Then why the charade? I can understand why the likes of Google and Facebook want to resist delivering maximum destruction, blood and massacre. The “atomized and often extreme online audiences” who clicked through to read the tempered coverage of Christchurch killings in the New York Times or viewed it on CNN surely got the suspect’s message. This let the press have it both ways-to claim an imagined moral victory by not using the video and manifesto directly but by extracting every essential reportorial detail from them.
Far from “protecting” the impressionable from the suspect’s racist and murderous message, the press communicated it everywhere.
You might think this would be a counterproductive tack for the news media to take if deplatforming the suspect and restricting the reach of his propaganda goals was the intent.
Every major media organization flooded the New Zealand story with reporters and photographers who told the story in tick-tock detail. The Australian Broadcasting Company probably spoke for most media companies that limited their graphic coverage when it explained that it had deliberately denied the suspect a “platform” because his attack was “aimed not at the audiences of traditional news organisations but at reaching and triggering atomised and often extreme online audiences.” The ABC continued, “His every move appears to have been deliberate, calculated, web savvy and designed to grab attention.” The Aussie broadcaster seems to be saying it had no desire to reward the suspect’s media efforts and thereby encourage additional mayhem.īut limited coverage didn’t mean zero coverage. Some users subtly altered the videos to slip under automated screening processes.Īt least two British tabloids ran edited footage from the suspect’s body cam and one published his 84-page “ manifesto,” but they quickly self-censored the material off their websites. Even though Facebook deleted 1.5 million of the first-person videos inside of 24 hours and Google’s YouTube boasted of “ unprecedented“ scale and speed in erasing the videos (one per second!) and temporarily disabling search functions, neither service could keep up with the uploaders. The new complaint was that big tech wasn’t powerful enough to block the shooter’s videos from appearing on the web.
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