The company also said it “hashed” the video, so that visually similar videos could be detected and automatically deleted.įacebook later said it had removed 4.5 million pieces of content related to the attack.Ī year after the Christchurch shooting, however, TTP was able to identify eight videos of the massacre that are still available on Facebook. Three days after the mass murder in New Zealand, Facebook said it removed 1.5 million copies of the video in the first 24 hours after the massacre, the vast majority of them before they were uploaded to the platform. Facebook removed the stream after it ended, but not before it was replicated and spread across the social network and the broader internet, including YouTube, Twitter and Reddit. The Christchurch massacre-in which a heavily armed man with a helmet-mounted camera livestreamed his killing spree in a pair of mosques-was New Zealand’s worst-ever terrorist attack. The continuing presence of the horrifying images on the social network-12 months after Facebook first outlined the steps it was taking to remove the videos-highlights the company’s inability, or unwillingness, to rid its platform of gruesomely violent and hateful content, even in cases that have attracted intense global scrutiny.įollowing the Christchurch attack, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said people have “rightly questioned how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the attack,” adding, “We have heard feedback that we must do more – and we agree.”īut the New Zealand shooting shows that even when Facebook knows what it’s looking for-in this case, a specific video image-the artificial intelligence systems that it so often touts as the answer to its content woes have failed to do the job.

All of them indicate they’ve been active since shortly after the shooting on March 15, 2019.

The Tech Transparency Project (TTP) identified eight versions of the attack video on Facebook. A year after a gunman used Facebook to livestream a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 people dead and sparked an international outcry over violence on social media, videos of the massacre can still be found on Facebook today.

Christchurch shooting video live stream