Facebook has recently been heavily criticized for allowing Buffalo mass shooting to be posted onto the platform, resulting in the video’s further spread.
News travels fast, and I’m sure anyone encountering this article has already heard of the shooting that took place on the 14th of May, 2022. An eighteen-year-old white male, someone who just turned the legal age, walking into a general store of all places and murdered ten individuals while harming three others. Eleven of these victims were black, and two were white. While I’d be fully willing to avoid drawing the rather obvious conclusion this leads us to, the shooter, a Payton S. Gendron, did it for us: he left a hundred and eighty-page manifesto online clearly confirming this to be a hate crime. This individual currently lies under police custody, pleading not guilty to multiple first-degree murder charges. Then again, he’s a white mass shooter in the USA: I’m sure everyone’ll be more than happy to dismiss this ridiculously obvious hate crime as a matter of mental insanity or whatever. You know, the exact same terminology everyone likes avoiding whenever we discuss criminals of other skin colors.
Am I incredibly horrified by this act of mass murder, and entirely frustrated by how a kid managed to get his hands on weapons this easily? Yes, I definitely am, but that’s beside the point in a tech article. I guess I’ll settle for the usual criticism of Facebook and Meta that seems to make up half of my workload here. The shooting was live-streamed onto Twitch, from where it was removed soon after. However, not soon enough since a great number of netizens got their hands on the footage and decided to post it onto Facebook. Meta’s flagship social media site is notorious for flagging videos and other content that features even a smidge of copyrighted media within literal seconds. However, a video bordering on for few minutes’ worth of horrific murder managed to stay online until people finishing it at the very least, and even more people downloading it at the most.
Meta’s a company that keeps making the wrong community guideline decisions at every turn, what more is there to say? I’m sure a statement about how this is the fault of other social media platforms or how they’re going to update some algorithm to better catch some content will be out in a bit. I neither know, nor care to elaborate further. A white kid managed to murder ten people that did nothing wrong, whose only crime was to be born black. My heart goes out to these people, who did no wrong and yet had to pay a price all too dear for it. My heart goes out to the two white victims as well who, while being alive, still have to suffer real physical pain and trauma. It goes out to the only surviving black man who thankfully was spared a more final fate. I have nothing more to comment on: a white man killed these people because they were not white, and is being branded as being mentally ill instead of the serial killer that he is. I’m done.
H/T: Vox.
Read next: There Is No Such Thing As Privacy In The Digital World As New Report Highlights How Tech Giants Are Sharing User Data With Advertisers
News travels fast, and I’m sure anyone encountering this article has already heard of the shooting that took place on the 14th of May, 2022. An eighteen-year-old white male, someone who just turned the legal age, walking into a general store of all places and murdered ten individuals while harming three others. Eleven of these victims were black, and two were white. While I’d be fully willing to avoid drawing the rather obvious conclusion this leads us to, the shooter, a Payton S. Gendron, did it for us: he left a hundred and eighty-page manifesto online clearly confirming this to be a hate crime. This individual currently lies under police custody, pleading not guilty to multiple first-degree murder charges. Then again, he’s a white mass shooter in the USA: I’m sure everyone’ll be more than happy to dismiss this ridiculously obvious hate crime as a matter of mental insanity or whatever. You know, the exact same terminology everyone likes avoiding whenever we discuss criminals of other skin colors.
Am I incredibly horrified by this act of mass murder, and entirely frustrated by how a kid managed to get his hands on weapons this easily? Yes, I definitely am, but that’s beside the point in a tech article. I guess I’ll settle for the usual criticism of Facebook and Meta that seems to make up half of my workload here. The shooting was live-streamed onto Twitch, from where it was removed soon after. However, not soon enough since a great number of netizens got their hands on the footage and decided to post it onto Facebook. Meta’s flagship social media site is notorious for flagging videos and other content that features even a smidge of copyrighted media within literal seconds. However, a video bordering on for few minutes’ worth of horrific murder managed to stay online until people finishing it at the very least, and even more people downloading it at the most.
Meta’s a company that keeps making the wrong community guideline decisions at every turn, what more is there to say? I’m sure a statement about how this is the fault of other social media platforms or how they’re going to update some algorithm to better catch some content will be out in a bit. I neither know, nor care to elaborate further. A white kid managed to murder ten people that did nothing wrong, whose only crime was to be born black. My heart goes out to these people, who did no wrong and yet had to pay a price all too dear for it. My heart goes out to the two white victims as well who, while being alive, still have to suffer real physical pain and trauma. It goes out to the only surviving black man who thankfully was spared a more final fate. I have nothing more to comment on: a white man killed these people because they were not white, and is being branded as being mentally ill instead of the serial killer that he is. I’m done.
H/T: Vox.
Read next: There Is No Such Thing As Privacy In The Digital World As New Report Highlights How Tech Giants Are Sharing User Data With Advertisers
