Page 12 - aruba-today-20220519

A12 TECHNOLOGY
Thursday 19 May 2022

An investigator works at the scene of a shooting at a supermarket, in Buffalo, N.Y., Monday, May
16, 2022.
Associated Press
Livestreamed carnage: Tech’s hard

lessons from mass killings

By BARBARA ORTUTAY, all of them Black, at a Buf- livestreams. Still, not ev-
HALELUYA HADERO and falo supermarket Saturday erything went according
MATT O’BRIEN had mounted a GoPro to plan. By most accounts
AP Technology Writers camera to his helmet to the platforms responded
These days, mass shooters stream his assault live on more quickly to halt the
like the one now held in the Twitch, the video game spread of the Buffalo vid-
Buffalo, New York, super- streaming platform used eo than they did after the
market attack don’t stop by another shooter in 2019 2019 Christchurch shoot-
with planning out their bru- who killed two people at a ing, said Megan Squire, a
tal attacks. They also cre- synagogue in Halle, Ger- senior fellow and technol-
ate marketing plans while many. He had previously ogy expert at the Southern
arranging to livestream outlined his plan in a de- Poverty Law Center.
their massacres on social tailed but rambling set of Another Twitch user watch-
platforms in hopes of fo- online diary entries that ing the live video likely
menting more violence. were apparently posted flagged it to the attention
Sites like Twitter, Face- publicly ahead of the at- of Twitch’s content mod-
book and now the game- tack, although it’s not clear erators, she said, which
streaming platform Twitch how may people might would have helped Twitch
have learned painful les- have seen them. His goal: pull down the stream less
sons from dealing with the to inspire copycats and than two minutes after the
violent videos that often spread his racist beliefs. Af- first gunshots per a com-
accompany such shoot- ter all, he was a copycat pany spokesperson. Twitch
ings. But experts are calling himself. has not said how the video
for a broader discussion He decided against was flagged. In a state-
around livestreams, includ- streaming on Facebook, ment about the shooting
ing whether they should as yet another mass shoot- Tuesday, the company
exist at all, since once such er did when he killed 51 expressed thanks “for the
videos go online, they’re people at two mosques user reports that help us
almost impossible to erase in Christchurch, New Zea- catch and remove harm-
completely. land, three years ago. Un- ful content in real time.”
The self-described white like Twitch, Facebook re- “In this case, they did
supremacist gunman who quires users to sign up for an pretty well,” Squire said.
police say killed 10 people, account in order to watch “The fact that the video is
so hard to find right now is
proof of that.”
That was little consola-
tion to family members
of the victims. Celestine
Chaney’s son, Wayne
Jones, found out his moth-
er had been killed when
someone sent him a vid-
eo screenshot from the
livestream. Not long after,
he saw the video itself. q