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.
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-...