Christchurch shows how social media sites help spread the poison of far-right ideology | John Naughton

The atrocity in New Zealand was carried out by a man fully aware of the power of the internet

The aftermath of the Christchurch atrocity brought significant media coverage of the attempts made by the tech companies, especially Facebook and YouTube, to take down the alleged killer’s video livestream and his so-called manifesto. These narratives had two subtexts. The first was to impress us with the sheer scale of the task. The second was implicitly to convey the public-spirited dedication of the engineers who worked around the clock to keep these obscenities from infecting the public sphere.

It would be churlish to downplay the scale of the challenge the companies faced, for it was indeed huge. Facebook for example, dealt with 1.5m uploads of the video within 24 hours and claimed to have caught 1.2m of them before they made it into users’ newsfeeds. (That still left 300,000 copies on the loose, though.)

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Wq5HZT
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