4,000 viewed NZ mosques shootings live: Facebook

San Francisco, March 19

Facing the flak over its inability to spot and remove the livestreaming of New Zealand mosque's shooting, Facebook on Tuesday said 4,000 people viewed it before being taken down.

"The video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast. No users reported the video during the live broadcast," Chris Sonderby, VP and Deputy General Counsel, said in a blog-post. "Including the views during the live broadcast, the video was viewed about 4,000 times in total before being removed from Facebook," Sonderby added.

Strapped with a GoPro camera to his head, the gunman broadcasted graphic footage of shooting via Facebook Live for nearly 17 minutes. It was later shared in millions on other social media platforms.

Fifty people were killed in the shootings at Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Avenue Masjid in Christchurch on March 15 after 28-year-old Australian national Brenton Tarrant opened indiscriminate firings.

According to Facebook, the first user report on the original video came in 29 minutes after the video started, and 12 minutes after the live broadcast ended. "Before we were alerted to the video, a user on '8chan' posted a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site," said Sonderby.

"We removed the personal accounts of the named suspect from Facebook and Instagram, and are identifying and removing any imposter accounts that surface," he said.

Facebook said it removed the original video and hashed it to detect other shares visually similar to that video and automatically remove them from Facebook and Instagram.

"Some variants such as screen recordings were more difficult to detect, so we expanded to additional detection systems, including the use of audio technology," Sonderby said.

"In the first 24 hours, we removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack. More than 1.2 million of those videos were blocked at upload, and were therefore prevented from being seen on our services," he said.

IANS