Pressure Facebook to be accountable for allowing islamophobic and murderous content. Violence is being used to cause attention to these ideas. We wrote up a short thread for reporters.

Sociologists who study the way information spreads online - including Joan Donovan of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and Whitney Phillips, who wrote a report for Data & Society last year titled, “ The Oxygen of Amplification ”- advised journalists not to quote from the killer’s writing. Whether to report on the killer’s writing about his deed was another matter. The other saying a level of context is required and reporters need to do their job 1/įrom archives: Reporters shouldn’t profile mass shooters, say expertsĪlmost everyone agreed that posting the actual video of the killings was beyond the pale ( The Mirror in Britain included edited footage from the video and later apologized, but the Daily Mail had a video clip that auto-played on its site ). One from researchers and some journalists saying do not spread material from the NZ attack, it serves as recruitment. There are two very distinct parts of my feed this morning. The acts and their victims say far, far more than enough. Don’t link to it, don’t screengrabs it, don’t précis it, don’t do a long thinkpiece on what it means it was tied to 8chan. The shooter posted that manifesto precisely for you to share, condemn, analyse, and mock it. As quickly as the videos were pulled down by the platforms (which wasn’t very quickly in many cases), new copies were posted and shared, in a terrible game of deplatforming Whack-A-Mole.Īs the video copies and links to his writing continued to spread, journalists and experts in misinformation and online behavior debated a key question in these incidents: how much should journalists write about the details of the killings, and, in particular, about the killer’s delusional ideology? The killer took things to a new and even more disturbing level by live-streaming the entire thing on Facebook Live, part of what appeared to be a co-ordinated media strategy involving multiple posts of his rambling, 74-page screed and video clips to social platforms like 8chan, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Thursday brought yet another horrific example of this depressingly frequent phenomenon, when a white supremacist shot and killed 49 people in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Mass shootings have a way of making the theoretical talk about Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and their role in spreading hate all too real.

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