A terror attack was literally live streamed on Facebook.

Wasn't Facebook racing to take down the video?

Which one and why is live streaming (aka what TV news occasionally does) bad?

The one in Christchurch NZ was streamed by the shooter.

Christchurch shooting in New Zealand. It was stomach churning, don't watch it.

I won't. I'm just trying to determine what this has to do with showing the content. Authorities could have benefitted by seeing the stream, so this isn't a clearcut issue. Do you remember live 9/11 coverage? Were you telling people not to watch that?

It's the incitement that we should be concerned about, and balancing restrictions with peaceful freedom of expression.

I mean, I watched as people on Twitter and Facebook Live coordinated to torch one of my favorites neighborhoods in L.A. this summer. I saw looters tweet about breaking into a drug store in Sherman Oaks. You can't say it's just talk there. The damage to Melrose and DTLA had to have been in the tens of millions, if not more.

Perhaps shutting down all social media would be a net gain for society. I will miss my "buy nothing" group though.

And the fellows that organise this and boast about it on Twitter will never, ever get banned.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. Can you please not do that? It's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. This is because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.

I will be very glad to stick to following the rules and limiting myself to technology discussions.

Could you please ban these topics then ? After all, this thread is a political discussion and imbalanced or biased statements naturally invite responses to correct them.

That's not an option—it's not that easy. I've explained why this is so many times, most recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723581. If you check out that post and the ones it links to, you'll find thorough explanations. If you read some of those and still have a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is. Just please make sure that you've familiarized yourself with the material and understand the constraints we're subject to. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why that won't work.

The bottom line is that a certain amount of political discussion is inevitable here, and users (all of us, on all sides) need to learn the skills of doing that while remaining within the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's definitely doable, as many HN commenters demonstrate every day.

did you report them? was there any follow-up action? i'm not condoning it but it's unreasonable to expect them to be able to ban IN REAL TIME stuff like this if they aren't already observing specific people.

not to mention one of the instigators of this entire thing has been the president of the united states. his actions have consequences that are 100x order of magnitude than your rioter on the street.

Of course I reported them. Nothing happened. Twitter was totally supportive of everything that happened in June. They even put up billboards bragging about how their platform helped protests grow. During a pandemic.