Tech companies are too slow at preventing users from spreading videos and images that analyze and celebrate mass shooters, potentially inspiring future attacks
Mass shooting events like the one that happened July 4 near Chicago typically set off an-all-too-common chain of procedures at tech companies …
Bloomberg
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a recurring failure mode with a long paper trail. In 2018, Google, YouTube, and Facebook were already being told they needed dedicated breaking-news teams because their systems caught tragedy-related hoaxes too late. A year later, the New Zealand shooting livestream spread across Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter faster than any of them could pull it down — even though the same companies had earlier shown they could act decisively against ISIS propaganda when they chose to.
Bloomberg's report lands two months after the Buffalo-area live-broadcast questions resurfaced the same debate, and it sharpens the frame: the problem is no longer just graphic footage spreading, but user-generated videos that analyze and celebrate shooters — content that sits in a gray zone between 'graphic' and 'glorified,' a gap researchers flagged again around the Charlie Kirk shooting videos.
First-order effects
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter face immediate pressure to explain why celebration-and-analysis videos evade their moderation queues while the July 4 attack near Chicago is still in the news cycle.
Second-order effects
The ISIS playbook becomes the benchmark again: platforms will be pushed to stand up rapid-response teams and public takedown commitments rather than relying on post-hoc flagging, as CNN's coverage argued they should for white-supremacist content.
Third-order effects
If each attack repeats this cycle, the likely endpoint is codified crisis protocols — and possibly regulatory mandates — defining how fast platforms must classify and remove shooter-celebration content, closing the graphic-versus-glorified gap the Kirk videos exposed.
The trend: Platform moderation is drifting from reactive, per-incident cleanup toward pre-committed crisis response models, with every new mass shooting tightening the case that voluntary speed is insufficient.
New from me & @cecianasta: People are already dissecting the online presence of the Highland Park shooter, passing around archives of his profiles and picking apart his postings for clues. It doesn't matter if it's nonsensical, the online frenzy is real https://www.bloomberg.com/…
And this kind of frenzy that inevitably ensues after these tragedies is not something tech companies are equipped to deal with. Yes, deactivating accounts helps—but it's low-hanging fruit. As @MelissaRyan told us, “Mass shooters count on the online frenzy” https://www.bloomberg.c…
@MelissaRyan +1 impt point from @etbrooking: you might want to look away from this stuff because it's happening on the fringes. Sure, but that's how this stuff bleeds into the mainstream. We really have no right to be surprised when the next mass shooting event occurs https://www…
In the wake of mass shooting tragedies, social media companies have a playbook: investigate, remove account, delete content. Their next frontier is digital “tributes” that valorize attackers and, experts say, inspire others. From me and @daveyalba: https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Even a PayPal link passed around that allowed people to “donate” to the shooter, shared through an archived website of his, was active until we asked about it. (Side note: love to play content moderator for these tech companies...) https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.co…
How nonsensical? They've tried to scrutinize the meaning behind a self-published book by the suspected gunman—it contains a string of meaningless numbers. They've passed around a Mega link of his profiles, photos & posts, trying to discern his affiliations
These are not new phenomena. Creating propaganda like this is intentional, and feeds into chaos and social conflict that extremists hope will catch on more broadly. @AlexBNewhouse told us this is known as “accelerationism” — shooters want to be valorized. https://www.bloomberg.co…
ACAB All Citizens Are Bastards? What happens when everyone, including journalists and cops and the general public, all use the same surveillance tools to look for “evidence”? Social surveillance turns anyone into an expert on online extremism and propaganda too, it seems. https:/…
No matter how quickly tech cos remove the shooter's content, users invariably find, circulate and in some cases glorify past posts. The tech industry, for all its engineering might, is still ill-equipped to curtail this amplification of violence. https://twitter.com/...