The Enduring Afterlife of a Mass Shooting's Livestream Online

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Ryan Mac 🙃
@RMac18
The Buffalo gunman video is propaganda for a hateful world view. And it will likely never be erased from the web.

To understand its future path, we traced the continued existence of its inspiration, the Christchurch video, which continues to spread today.
A memorial outside a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, N.Y., last weekend after a mass shooting. The gunman took inspiration from a 2019 rampage in Christchurch, New Zealand, videos of which continue circulating.
nytimes.com
The Enduring Afterlife of a Mass Shooting’s Livestream Online
Dozens of recordings of a 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, remain online, in a sobering reminder of the internet’s permanence.
8:21 AM · May 19, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/technology/mass-shootings-livestream-online.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/kxUF9

The one-minute 30-second video offers an unnerving first-person view. A man strides across a parking lot. Then he raises a semiautomatic gun and fires at two people standing in a doorway. One falls, while the other tries crawling away before getting shot again.

The black-and-white clip was uploaded to Facebook on March 15, 2019. It was a partial recording of a livestream by a gunman while he murdered 51 people that day at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

For more than three years, the video has remained undisturbed on Facebook, cropped to a square and slowed down in parts. About three-quarters of the way through the video, text pops up urging the audience to “Share THIS.” The clip has amassed about 7,000 views and 22 comments, including some asking for it to be deleted.

Online writings apparently connected to Payton S. Gendron, the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store on Saturday, said that he drew inspiration for a livestreamed attack from the Christchurch shooting. The clip on Facebook — one of dozens that are online, even after years of work to remove them — may have been part of the reason that the Christchurch gunman’s tactics were so easy to emulate.

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