Live
streaming has grown in popularity in the past decade, enabling the sharing of
violent acts such as the attack on two New Zealand mosques on March 15, which
was streamed through Facebook Live.
Brenton Tarrant, the gunman, opened fire on worshippers in the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre. Tarrant had also written a 70-page manifesto, detailing his radical extremist views. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden publicly denounced the shooting as a “terrorist attack.”
“One suspect has been charged with murder after at least 50 people were killed and more than 40 others were injured in mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday […] A man by the name of Brenton Tarrant posted a hate-filled manifesto to social media,” according to Time Magazine.
Live streaming events have the potential to spread media quickly on a large scale. For instance, minutes after Tarrant’s live stream ended, videos of the stream began to appear on websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Reddit. These sites quickly began removing the videos, claiming that the videos violated the sites’ policies.
“New Zealand’s Prime Minister said […] that she was doing everything in her power to conceal the name of the shooter so that he [wouldn’t] gain notoriety because that was one of the main purposes of the attack. Spreading the video will give him that notoriety that he wants, so it’s good that it’s being taken down,” said sophomore Tryphena Z.
Facebook used a combination of
artificial intelligence (AI) and content moderators to identify and remove the
videos. However, some videos were able to bypass the AI, which allowed them to
stay up for longer and gain more views.
“Those types of technologies use something called fingerprinting, where they’ll take a video that they know is bad and then they’ll check for major components of it. […] This can be bypassed by just changing enough of it so that the AI is not able to recognize that it is indeed the same video,” said Computer
Science Club president Jared H.
In other instances of live
streams involving crimes, it is not the perpetrator who live streams the
actions but rather a bystander. People may stream these criminal actions due to the ‘bystander effect.’
“When there are other people around, we are less likely to intervene and to offer someone help. What more recent research has found is that this effect is exacerbated by different factors. So when people feel like they can’t help, they don’t have the skills to help or they feel like it’s unsafe to help, […] the ‘bystander effect’ is amplified,” said school psychology intern Ashley Gabriele.
Many believe that people should
help the victims of harmful actions if they are able to rather than live streaming
or recording.
“Spreading a video and saying that it’s so bad is not going to help anything. But not taking the video and actually [intervening in] the situation will actively stop it and prevent [events] like that from happening in the future,” said Zareif.
Despite the
appearance of violent live streams and videos in recent years, some do not
consider live streaming technology to be the issue.
“I don’t think that [live streaming] can or should be restricted in the sense that there would have to be a preliminary check before you’re able to live stream. […] There are greater, underlying issues as to why an attack like that would be done. So, I don’t think the technology should be punished, in a sense, just because something like this had happened on this type of platform,” said Jared.
Explanations for why people live
stream violent acts, whether they are the perpetrator or a bystander, and for
why others watch such content are uncertain.
“Unfortunately, the answers to these topics are really complicated and really vary situationally. So, all we can do is try to learn from them,” said Gabriele.n
Kathy C.
Published May 2019