After Facebook, YouTube Pulled Tens Of Thousands Of Videos Relating To The New Zealand Shooting

In an interview with The Washington Post, Neal Mohan, the Chief Product Officer of YouTube, said that the video sharing platform has tried to pull a series of videos after the New Zealand mass shooting occurred a few days ago.

On March 15, two Christchurch mosques became the target for Brenton Tarrant who attacked and killed 50 people brutally. Not only that, the whole process of the attack was recorded and uploaded to many channels in social media platforms all over the world. The culprit seemingly wanted all Internet users to easily access the footage.

After that, the footage kept being shared and re-uploaded in many times on the Internet. On March 17, Facebook reported that there are 15 lakhs videos relating to this attack removed out of its platform during 24h since the shooting happened.

The exact number of videos which was pulled out of YouTube has been still a secret. However, according to Neal Mohan, the massive amount of similar videos have newly appeared on this site. To deal with the issue, YouTube moderators had to work all night to remove dozens of thousands of these violent videos. YouTubers even replaced how to upload to prevent from being detected by automated tools run by YouTube.

In the report, copies were allegedly added in a blinking eye. Almost every second went by, there would be new copies uploaded in the video sharing platform. In the end, YouTube had no choice but deactivated some of the most potential searches to reduce the visibility of these kinds of videos. The company even decided to lock some features to create reviews of its users.

In addition to YouTube, many other companies including Facebook, Twitter and Google have faced a wave of questions concerning how they manage and moderate their platforms after the New Zealand shooting. As a result, these companies have received a lot of lawmakers’ calls to request them to have more practical actions to control their platforms.