Graphic videos and images of the aftermath of two bloody events this weekend in Texas — a shooting at a mall and a car plowing into a group of migrants — circulated widely on Twitter over the last couple of days, generating renewed concern about the platform’s moderation capabilities under CEO Elon Musk.
It was imagery that some users said was pushed into their “For You” feed, which was introduced earlier this year and surfaces content based on Twitter’s recommendation system and a user’s preferences based on who they follow. Users can choose between the “For You” feed and the “Following” feed, which only shows tweets from accounts that a user follows.
David Hogg, a gun control advocate and Parkland shooting survivor, tweeted on Sunday (in response to a poll from Musk asking if he had succeeded in improving the platform in the last six months) that graphic images had been pushed into his “For You” feed.
“Well I saw a significantly higher number of photos and videos of dead people from the most recent mass shooting in Texas on my For you page and timeline yesterday than I ever had seen before,” Hogg tweeted. “So not great in that respect.”
That concern was offset by some calls for the graphic images to be more widely distributed, a decades-old argument that has gained some renewed momentum in recent years around the gun control debate.
“The entire genre of photos and videos of violent attacks is fraught with peril,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute. “On the one hand, many or most people don’t want to see it. On the other hand, it can be critical evidence of what’s happened and in some cases it can shock people into changing their views. We both want and don’t want that content to be widely available.”
“That puts the internet services in a no-win situation,” he added.
The Allen mall videos, which NBC News has seen and is electing not to link to or embed, show mangled bodies piled on each other just outside the mall, many covered in blood.
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Twitter’s “sensitive media policy” states that users “may not post media that is graphic or share violent or adult nudity and sexual behavior within live video or in profile header, List banner images, or Community cover photos. Media depicting excessively gory content, sexual violence and/or assault, bestiality or necrophilia is also not permitted.”
Twitter does allow for users to post “sensitive” media if they mark their account as such, which puts images and videos behind a warning that must be clicked on before the media is displayed.
It’s not clear how many employees Twitter has to enforce those rules. Musk has said he laid off about 80% of the company’s staff, with NBC News reporting that the company’s moderation teams were cut back.
Searches of Twitter on Monday morning turned up a wide variety of unmoderated videos with no content warnings that would appear to violate those rules, including videos of pornography.
Goldman said he doesn’t know what Musk’s motive is but pointed to the company’s pullback on moderation.
“Content moderation is hard enough when you do it well,” he said, adding that the company has ways to host such videos while also shielding users. “The question is, why didn’t Twitter put this behind a warning screen and was that the wrong choice?”
Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of product overseeing trust and safety, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the videos from the mall shooting. Musk tweeted throughout the weekend, at times touching on the shooting to support mental health efforts.
YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon said in an email that the company’s trust and safety teams removed videos from the weekend mall shooting that violated the company’s community guidelines.
Other less graphic video showed white sheets covering dead bodies surrounded by blood. Another video from a car’s dashcam showed the moment a man opened fire at the mall. Other videos came from people inside the mall who documented their efforts to hide until help came.
Videos from Brownsville, Texas, where eight people died and 10 others were injured by an SUV, also showed a brutal and bloody scene. Some of those videos remain live on Twitter and have been seen by NBC News.
In the case of the graphic mall shooting video, many accounts posted it to Twitter in the hours after the incident. As of Monday morning, a search of Twitter showed that most of those tweets had been deleted, though it was not entirely clear if they had been deleted by those users or by Twitter.
The videos generated a swift reaction from many users, some of whom tweeted at Musk directly and asking him to take action.
That sentiment as not unanimous. Other users pushed for the videos to be seen by more people, arguing that the disturbing images need to be seen in order for people to fully understand the magnitude of these violent actions and the widespread availability of guns in the U.S.
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It’s a point that has found some growing traction as the broader issue of gun regulation remains frozen.
“I thought long and hard about whether to share the horrific video showing the pile of bodies from the mass shooting at the outlet mall in Allen, Texas,” tweeted Jon Cooper, a Democratic fundraiser who has worked for President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama.
“But maybe — just maybe — people NEED to see this video, so they’ll pressure their elected officials until they TAKE ACTION,” he added.
Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times opinion columnist, also said he thinks people need to see the aftermath of these shootings, but that it is also important who sees them.
“Years ago I wrote that the public needs to see the results of our experiment in unlimited gun ownership and I still think that’s true. That includes the Supreme Court,” Bouie tweeted.
Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, offered a counterpoint.
“There is nothing virtuous or ethical about showing easily identifiable dead children and adults, whose families might not yet know they are dead,” Bell tweeted. “It’s deeply unethical — it strips victims and their families of privacy and dignity in death. It serves only Musk’s click farm.”
The open circulation of graphic videos in the aftermath of violent events is a common occurrence on social media, and one that many consumer tech platforms have worked to limit through a combination of human intervention and automated systems that can identify when certain pieces of media are repeatedly posted.
Many consumer tech companies have invested in efforts to limit the spread of graphic images, most notably in the aftermath of violent events. But most also have policies that allow them to weigh whether a particular video is important for the public to see.
Among the most notable examples happened around video from the shooter who killed 49 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, with Twitter and YouTube scrambling to remove copies that were repeatedly uploaded. Such videos are typically regarded as violent propaganda.
More recently, YouTube allowed police body camera video from a school shooting to remain online, with the company stating that the video was in the public interest.
Goldman said thinking around moderation has changed since the Christchurch shooting and noted examples of graphic photos that are now seen as having historical important, such as the “Napalm Girl” photo.
“Seeing that photo helped change American views about the Vietnam War,” he said.
Still, Goldman said there is not a clear consensus on what platforms need to be doing around videos like the ones that emerged this last weekend.
“The content moderation dilemmas that are faced by the internet companies in those circumstances — they cannot please everybody,” he said. “I feel like this is another moment like that.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
