Supremacists circumvent algorithms and keep videos of massacres on the internet

The 1 minute 30 second video offers an unnerving personal insight. A man crosses a parking lot. He then raises a semiautomatic weapon and shoots two people standing in a doorway. One falls, while the other tries to crawl away, before being shot again.

The black and white video was posted to Facebook on March 15, 2019. It was a partial recording of the live stream of a gunman as he murdered 51 people on the same day at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

For more than three years, the video has remained quietly on Facebook, cropped in square format and slowed down in certain parts. About three-quarters of the way into the video, text appears asking the audience to “Share THIS”. The clip has amassed around 7,000 views and 22 comments, including some calling for it to be deleted.

Online texts apparently linked to the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, said he was inspired by the Christchurch massacre to live-stream his attack. The Facebook clip — one of dozens that are online, even after years of work to remove them — may have been in part why it was so easy to imitate the Christchurch shooter’s tactics.

In a 24-hour scan this week, The New York Times identified more than 50 videos and internet links with footage of the 2019 Christchurch shooter. They were on at least nine platforms and websites, including Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, 4chan and the video site Rumble.

Three of the videos had been posted on Facebook since the day of the murders, according to the Tech Transparency Project, an industry watchdog group, while others were posted this week.

Finding the videos and links was not difficult, though Facebook, Twitter and other platforms pledged in 2019 to remove the footage, pressured in part by public outrage over the incident and by governments. In the aftermath, tech companies and governments came together, forming coalitions to crack down on terrorist and extremist content online.

However, despite Facebook purging 4.5 million material related to the Christchurch attack six months after the murders, what the New York Times found this week shows that video of a mass murderer has a lasting afterlife. –and potentially eternal– on the internet.

“It’s clear that some progress has been made since Christchurch, but we also live in a world where these videos will never be completely erased from the internet,” said Brian Fishman, Facebook’s former director of counterterrorism who helped lead the attempt to identify and remove the Christchurch videos from the website in 2019.

To fool some big platforms, which often rely on artificial intelligence to remove toxic content, people added watermarks or filters to alter Christchurch clips or changed the playback speed of the recording.

Others have started posting the video’s addresses on the web, rather than posting the clips directly, to avoid detection by algorithms that match footage of shootings with known versions. Others uploaded the Christchurch footage to less popular platforms with fewer content moderation rules.

If footage from Christchurch is any guide, the Buffalo attack will likely persist on the internet. The shooting was streamed for less than two minutes on Twitch, the Amazon-owned live streaming site, before being cut by the company. But it was enough for someone to record the slaughter and for links to the recording to spread widely.

These links have already appeared on Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. Videos of the Buffalo shooter’s attack were also uploaded to Facebook, Twitter and WeChat, as well as sites like Rumble, Parler and Truth Social, which are popular with right-wing audiences, according to experts and a New York Times analysis.

Many sites said they are working to remove the links and clips from the Buffalo murders, so they are unlikely to proliferate as widely as those in Christchurch. But even though the Buffalo footage may “diminishing significantly” on major platforms, it will “never disappear from the internet,” said Courtney Radsch, the United States representative at the international human rights organization Article 19.

Facebook, owned by Meta, said that for every 10,000 views of content on the platform, only about five were of material related to terrorism. Rumble and Reddit said the Christchurch videos violate their rules and that they continue to remove them. Twitter, 4chan and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment.

The Christchurch attack appeared online on the afternoon of March 15, 2019, as the gunman began live-streaming the murders on his Facebook page.

Six minutes later, the first recording of the murders was uploaded to a file-hosting website called Mega, as per investigation by the New Zealand Department of Home Affairs. File hosting sites allow photos, videos and other content to be stored and shared on other platforms.

By the end of that day, a complete recording of the 17-minute live stream had been uploaded to dozens of other file-sharing services, video streaming sites, and social networking platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit.

Many sites tried to remove the videos as they were posted, but they became overwhelmed. Facebook said it took down 1.5 million videos in the 24 hours after the incident, but many managed to evade detection. On Reddit, a post featuring the video was viewed over 1 million times before it was removed. Google said the speed at which the clip was shared was faster than any tragedy to date, according to the New Zealand government report.

In the days that followed, some people began discussing ways to bypass the platforms’ automated systems to keep the Christchurch video online. On Telegram on March 16, 2019, members of a white supremacist group discussed ways to manipulate the video so it wouldn’t be taken down.

In the following months, the New Zealand government identified over 800 variations of the original recording. Officials have asked Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other sites to devote more resources to removing them, according to the government report.

New copies or links to the video were uploaded online whenever the Christchurch shooting appeared on the news or on anniversaries of the event. In March 2020, about a year after the massacre, nearly a dozen posts linking to versions of the video appeared on Twitter. More videos appeared when the shooter was sentenced to life in prison in August 2020.

Other groups have swung into action to pressure tech companies to delete the video. Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-backed initiative that develops technology to detect extremist content, sent 59 alerts about Christchurch content to tech companies and file-hosting services between December 2020 and November 2021, said Adam Hadley, founder and group director. This represented about 51% of the right-wing terrorist content the group was trying to get off the internet, he said.

“A video can have massive reach, and not reporting or failing to act can make it very popular,” Hadley said. “Terrorists know this and are trying to spread it across as many platforms as possible.”

Despite surveillance, at least nine videos featuring images of Christchurch appeared on Gab, another fringe site, in 2021, according to the Times review. Some were narrated by conspiracy theorists who claimed the shooting had been staged.

After Saturday’s attack in Buffalo, several links to the Christchurch massacre appeared online again. On Twitter, some users commenting on the New York killings asked where they could find videos of the New Zealand attacks. “You can find everything on Twitter,” replied one user, adding an emoji that sends a kiss.