The shooting of Buffalo has focused attention on the role of Twitch, the gaming platform used by the gunman to broadcast a live stream of the massacre, amid renewed calls for tighter regulation of social media platforms.
Many of the millions of followers can stream themselves playing video games, chatting with fans, or simply going about their daily lives by using Twitch.
The Buffalo man, a self-confessed white supremacist, allegedly shot 11 Black and two white victims, killing 10 people in a racially motivated hate crime, using a Twitch channel to livestream the assault from a helmet camera.
Amazon-owned Twitch said it took down the video within two minutes of the violence beginning, but by that time the video was already shared on Facebook and Twitter. In a statement issued to the New York Times, Angela Hession, Twitch's vice president of trust and safety, said the site's response was a very strong response time considering the challenges of live content moderation and shows good progress. The fragmentary nature of modern social media platforms has added to the moderation difficulties. As news of the shooting went viral on TikTok, the platform s moderators tried to take down uploads of the footage, but were much less successful at taking down videos that directed viewers to Twitter accounts where they could watch the shooting in full.
The role of livestreaming is not a part of the question. Some of his followers were prepared to download the video as it was broadcast by the shooter in advance, including by preparing a to-do list on the chat platform Discord.
The initial repeat uploads appeared to come from supporters but within a few hours the bulk of shares came from users who were trying to satisfy the curiosity of others online, similar to what was seen after the Christchurch shooting in 2019 that was initially livestreamed on Facebook before being distributed across YouTube, Twitter and Facebook itself. The livestream was running for 17 minutes before Facebook's moderators brought it down a response time almost 10 times slower than that of Twitch.
The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, told ABC TV on Sunday that social media companies need to be held accountable for violent racist views circulating online. The attacker of Buffalo posted a 180-page manifesto online before the shootings that focused on the racist replacement theory, a conspiracy theory that white people are being systematically replaced by non-white people.
Hochul said tech firms need to be held accountable and that they are taking every step humanly possible to be able to monitor this information. How these depraved ideas are spreading like a virus, and they need to be held accountable. The online safety bill and the Digital Services Act, pieces of legislation being introduced in the UK and EU, are aimed at criminal activity online, but in the US progress is slower. President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, support reforming it, despite the fact that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 absolves platforms of responsibility for content posted by others. The first amendment to the US constitution makes it unlikely that platforms will face significant liability for hosting racist content.