New Zealand Shooting: Can Live Streaming of Massacres in the Future Be Stopped Before They Truly Begin?

In the aftermath of the recent New Zealand shootings, their are several questions that now need to be answered.

The main one will be with the rather strange and dubious phenomenon of this having been live streamed on the internet, and with nobody having caught it on time to block it. This meant that the guy responsible, who designed this massacre to have a large audience online, managed to get exactly what he wanted.

This went live on Facebook, and nobody there caught it. There are other sites that apparently, or at least allegedly, are better at catching this kind of thing than Facebook proved to be, but this is starting to be a problem. It is understandable that this kind of thing might be difficult to avoid, at least if sites want to provide their members the apparently attractive option of broadcasting live. That is attractive on many levels for many people, although presumably, in this age of selfies and crushing narcissism, you have to wonder just how important the messages that so many people are trying to get across with such immediacy really are.

That notwithstanding, this nutcase decided to live stream the massacre. He placed cameras in his car, and he placed cameras on top of his gun, or on his arm with a view over the gun, to give it a look, and almost a feel, of being like a video game. The only difference, of course, was that the consequences were all too real. People were really being shot, really suffering and, obviously in many cases, dying. 

So, how can this be avoided in the future? 

Well, there are some ways in which things like this can be caught. Anything that looks like this is supposed to be monitored, and some sites allegedly have technology that spots violence like this, and prevents it from being aired. But again, this guy made it appear almost visually like a video game, so would that not make it more difficult to catch.

Most likely, it would. Difficult, but not impossible. There are indicators that could have helped. One of them was the numbers of views that the video received. After all, the numbers for this video apparently spiked, as word spread. It kind of makes you wonder how news of this did not also spread to the police, and one hopes that some of the people watching actually did call the authorities to warn them about it. Obviously, most people in the world have never been to Christchurch, and would not be familiar with it. However, locals probably would be, and the police definitely should be. This might have been enough to tip them off as to the whereabouts of the perpetrator. 

The numbers spiking also should have set triggers for those in Facebook to pay attention that there was something that made this video stand out in some way, and to stop it from broadcasting.

Now, of course, it is too late. I worked at a school on Friday, and some of the kids there, half a world away from New Zealand, and having nothing to do with white supremacy (these kids were black) were watching the video themselves, the violent parts. So clearly this guy got exactly the kind of attention that he sought for himself, and his crazy actions.

The trick now is to make sure that any future copycats and wanna-be's, if you will, cannot get anywhere near the same kind of publicity.