Spread of Buffalo Shooting Video Shows Social-Media Platforms Still Struggle to Remove Violent Content

Twitch removed the stream less than two minutes after shots rang out, it said—faster than it has taken platforms to respond to previous incidents. But versions of the video could still be found on

Facebook,

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Twitter

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and YouTube more than a day later. Tech Against Terrorism, a group backed by companies and governments that battles terrorist activity online, said on Monday that it had found content associated with the Buffalo shooter on more than 70 different platforms.

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.

Eleven of the 13 victims were Black and authorities are investigating the attack as a possible hate crime. Before the shooting, the suspected shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, posted a document online about his plans, saying he chose Twitch because the platform is free to access. “I think that live streaming this attack gives me some motivation in the way that I know that some people will be cheering for me,” he wrote.

The alleged shooter,  who is white, initially planned to stream his attack to Facebook, documents he allegedly posted online reveal, but in January he decided to switch to Twitch for its younger audience.

Many of the big social-media platforms have the ability for anyone to easily broadcast live video from a smartphone or computer with little or no restrictions. That has made it possible for acts of violence to be streamed in real time—and for recordings of the streams to be quickly posted and reposted—even though doing so violates platforms’ policies.

The pitfalls of live-streaming technology came under particular scrutiny three years ago, after a mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people was broadcast on Facebook in 2019. An attack later that year near a synagogue that killed two people in Halle, Germany, was streamed on Twitch.

Platform operators say they have improved their response times to policy violations by investing in detection technology and expanding their content-moderation teams.

Industry experts said the speed with which Twitch ended the Buffalo suspect’s broadcast was impressive. But, they say, it is still relatively easy for someone to repost banned content by modifying it in ways that avoid detection.

“There’s always more work that can be done,” said Micah Schaffer, an independent consultant for social-media companies on user trust and safety issues who previously worked at

Alphabet Inc.’s

YouTube and

Snap Inc.

“But as a technology matures, big advancements are harder to come by and small incremental improvements are less likely to be felt by users. So as a practical matter, this might be about as good as it gets.”

It took Facebook about an hour to remove the 17-minute-long Christchurch broadcast, which the company, now known as Meta Platforms, at the time said was viewed 4,000 times. A recording of the footage was also reposted millions of times on the platform and others, Facebook said.

After the Halle shooting, Twitch said five people watched the suspect’s 35-minute live stream of the incident, and a recording of it was viewed on the platform by about 2,200 people in 30 minutes before it was flagged and removed.

A spokeswoman for Twitch said over the past two years the company has doubled the size of its safety-operations team and quadrupled the number of content-moderation professionals available to respond to user reports, yielding a 96% reduction in the median time it takes the company to respond to reports.

Twitch uses several mechanisms to detect and remove violence on its platform, including detection technology and a user-reporting system, according to Angela Hession, the company’s head of trust and safety.

She said Twitch is also collaborating with law enforcement and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a nonprofit coalition of social-media companies that was created in response to the Christchurch massacre. The group’s mission is to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.

“Violence, hate and terrorism aren’t a problem any platform alone can solve, which is why we collaborate across the industry to share information and best practices,” Ms. Hession said.

Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for about $970 million in cash. It initially featured mainly broadcasts of people playing and talking about videogames, but it has since expanded to include people engaging in various other activities. More than 2.5 million people are watching Twitch content at any given time and more than 8 million people stream video on it every month, according to the company.

—Georgia Wells contributed to this article.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]