You might still find Buffalo mass shooting videos on Facebook.
Facebook is still struggling to keep its platforms from being used to broadcast violent footage as the social media can't contain videos of last weekend's horrific mass shooting in Buffalo, New York.
Footage of the Shooting Appears Alongside Facebook Ads
According to Engadget, The New York Times said that not only are clips of the shooting available on the platform, reposted clips of the attack are sometimes appearing alongside Facebook ads.
It is unclear how often ads appear alongside clips of the shooting. However, The New York Times said that "searches for terms associated with footage of the shooting have been accompanied by ads for a horror film, clothing companies and video streaming services."
The phenomenon is not a new issue for Facebook. The social media platform has the same problems during the wake of a 2019 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.
In some cases, according to The New York Times, Facebook is recommending search terms associated with videos of the shooting.
Like the previous mass shootings and violent events, the footage was initially streamed to Twitch by the gunman in Buffalo. The accessibility of the footage on Facebook proved that it is still difficult for social media platforms to contain such content.
Facebook claimed it had previously designated the event as a terrorist attack. It was working to detect new copies that are shared with its service automatically.
However, videos still managed to fall through the cracks. The fact that ads appear near those videos on Facebook is likely to raise further questions about whether the company chooses profits over safety, a whistleblower has claimed.
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Meta Said They Have Been Working to Remove All Posts of Buffalo Shooting
According to The Wall Street Journal, representatives for Meta Platforms Inc., Twitter Inc. and YouTube said they have been working to remove all posts of the Buffalo shooting that violate their policies as quickly as possible.
A Facebook spokesperson told The New York Times that it was trying "to protect people using our services from seeing this horrific content even as bad actors are dead-set on calling attention to it," Engadget reported.
According to Twitch, they had removed the stream less than two minutes after shots rang out. However, versions of the video are still accessible on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube more than a day later.
According to Tech Against Terrorism, a group backed by companies and governments that battles terrorist activity online, they had found content associated with the Buffalo shooter on more than 70 different platforms, as per The Wall Street Journal.
Before the shooting incident, the suspected shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, posted a document online about his plans. He said that he chose Twitch because the platform is free to access.
Gendron first planned to stream his attack to Facebook. However, in January, he decided to switch to Twitch because of its younger audience.
Most social media platforms have the ability for anyone to broadcast live video from a smartphone easily. Thus, even though it violates the platform's policies, it is possible for acts of violence to be streamed in real time and for recordings of the streams to be quickly posted and reposted, as per The Wall Street Journal report.
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