>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?

Are you in favor of Facebook freely disseminating ISIS recruitment material?

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.

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-...

Damn, that's a LOT of people with access to the original source, or a copy of a copy, having a really strong desire to share the video on their personal or throwaway account.

The killer livestreamed to Facebook and people captured that video and re-uploaded back to Facebook 1,500,000 times.

A cursory read of their statement would have you believe it was only viewed 4,000 times.

This is criminally dishonest.

1.2m "blocked at upload". Not shares or links.

Remaining 300k were not "blocked at upload".

This is why Facebook's specific numbers like "4000 times" are so insidious and deceptive.

It's what they intentionally neglect to say that's important here.

That's deceptive because it only covers the original video and not the copies which is really irrelevant.

And it's deceptive because it starts the clock when NZ police alerted Facebook, even though it's Facebook's responsibility to manage their platform, not the police's responsibility.

If the video was re-uploaded and not blocked 300,000 times, then total views is most likely in the millions.

And Facebook continued to disseminate this material for thousands of minutes.

I can only conclude these more important numbers are intentionally excluded from Facebook's report because Facebook wants people to focus on the other, meaningless numbers instead.

That's deceptive.

Instead Facebook is publishing PR that does more to mislead than inform.

And they're doing it with simple language that makes it appear they're being open and honest when they're actually hiding the important bits in order to deceive.

This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435419), states that according to NZ law, the video was "born illegal." [1]

[1] term inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret

Similarly if someone murders someone it's a crime when the event happens, even if it is not found out until later.

In all cases ignorance of the law is not a defence.

And if someone does this from another country then most countries have extradition treaties in place.

I live in the USA. Barring a few very specific categories I'm allowed to post almost anything. At worst I can get sued for refusing to take it down.

> And if someone does this from another country then most countries have extradition treaties in place.

What? I can violate all the New Zealand laws I like. I live in a sovereign nation very far away.

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.

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.

Yep, saw a 4chan thread about how "the govt took down the video because they made a mistake that reveals it's a false flag!" However, it was a very weak argument, and even most of the usually-conspiracy-loving people on 4chan weren't buying it.

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-...

...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.

I would add, emotional harm to the families of the victims as well. If there was a video of someone in my family getting murdered out there, I'm sure it would cause me considerable stress to know that people were intentionally watching it happen, and it was being widely distributed.