Update on New Zealand
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
[1] "Bad" is a very loose term that changes over time. When advocating for this kind of tech and strict content rules, we are also codifying a set of moral standards to define "bad", so we should tread carefully. Not everything is as clearcut bad as this video, and it's not a huge jump to apply this to other "objectionable" media, which is not the world I want to be pushing for.
These questions aren’t as hard as you think.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/fac...
And I don’t think distributed or decentralised platforms aren’t even close to the alternative you think they are.
Yes, just let's block whatever you don't like. What could go wrong?
Imagine a person like yourself, mainstream opinions, politically correct.
We now know he would be wrong on a number of things.
I mostly agree with you on a case-by-case basis it seems, but a little humility might be good.
Go back 50 years and "race mixing" was taboo.
I'm talking about limiting the freedom of anyone in theory talking about subjects in a way that results in physical violence or substantially harms society to the point of losing a substantial number of lives on one single private platform in large groups. I'm not talking about death camps, but the distinction seems to be lost on the crowd flitting down the slippery slope.
Their monster is out of the cage and it's making frightening changes to society, rapidly and globally.
I have an extremely strong bias in favor of free expression, but Facebook altered the playing field.
Do we really want ISIS beheading videos and terrorist recruitment to circulate freely, amplified and accelerated by Facebook's social graph? [0]
Do we really want disinformation fanned out instantly to friends of friends that incites mob violence? [1]
No, I don't want to live in a world where a faceless ML automatically censors everything I do. But if that's the only way to control the monster Facebook created, then maybe it's better to switch off the monster entirely.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/facebook-modera...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/facebook-to-re...
I suppose in at least one way they did, because mail fraud is a crime with special extra penalties. But overall, it seems like we've accepted the idea that humans are humans, some do good things and some do bad things, and greater communication amplifies their ability to do both.
Are we now saying that we've amplified as much as we want to, and we should stop? Or maybe we're saying that, because this is all taking place on a computer, we now think it should be a solvable problem, when it wasn't before with a telephone.
The good people who operate the postal service, courier services and telephone networks also deploy very capable security tools to ensure their services aren't used to create mayhem.
It's not perfect, as occasionally FedEx will deliver a bomb, or the post office will deliver an envelope with anthrax powder, or a threat will be delivered by telephone.
But you can tell that the security tools are operating effectively because these events are rare and isolated. When was the last time 50 people died because of DHL or Verizon?
In contrast, Facebook released their creation on the world without the tools needed to keep it safe. Now they've lost control and are trying to deflect blame on "the industry".
We cannot allow Facebook to escape accountability. It's their responsibility, not "the community" or "the industry".
If they cannot fix it, and fast, then they must be rigorously regulated to disable features that cause more harm than good.
Zuckerberg's latest strategy is to encrypt everything so even Facebook can't read it. This is one more cynical attempt to force others to bear the negative externalities of the monster he created.
> In contrast, Facebook released their creation on the world without the tools needed to keep it safe.
Instead we should be more like China. They keep their citizens safe, right?
Yes, free speech has negative externalities. But imagine world without it.
When you understand why the terrorist selected Facebook to livestream instead of hundreds of other services, then you'll understand why Facebook is the problem and not livestreaming itself.
Other platforms that could have been used: youtube, twitch, periscope, vimeo, younow, dailymotion, ooyala, even IBM has a live video streaming offering.
>It's not perfect, as occasionally FedEx will deliver a bomb, or the post office will deliver an envelope with anthrax powder, or a threat will be delivered by telephone.
This is a false comparison. When was the last time Facebook was used to deliver a bomb? The answer is "never" because it's literally impossible to do so.
Terrorists can communicate through the mail service just like they can on Facebook and there is nothing the mail service can do, because the secrecy of your correspondence is literally a human right (article 12 of the universal declaration of human rights).
Of course I didn't say Facebook delivered a bomb. I said Facebook is causing harm.
Other communication services have effective security measures to minimize and isolate the harm they can do.
Facebook does not.
Facebook has lost control of their platform, and they are unable or unwilling to minimize and isolate the harm their platform inflicts on the world.
> Terrorists can communicate through the mail service just like they can on Facebook
The fact that terrorists choose Facebook instead of the mail should tell you that Facebook is the problem we need to fix.
You claim that Facebook causes harm because people can communicate there without it being checked. You claim that the mail is different because they check that the mail isn't a literal bomb, and this is why the mail service doesn't cause harm. But people can communicate through the mail service without it being checked as well. In fact, checking somebody else's mail is very illegal. So the same harm you abuse Facebook of facilitating can be done through regular mail.
>Other communication services have effective security measures to minimize and isolate the harm they can do.
No, they don't. Let me put it in caps for you: IT IS ILLEGAL TO CHECK SOMEBODY'S PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. It is actually a violation of human rights. The mail service does not check what is written in your letters.
>The fact that terrorists choose Facebook instead of the mail should tell you that Facebook is the problem we need to fix.
This is so ridiculously shortsighted. They use it because it's popular and convenient, not because it's the only way to do it.
If I want to start an alt newsletter and post it out, or conspire via phone, I am very limited in reach. A mailshot in the thousands could take days to stuff, address and stamp, and the costs escalate quickly. Few aside from fellow nutters and conspiracy theorists will know my little alt postal newsletter even exists.
Social gives unlimited reach if it goes viral. Thus the overriding aim of every alt and conspiracy group is to go viral and achieve global notoriety. Few knew or cared and certainly didn't have access to what a plane hijackers side of the story was in the 1980s and earlier. Or their propaganda. There might be short extracts in follow up reports. Giving them the oxygen of publicity was almost universally considered a bad thing. I entirely share the view of the NZ Prime Minister in refusing to use his name. Then the US services showed up.
Yes we should stop as we've amplified too far. What many Americans call outrageous censorship, often conveniently ignoring it being a private service rather than speaking against a government, much of the rest of the world might call reasonable moderation. If FB can't moderate and block it, or find a way for users to moderate it, perhaps it's time to limit, restrict and censure.
It's certain that if FB won't find a way to do it reasonably and fairly, and soon, governments will start to compel them and others. Each event and atrocity makes it that little more certain.
That seems unlikely. More relevantly, it seems likely that if such communities exist there is a reason they exist and solving that reason should be an urgent priority.
Nevertheless there are groups who wish to cause harm - anti vaxxers and up who benefit from the reach of social. You;re right that restrictions won't stop lone wolf madness, but publicising their actual message and videos encourages every other copy-cat to be "outrageous enough". The phenomenon of copycats is well enough known and seen in all sorts of things, even atrocity and suicide methods.
Speaking to this particular incident, showing that video won't enable him, it is far more likely to draw out a knee-jerk response in opposition to whatever he was trying to do. There weren't millions of people uploading his video because of a latent communal desire to watch Muslims being gunned down in mosques; there were millions of people uploading the video so that other people could judge the situation. There is no way that judgment is going to be positive. Uploading or watching that video is not a respectful act; it is judgmental.
> Nevertheless there are groups who wish to cause harm - anti vaxxers and up who benefit from the reach of social.
We've had well publicised cults and lunatic ideas since the dawn of time. Facebook is, if anything, just as likely to make it easier to leave such communities than cause them to grow. We'll need some evidence to talk to on that point - which I do not have.
> The phenomenon of copycats is well enough known and seen in all sorts of things, even atrocity and suicide methods.
I dunno, the last time something like this happened in the APAC region (the Port Arthur Massacre) it resulted in mass gun removal from Australian society. New Zealand might well do the same thing. Pretty likely to squelch down on copycat incidents.
Showing that video around is going to make it much more likely that NZ bans guns. Nothing like a video to persuade people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
For some reason, most free societies seem to have, over time, accepted the free press is a good thing.
They are either a dumb pipe or the publisher, depending on whether it is time to being sued or collect ad revenue.
It wasn't until the operator system was removed that conversations might appear to be untracable, but by then automatic logging and billing was in place and thus calls were as tracable as they were in the early days, and the public already knew that the police could/would 'trace calls' before this switchover, it had become a movie trope.
So no, I don't imagine people were as concerned, at least with telephones.
Post probably followed a similar curve - early post was person to person and involved an intermediary (horse rider/carriage driver) who probably kept some records, although in the very early days likely knew all of the people involved. Not until centuries later did national post systems come along with some semblance of anonymity to the act of posting a letter.
Yesterday somebody on the train was really adamant that I should google something about Michael Jackson being alive and reincarnated -- truly believed it with all his heart. Where is this disinfo coming from? How can we stop it? The horrifying answer would be that it's coming from everywhere, and that we can't stop it.
And what some people say about the internet, others say about society as a whole.
Censor Facebook, or all of the Internet? Or all social discourse?
After we solve the Facebook problem, then we can see what the next biggest threat is, and address it.
^ This is how you get authoritarianism. Authoritarianism usually ends in suffering. I will take a free society over that, even if it comes with disgusting content.
I believe, more generally, that the problems we're seeing with FB and social media overall were an entirely inevitable result of, effectively, free and unlimited exchange of information among most of the people on this planet.
Even more generally, I think that the effectively free and unlimited ability to exchange information was an entirely inevitable result of the arc of technology as it exists here on planet earth.
Our ability to magically beam information and emotions, at effectively no cost, and with effectively no limits, is, I believe, making us crazy, because our evolutionary neurology is still pretty miuch the same as it has been for the past 100,000 years.
For the record, I firmly believe that FB and the other social media companies, and tech in general, have objectively produced more good than bad. It's just that our still relatively primitive brains can't handle this new kind of bad.
The real amplification was caused by people, not by platforms. The amazing stat here is that a staggering 1.5 million people attempted to re-uploaded it.
Suppose the attacker uploaded it to 8chan instead? I doubt the final numbers would be much different. People are going to decide for themselves whether or not they want to watch something on the internet.
Facebook provided that specific and meaningless fact to distract us from the truly important facts that they're still hiding.
(1) How many minutes from the beginning of the livestream until the last re-uploaded copy was removed?
(2) How many Facebook users viewed even part of the livestream or any of the re-uploaded copies?
The answers are likely (1) thousands of minutes and (2) millions of views.
Naturally these two numbers are not to be found anywhere in Facebook's deceptive explanation.
Facebook let 300k people re-upload the video without being stopped at upload. Facebook pushed it to their friends, and when their friends interacted with it Facebook pushed it to friends of friends.
That fanout push to feeds isn't comparable to 8chan.
So news agencies had to decide to print it, or broadcast it, or a publisher had to distribute it. Even on the internet, until fairly recently distribution meant you had to seek out the content you wanted. These people were all responsible for their decision.
Now Facebook and YouTube are operating like broadcasters. They're the biggest broadcasters in the history of the world. And there is no human in the loop, there's no decision made. It's just some algorithms designed around harnessing attention. It's all automatic. And it can be used for harm.
Distributors of the past couldn't absolve themselves of responsibility because they were in the loop. Distribution was a decision they made.
Facebook and Youtube want to absolve themselves of any of the responsibility those distributors used to have.
What this may mean, and we haven't seriously discussed it as a society, is that there was an automatic assumption that what we now have with FB and YouTube is right and okay. Perhaps it's not, and perhaps these platforms should be regulated in a way such that there is a "distributor" that is responsible, and/or a person has to "seek" the content.
Totally as an quick thought experiment of how that might work, using Youtube for an example:
YouTube channels would need to have validated owners, and all autoplaying and promotion of videos on YouTube would need to stop outside of those channels. Thus each channel becomes its own "distributor" with a responsible party. And users must seek content by subscribing to or choosing to view that channel.
The negative implications of this are:
1. Youtube's business model changes, it's bad for Youtube, but it's maybe not nearly so bad if it's regulation that affects everyone the same way.
2. There's this idea that these platforms can also be used for good by allowing anonymous distribution of dissent and the like (e.g. Arab spring). This would quell that somewhat, to distribute dissent it would need to be done through, say, sending a video to one of the channel distributors who makes a decision to publish it or not, like a news agency of old. This isn't inherently bad, note how most of the big leaks of recent years have required responsible journalists to accept and publish the content.
3. There would need to be some regulation around deplatforming actions. For example, a person becomes a "distributor" on YouTube, they're authorized, and YouTube knows who they are. They're responsible. But if someone sends them snuff films, are they allows to broadcast them or not? In this case things are easier, because YouTube can block individual "distributors"/channels in a country like NZ based on local laws. In the US for example I don't think there is anything that makes distribution of this video we're talking about illegal, so it would probably be an issue if this regulated platform was able to decide to kick off this channel now. But it's certainly a lot less gray in this set up than it is in the current set up.
Would the Internet basically lose it's purpose? It would still be able to connect consumers to businesses.
If you took away the USA and its DMCA safe habor, I'm not sure how much of the Internet (as we know it) would be left.
It would also break a huge number of businesses. Something like GitHub could be used to link/host the video, no way you could enforce pre-moderation for all commits/uploads.
When I mentioned the DMCA safe harbor, I forgot that it only protects sites from copyright violations. Could a site like Facebook, in theory, be prosecuted for distributing terrorist propaganda when such incidents occur? Or in the case of other data-sharing crimes, like distributing child pornography?
Apparently, such issues aren't really settled. https://www.ericgoldman.org/writings/websiteliabilityalert.h...
It's easy to keep driving your car through an intersection without stopping at a stop sign, and some people get away with it.
Even though stop signs can be circumvented, we're all a lot safer with stop signs than without them.
>Would the Internet basically lose it's purpose? It would still be able to connect consumers to businesses.
Yeah, it would connect consumers and businesses in the same way that TV connects consumers and businesses. If server operators are responsible for all of the content online then no server owner will allow ANY user-generated content.
>They are forced to implement pre-moderation, or to disallow content from non-trusted sources.
So, upload filters? People don't take kindly to being considered guilty into proven innocent.
>The EU is already going down this path to better enforce copyright.
There's a good reason why the EU has basically no large tech companies. I'm not sure being anti-technology like we are in Europe is a good idea in a world that's spurred on by technology.
Also, P2P would basically break this kind of regulation. To fight against that you eventually need to ban encryption or require backdoors in them. You also need to criminalize encryption that's not state-sanctioned.
That sounds like a hellscape to me.
I'm all for punishing incitement to violence, but I think the rush to squelch the video is misguided. In society we take lessons from the bad actors as well as the noble ones, and IMO there are good lessons to learn in watching this video.
I think Facebook acted well. They jumped on it as soon as they were made aware, did everything to remove it. So hats off to them.
I still be think that this monster had great help in spreading the video. A team would have been uploading this on every major site and sharing like crazy to get to 1.5 million ...
That seems quite scary actually, all it takes to get someone thrown in jail for 14 years is to grab their phone/laptop when they're not looking or guess their password and share a video?
14 years is a maximum.
Maybe I'm just down on Facebook, but this deflects pretty hard on the main point of this whole terrible story: given a free platform to broadcast live video, there's just no feasible way (at the moment) to prevent someone from using said platform to broadcast horrific events.
Content moderation has always, always, always been an afterthought, and these major platforms don't really seem to have an interest in truly solving this problem. Massive teams of poorly-paid contractors supplemented with ML tools seems like an overly optimistic solution to a much harder problem.
What do you suggest at this point?
I chose years ago to stop using Facebook and encouraging others to do the same. I truly believe the absolute best thing FB could do for society would be to dissolve, but that's not realistic.
Or at least, you didn't really answer the question that was asked.
What would you suggest as a solution to the problems stated? These problems are larger than just Facebook.
Why do we carry around this mentality that everything can just be fixed? When did the idea of "maybe X thing shouldn't exist in our society" become such a foreign idea?
Facebook is only valuable because people use it.
How would you address the problem itself, rather than a single instance of it?
> What do you suggest at this point?
> I truly believe the absolute best thing FB could do for society would be to dissolve, but that's not realistic.
I take 'not realistic' to mean that it's not going to happen, which is accurate.
Yes, these problems exists outside of FB.
Yes, I'm sure the other poster is acknowledging very little if anything would change if FB disappeared, over a nominal time horizon.
I personally think FB and the other social media sites are doing more good than harm, so I disagree with the other poster's overall assessment.
One way or another, there are no clear or known paths that are reasonably possible away from this kind of situation.
It's non sequitur at best, but technically an answer, sure.
I'm more interested in something tangible and (hopefully) universifiable than "delete Facebook".
I am as well, believe me. I just don't think any are available, at least at the moment.
Because telephone companies cant pre-censor conversation...they dont have value.
Because web browsers dont block objectionable content from reaching other peoples comp...they dont have value.
I find it absurd to say that facebook has no value to people because it cant screen everything for worth before its posted. That said, sure why does something being posted have to be instantly visible without first meeting some criteria. What's wrong with a small buffer?
I've read some folks floating the thought of requiring a Gov ID to livestream, etc. I am not in favor of this.
How would that stop a psycho like this? He wouldn't care if you knew his real id. He would just pretend to be docile / normal until the second he starts broadcasting his horrible intentions.
I think those are very good ideas for mitigating this kind of problem.
Facebook (and other internet companies) have basically built sharing platforms with no breaks, and that opens them up to exploitation by people like this mass shooter. I think the only effective solutions will involve retrofitting breaks and proactively inserting human moderators into the loop. There's literally no good reason that something should be able to go viral globally within hours of creation, not even disconnected natural disaster reports.
The article states the stream had ~200 views total. That's not anywhere close to viral.
No. According to the article the original video actually had ~4,000 views in the unspecified amount of time before it was removed. Only ~200 people watched it live.
But you missed my point: the current design is setup to present as few obstacles as possible to something going viral, which means it's easy for something to spread so quickly it's impossible to moderate. The solution is to add obstacles on the path to virality to prevent things from going viral. These could include things like post-visibility delays that could trigger even before the objectionable content is even close to viral (and would similarly slow down the spread of mutated reposts).
I really don’t worry about mass shootings, because statistically they’re still utterly insignificant. You can take a step back and see the sky’s not (objectively) falling. But every time something like this happens and people race to give up hard-won rights and invite, even demand more control and censorship, it’s hard not to be cynical…
Fair enough re: 4,000 views, but I still think it's reasonable proof that the system works. It's not like millions had seen the video before it got purged.
Yes, because for good things the present speed is not necessary and for bad things it makes needed moderation more difficult. My guess is the only people who'd even notice the slowdown would be social media junkies (as in addicted, compulsive over-users).
One major problem is that companies like FB are financially disincentived to do preemptive content moderation because it would dramatically reduce the rate at which content is generated, and thus the amount of content generated. Maintaining a high rate of content generation keeps engagement high, which in turn drives ad revenue.
I see people quickly jumping on the "stop the internet open sharing platforms" bandwagon when events like these happen, because the platform may be associated with the current "cultural villain" but just as we don't ban knives when they are used to murder people and are being produced by despicable companies I don't think we should ban the possibility of having open sharing platforms until we have determined they do more bad than good.
Food for thought: in administrative decisions on improving car infrastructure/safety of intersections there is an actual value assigned human life. If the cost to build the improvements is less than the human life valuation of the lives that would be saved by the improvements then the project is not done. It's terrible to think of human lives as numbers but it is a requirement to do so for deciding policy in a world of inherent costs to anything being done. So before we think about advancing policy changes with far ranging impact, we should perform such an analysis. We may also realize at that point that alternative solutions may prove far cheaper than banning open sharing platforms or regulating them to the point where business is so expensive nobody cares to do so.
First, users don't pay to use Facebook, so the financial incentives are completely reversed from a car company that might be putting out defective cars.
Second, Facebook isn't controversial because it makes defective products; it's controversial because of how the software works as designed. It's designed to maximize engagement, harvest user data, and display ads.
Third, what is the material value that Facebook provides? At least with a car, you can pretty easily determine its value by looking at how it helps you increase your economic potential (i.e. getting you to work.) What's Facebook's true value to its users?
Fourth, Facebook has been featured in headlines that few private companies have ever been in. The UN determined that Facebook played a "determining role" in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar[0]. How exactly does one calculate the value of a human life vs the value that Facebook provides in that instance? Is it really so crazy to argue that companies that catalyze genocide perhaps shouldn't exist? People were ripped from their homes and brutally murdered in the streets because of what people were posting and reading on Facebook. Facebook eventually killed the entire Internet.org project.
They got caught doing emotional manipulation research without the approval of the APA, they've faced salvo after salvo for their conduct in a variety of areas ranging from user privacy, election manipulation and illegal foreign campaigning, paying young users to to use intentionally monitored VPNs to gather data. The list goes on and on.
[0]: https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-pro...
There are sites with no content moderation, and they can't seem to get many customers because they are so terrible.
Note that NZ law is written so that this means it was always in this state from its creation (not just from the point of classification).
People found doing so could face up to 14 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine, there's already one person in jail for doing this.
NZ ISPs are blocking the IP addresses of websites that are hosting this video.
This crosses a line between discouraging horrific material being easily available by pressuring Facebook, which practically speaking makes sense because people who wouldn't want to see it might see it, and a ban on facts. If they can ban this video, could they also ban videos of police or military abuses of power produced by a private citizen?
It isn't even an obviously good idea socially, that video (which I have not seen) is presumably one of the most pro-Muslim and pro-gun-control pieces of propaganda to be produced in the last 30 years. There is no pressure group that supports gunning down peaceful people at prayer time.
In theory no. The censor operates independently under strict legislation and decisions can (I believe based on memory of previous instances) be challenged in court.
So such an example as above wouldn't be censored because it wouldn't be injurious to the public good. Quite the opposite, such a video would be for the public good.
Banning it would require some kind of authoritarian capture of both the censor's office and the the judicial system to enforce. Certainly if somehow NZ became an authoritarian state then the censor could be used to those ends, but by that point authoritarian states don't exactly care about law or process or political interference when it comes to censorship anyway.
Meaningless political theater. This is like trying to divorce the king in a country with lese majeste. If you cannot know what's in the video, how could you possibly ask for it in court, without admitting that you illegally watched the video?
The best word to describe New Zealand right now is Kafka-esque.
You're confusing having seen objectionable material with distributing that objectionable material. It's the distribution that is an offense.
That said, possession, distribution and (I believe!) consumption of objectionable material are all considered an offence. The cops and the courts exercise discretion here.
Nah. The most relaxed way to live is knowing your government won't arrest you because you watched a video before it was declared illegal.
There likely is discretion involved and the law probably needs some updating. The DIA website on this [1] makes it clear their concern is really around collection and "trade" of objectionable material. Not random people accidently viewing it (or even curious rubberneckers going for a look). It was much easier in a time when the law was largely written, and obtaining objectionable material meant having an actual physical copy. You most likely knew you were getting an objectionable DVD or book because you had to go to a back alley to buy it off a guy. The law couldn't anticipate people opening Facebook to find an autoplaying video of a massacre, hence why you're right wrt discretion that's probably in use now.
This is striking below the belt and I apologize, but:
I am sure a Chinese citizen would say the same. In public. When their government is monitoring.
>Anybody found “knowingly” in possession of objectionable material can receive a maximum of 10 years imprisonment.
>Every time a person downloads objectionable material onto their screen, there is the potential for a possession offence having been committed.
>> If this happens to you, just leave the site immediately.
You shouldn't knowingly go seeking it out this video. Just like you shouldn't knowingly go seeking out child porn. If you do, as I'm sure a lot have, just make sure you don't knowingly keep a copy on your computer.
And by knowingly don't be a smartass about it and try to hide it thinking you can pretend you didn't know. Seriously just don't keep a copy and clear your cache.
I'm a little conflicted about this. As a NZ'er the chief censor[1] has always done a decent job, we've never had to debate the issue of censorship in NZ much before. In this case the ability to retroactively label something criminal, and someone to face charges for it feels unjust.
On the other hand, and details are light at this point, this one person who is being charged allegedly mirrored the live stream during the event, cheered it on in his comments, and may have posted inciting materials prior to the attack (a picture of the mosque captioned "target acquired", but it's not clear based on the public information yet if this was posted before or on the day of the event).
[1] The idea of a chief censor may seem really appalling to many reading this, I encourage you to actually research what they do and the legislation they operate under before casting an opinion on it. Essentially the role is to provide ratings on media items, and rarely outright censor things. In the past day to day shit for them meant watching DVDs of rape videos and crap like that coming through the physical borders.
Why does that factor in? New Zealand has (or had?) pretty strong protection for freedom of expression and freedom of speech.
That doesn't necessarily make it okay, but obviously a lot of Kiwi's have downloaded and shared and watched this video, but this is the only case I know of where someone was arrested for it.
> A second charge alleges that between the 8th and the 15th of March, he showed a photograph of the Deans Avenue mosque with the message “target acquired” and further chat messaging around inciting extreme violence constituting one of the offences.[1]
The 15th is the day of the attack, so as the grandparent comment said, it's unclear if he posted the image in advance of the attack, but it all sounds pretty dodgy.
[1] https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/03/18yo-in-c...
That balance does seem to have mostly been made in a way that most people are comfortable with these days (the proctor of Otago University being a gross exception)
I read about it and I lost a lot of respect for New Zealand. It surprised me, because I really didn't expect another first world country to be this weak on freedom of expression. I guess I was unaware of the culture.
Our culture is not perfect, but measure us by our response to this, and other, tragic events.
- arrests
- suppression of objectionable materials that could stoke the fires and cause more deaths, possibly from copy-cats
- identity suppression so that the killer will not be martyred
- a huge focus on the victims
- a swift change of gun laws
As opposed to the US, where it would be:
- thoughts and prayers
- "We should change gun laws. Not us, though, we want to get re-elected!" ~ President
- the killer's name and photo plastered over every newspaper, television, and website
Maybe if his manifesto wasn't illegal to read, they could read it and maybe see that they are so caught up in the emotional signalling they are doing exactly what the shooter wanted them to do.
Yeah, bloody terrible response.
You mean, your country doesn't have media ratings or censorship of any kind in the public good? None at all?
Unless you live on the moon…
Failing to take a stand means that ultimately the most intolerant place gets to censor the internet. You may remember that the Taliban banned all photos of humans, even if clothed and male.
I just wanna read about TurboGrafx and Sega Genesis...
If other sites are co-located with the places carrying the snuff film then they're IMHO shit out of luck, it's the company that you keep that we know you by.
Personally I haven't read what the motivations were behind the initial block that these ISPs put in very quickly after the attack. (Don't know if there's any threads on NZNOG about it, haven't gone looking.) One possibility, I had was the operations folk were trying to block suspicious sites in case they were being used for communication or would prompt further incidents in what was then an unfolding terrorist attack.
That the blocks continue now is something that should be discussed in the NZ ISP community. Do we want ISPs to be able to make unilateral blocking decisions or should they be legally required to be neutral? Maybe this will shape a future net neutrality law.
In 2008 there was a minor diplomatic incident between Finland and Thailand. Finnish police kept a list meant to block child porn websites, they just didn't do a very good job about it. The police had blocked a Thai portal that contained, among other things, memorial pages for a recently passed away Thai princess. Thailand happens to be quite serious about their royalty and offenses about their dignity. The portal probably contained other sections, and maybe some actual cp had been posted in some discussion boards there, who knows.
But that's not how the Thai government wanted to see the case, when they were told that a princess' memorial site was blocked in Finland with a police notice about cp. (If you did the same in Thailand, it could be up to 15 years in prison.)
There were some talks about Thailand withdrawing their ambassador from Finland, but the diplomatic crisis got resolved.
Beyond the double standards and collateral damage a question should be raised; is blocking these sites actually stopping the spread of the video, or is it creating a taboo and playing into the exact kind of conspiratorial disinformation the shooter believed? Obviously the video is vile, but by taking such extreme reactions don't we just give ammunition to the people who believe like the shooter and reenforce their misheld belief of being victims?
The ISPs opt into a filter, but the government runs the filter... and if all the ISPs have opted in, and the government is running the filter, then is it not the government doing the censorship?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_New_Zea...
Also, you act like countries have no leverage against these platforms. Maybe NZ should levy a 50% tax on all advertising revenue made by facebook in NZ?
> Failing to take a stand means that ultimately the most intolerant place gets to censor the internet. You may remember that the Taliban banned all photos of humans, even if clothed and male.
Also note how they haven't removed all photos of humans just because the Taliban banned those.
Many people spent countless hours in the aftermath of the attack doing what they could to minimise the harm from this one moron and his muppet allies. To do otherwise would not be human, and, though it isn't the first reason, would also see that ISP rejected by New Zealand households. NZer
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but why do you need to state that. It’s not the users jobs to report the videos. They aren’t getting paid.
I might be reading this too much but somehow this sentence stands out as a sore thumb for me.
Edit: to add it's basically "cover your ass" , because a third party would implicitly assume watchers of despicable content would report it, and then it would look like Facebook failed to act
> I don’t mean to be pedantic, but why do you need to state that. It’s not the users jobs to report the videos. They aren’t getting paid.
There's an idea floating out there that internet companies shouldn't be responsible for doing anything to mitigate social ills on their platforms that can't be accomplished with a staff-light approach [1], so it's somehow exculpatory if a user or their algorithm failed to flag it.
[1] a staff-light approach, in Facebook's case, could still entail a staff numbering in the tens of thousands.
Facebook doesn't seem to be able to win here
I own a store that has power tools that could hurt people. As a business owner, it's my responsibility to keep my property secure, and to ensure people on my property don't use my tools to hurt themselves or others.
I install security cameras and I hire guards. I closely supervise customers when they use my power tools.
If I didn't do these things and someone used my tools to hurt people, I would be liable. If I thought a crime had been committed, I would call the police.
But it's not the responsibility of the police to patrol my store. The police aren't responsible to supervise my customers on my property while they use my tools.
That's my responsibility.
If someone uses my power tools in my store to hurt someone, I don't say "pat me on the back, I cut the power to the tools within minutes of the police notifying me".
If I did that, I'd be guilty of gross negligence and reckless disregard for human life, because I could reasonably anticipate my tools could be used this way and I did nothing to stop it.
In many jurisdictions that's a criminal charge sometimes known as involuntary manslaughter.
I think you are unable to separate your dislike of facebook from logic. Let's not pretend that facebook was the cause of hurt, and give the shooter a free pass.
That depends on how you feel about censorship. Do you think platforms should proactively and unilaterally censor content that has - at the time of submission - not been the subject of user reports or any other external signal? Would you feel that way if it happened to content you were submitting, that you felt was perfectly legitimate? Because if not, then yes, the system does depend to some degree on user reports.
What if a viewing user had reported the issue? Would Facebook been able to intervene? What if a user had reported it and Facebook did not act, or did not act quickly?
1. Users who want to watch it. They won't report it.
2. Users who are in shock at watching a horrific event unfold and unable to mentally do anything.
3. Users who will be watching a crime happen, and will call the police.
Facebook by saying this are saying they expect the response to be:
"Oh, horrible mass murder crime is happening, I better just "flag" this video so I don't see it and it gets removed."
Heck. Flagging it for removal might even be evidence tampering in a funny kind of way. How do I know if it gets removed early some evidence of this crime isn't lost? I wouldn't want to make that decision.
Whoever wrote that at FB has drunk the "blame the users not the platform" cool aid a bit too much.
200 people watched the shooting live.
Nobody reported the video until ~15 minutes after the stream ended.
That means that EVERY person who viewed this video live did so without feeling the need to report it as objectionable, and the vast majority of those people arrived via 8chan.
It illustrates exactly what kind of person frequents the web communities that the terrorist did.
> The first user report on the original video came in 29 minutes after the video started, and 12 minutes after the live broadcast ended.
How long did it take them to react to that initial report and remove the video? It's notable that they included so many statistics, but left that one out.
> We removed the attacker’s video within minutes of [the New Zealand Police's] outreach to us.
They don't say how long it was until NZ police contacted them though, it could have been right after the reports came though.
If they reacted quickly, I think they'd have said so. Their evasiveness and omissions lead me to think it took them an embarrassingly long time to react.
This is Facebook's deceptive spin.
It's not the responsibility of NZ police to control Facebook's platform, yet Facebook acts as if they have zero responsibility until they're notified.
The important numbers here are:
(1) how many minutes from the beginning of the livestream until the last re-uploaded copy was removed?
(2) how many Facebook users viewed even part of the livestream or any of the re-uploaded copies?
The answers are likely (1) thousands of minutes and (2) millions of views.
Naturally these two numbers are not to be found anywhere in Facebook's deceptive explanation.
Why would you not ban/tempban/"deplatform" users for sharing/replicating/liking this on Facebook?
This is pretty directly against the "public interest" just like child pornography.
This isn't a grey area, it was the murder of 50+ people.
Why would you not just flat ban and forward the accounts of anyone forwarding this video, again just like child pornography?
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Would this be bots uploading the video or are there 1.5 million individuals trying to re-upload the video to FB? If so are they also having their accounts banned for praising / supporting terror attacks?
doubt it was just bots.
I followed the topic as it was trending on twitter and many of the accounts that re-uploaded it were accounts with Muslim names - often accompanied by a message such as (paraphrasing) "let the world see what terrors are inflicted by white man". They wanted to ensure the world sees what white man are capable of. For many it was a moment of "look at what they are doing to our brothers and sisters". I think they felt it was an injustice that the information is removed in this case (yet when the attacks were carried out by Islamist's nobody cared).
There was also a lot of outrage because some MSM's were not immediately calling it a terrorist act. I can understand quite well why they wanted this to be seen in all its gory detail. If my family were among the dead I too would wanted to make sure people know the truth. In fact my pain would be so big that I would want to show everyone in the hope that maybe somebody gets radicalized enough and hits back by blowing up a place where such types hang out. I'm not glorifying revenge or violence, but if you feel yourself into that kind of situation (that pain), it would take a lot of strength not wanting to retaliate (or shout out to those who might).
There is no other video like this one in the world. There's plenty of gory videos out there, but this one crosses a line nothing else I have ever seen has.
https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+kismayo+city+executi... (it should be the first link, I'd rather not directly link to the images out of courtesy to others)
Look, I'm not going to get into the issues around the death penalty, but the fact remains that a lot of governments and semi-governments use SV tech just as they would use any radio/TV station/newspaper that is under their jurisdiction. Death is horrible, no question. But it's not like these events are being hidden away on sketchy websites that you have to hunt for. In many parts of the world, such types of death are celebrated and proudly posted to as many 'legitimate' news sites as possible by 'official' semi/governmental agencies.
It's been less than 100 years since the US has had 'strange fruit' herself. I mean, we literally sold postcards with the results on them.
It was in full force before I even heard about the shooting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/18/inside-...
Here you go: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-...
They're terrible people who largely manage to avoid doing illegal (merely unethical) things as a hobby.
Is this like a denial-of-service attack where a few people have lots of automation? Are there "booter" services? Maybe Krebs will write about it someday.
This line would be suspect coming from YouTube or Snapchat, but Facebook has lied so many times that it's become impossible to believe them.
I wouldn’t trust them either, at this point.
And before anyone talks about VPN and Tor...try posting to HN from a Tor browser and see what happens to your post...blacklists exist. And the average shitposter isn’t going to go to the trouble.
The Arab Spring is widely seen as a triumph of social media over repression, but its effects were short-lived and those who posted were often tracked down and persecuted.