'Other than the astonishing nature of the video, it adds little information about what happened. Ward's camera, including screen captures of the alleged shooter. Spokespeople for WDBJ have asked other outlets not to use or share the video of their co-workers' deaths, but broadcasts used footage captured on Mr. 'The same feature that can help democracy can hurt moral society.'

'Citizens might want to have access to a copy of that video, versus to be censored by a certain authority,' Mr. It's not clear how an algorithm could understand the difference between a killer's attempt to document his crimes and footage from a police body camera that captures a shooting of great public interest, such as the death of Samuel DuBose, shot by a University of Cincinnati police officer in July. Gruzd said that better video-and-image analysis might help crackdown on content that platforms wish to ban, but even then the potential for false positives and overpolicing remains high. Reddit's policies on prohibited content are black and white when it comes to spam, so-called revenge porn and impersonations, but graphic violence is not explicitly banned unless it incites others to violence.

The site's posted policy says: 'It's not okay to post violent or gory content that's primarily intended to be shocking, sensational, or disrespectful.' But it also goes on to offer something of a dispensation for such content: 'If posting graphic content in a news or documentary context, please be mindful to provide enough information to help people understand what's going on in the video.'įacebook is more declarative: 'We remove graphic images when they are shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate or glorify violence.' That also means Facebook has broad leeway to decide what is sadistic or glorifying, and what is not. 'YouTube has clear policies against videos of gratuitous violence and we remove them when they're flagged.'Īnd yet, a simple YouTube search of the shooter's name provided dozens of examples of the video, some of which had been online for hours.

'Our hearts go out to the families affected by this terrible crime,' the Google-owned company said in a statement. YouTube has also struggled to remove the shooting videos posted by its users. Some media have questioned the ethics of auto-play, where videos posted to Facebook or Twitter apps begin rolling as soon as users scroll by, often with no deliberate action on the part of the user.ĭozens have expressed disgust at seeing the Virginia shooting in their timelines and many have disabled the auto-play feature on their devices. He said these platforms face similar struggles with content from natural disasters, which often feature dead victims, and from bloody civil struggles like the Maidan protests in Ukraine. Something that's considered violent for one group could be educational for another group.' 'It's really hard to come up with policies for all possible violations. 'Social-media sites are popular because they allow for content to be distributed virally,' said Anatoliy Gruzd, director of the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University. Neither were fast enough to stop users from downloading the clips, which were then reuploaded up on dozens of different Twitter accounts, YouTube pages, Facebook accounts, Reddit posts and many other sites.

The Twitter account was suspended mere minutes after the video was posted the Facebook page that also hosted the video was removed a few minutes later. The distribution of a video – evidence of a crime posted by a suspect – raises a host of thorny issues about the role of social media, the value of violent images and the ability of companies and users to set and maintain content standards on privately owned platforms. Police say the suspect, Vester Lee Flanagan II, a former on-air employee at WDBJ under the name Bryce Williams, died later of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Virginia cameraman shooting