actually partly fueled by the deplatforming actions social networks have been taking here in the US, which have been political, and very anti-free speech.

It doesn’t all seem purely about this case of whether a social network should be required to distribute propaganda videos of mass murder.

Personally I don’t get why people are okay with distribution of child porn being illegal, but think that distribution of mass murder videos shouldn’t be illegal AND ALSO now apparently must be required of any internet company.

It’s simply the matter of where we draw the line. Child porn is nearly universally considered past the line. Bestiality is predominantly considered to be past the line. Videos on how to make weapons or learn self defence / martial arts (all mechanisms by which violence can be inflicted) are placed past the line or not past it in the laws in many parts of the world. Hateful and vitriolic rants will be illegal in some places and legal in others.

Is it really so hard to understand that some people draw the line between the two things you mentioned? Especially when those advocating it not be illegal, may consider the video of mass murder to be news, or audiovisual documentation worthy of preserving as evidence of the events that have transpired.

> Is it really so hard to understand that some people draw the line between the two things you mentioned?

I know that people draw a line, that’s implicit from me saying that people make the distinction between those two things. What I said was personally I don’t understand why they draw that line.

> news, or audiovisual documentation worthy of preserving as evidence of the events that have transpired.

They can archive and preserve it themselves, or using services that want to facilitate that, and be subject to whatever local laws may permit or prohibit that. As you said laws vary by jurisdiction.

The anger at FB for not wanting to be party to disseminating this video of a horrific crime really is hard to understand.

I really don’t see this as an issue of censorship but protecting rights. These are not footages from public places. Churches, mosques and other places of worship are not public places for the most part. In addition, Facebook is a commercial platform where they make money based on user activities.

The video is being distributed in whatsapp groups in countries where education level of people is pretty low. This is going to be propaganda for more violence in the world.

World is complicated and no censorship doesn't work when a society has 50% that never went to school.

So we instead of spending more money on education in those places, censor the shit out of everything remotely questionable.

That sounds like a good long term solution!

I have not seen the video. I can't say I want to either. I can see how censorship would discourage others from repeating the atrocity. Someone else was talking about how scary it was the events that took place occurred so calmly, and with such ease. I don't believe most people can face watching that without negative consequences for their own mental health.

You put your finger on a key issue, which is consent. Many people were shown this film of a brutal mass murder with no warning due to autoplaying video on news or social media sites.

> I think censorship is not going to fix the issue, people have the right to see and face evil if they so wish to and have a strong heart.

I'd like to pentest that. Here are some real and hypothetical cases that should be easier to defend:

* thousands of people access scientific journal articles through scihub

* thousands of people copy books from an illegal mirror of the corpus of digital books from UC libraries that Google scanned for Google books

* millions of people sharing copyrighted digital music and videos

Do you also publicly defend without reservation the behavior of the people in my bullet points above on free speech grounds? Should such users and publishers be defended in their endeavors on free speech grounds?

It’s strange to ask that on HN of all places, because it’s known that loads of people here are for all 3 points. Plenty of people here are against copyright and patents entirely, even.

As a user, Yes. As a publisher no.

Absolutely.

I think anyone who seeks out - or worse, redistributes - this video, is complicit in furthering the propagandistic aims of the attacker.

Just as anyone who censors it is complicit in eroding human rights?

No.

> people have the right to see and face evil if they so wish to and have a strong heart.

Not on a site someone else owns and operates they don’t.

other put another way the owner of the site has the right to not show the face of evil.

Depends on the jurisdiction too I’d think.

By that logic we should stop censoring child porn, because it doesn't solve the issue by itself.

I can tell you after hours of meditating on it it is intrinsicly even disgusting to watch and morally fucked and you need to visit a therapist.

Edit: isn't that hard to find because of Bing article on it https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/unsafe-search/

What could be classified as hate speech more than a self videoed murderous rampage? Why the fuck should that be given a platform? Go search the dank corners of the internet for that shit if your "strong heart" desires it. What sick mind desires to give this piece of shit a bigger soap box?

I think if I was one of the people murdered, I would want others to see what kind of terror I went through. A video triggers emotions in people that they don't experience when they just hear about another unfortunate statistic. Maybe that would inspire more people to put effort into preventing these situations.

Why does me seeing a murderous rampage equate with me somehow having the ability to affect such events? Like I'm somehow indifferent to this until I see it and now I'm imbued with the will and ability to make it stop? How does me seeing this give me the ability to make it stop? I think this is terroristic and shouldn't be given a platform because that is exactly what this sick piece of shit wants.

So, you would prefer never to hear or even know about events for which you can not directly affect change?

Do you feel shame for your poor reading comprehension? I said nothing even close to that. I was well aware of these events and do not have any objection to being aware, but I didn't need to witness the murderers video. I speak only towards giving platform to terrorist videos. It seems like there is this idiotic idea that gore perpetrated by the filmer should be granted global freedom of speech and platform providers are infringing on this universal right. Which is dumb as fuck because such rights don't exist nor should they. Why do you get up in arms when these total shitheads aren't getting red carpet treatment?

Maybe you can go ask these people being murdered on video for the world to see if they consent to the broadcast of their death.

Oh wait.

Your belief that you'd be ok with it or even find that a positive outcome means pretty much nothing unless you're one of the people on that video.