Charlie Warzel

On Friday, a man in his late 20s strapped on a helmet camera, loaded his car with weapons, drove to a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and began shooting at anyone who came into his line of vision. He broadcast the act of mass terror live for the world to watch on social media.

Forty-nine people were killed in the attack, which occurred at two different mosques in the city.

A 17-minute video of a portion of the attack, which leapt across the internet faster than social media censors could remove it, is one of the most disturbing, high-definition records of a mass casualty attack of the digital age — a grotesque first-person-shooter-like record of man’s capacity for inhumanity.

Videos of attacks are designed to amplify the terror, of course. But what makes this atrocity “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence,” as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it, is both the methodical nature in which the massacre was conducted and how it was apparently engineered for maximum virality.

Although platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube scrambled to take down the recording and an accompanying manifesto from the gunman, they were no match for the speed of their users; new artificial-intelligence tools created to scrub such platforms of terrorist content could not defeat human cunning and impulse to gawk. In minutes, the video was downloaded and mirrored onto additional platforms where it ricocheted around the globe. Still frames of bodies were screenshotted and uploaded to sites like Reddit, 4chan and Twitter where it was shared and reshared.

Some Twitter users described frantically trying to stop videos in their feeds from autoplaying, so as not to be bombarded with the recording of the carnage from around the globe.

Internet users dredged up the alleged shooter’s digital history, preserving and sharing images of his weapons and body armor. The gunman’s digital footprint — from the rantings of his White Nationalist manifesto to his 8chan message board postings before the murders — was unearthed and, for a time, distributed into far-flung corners of the web.

The killer wanted the world’s attention, and by committing an act of mass terror, he was able to get it.

It was not the first act of violence to be broadcast in real time.

In 2015, two reporters in Roanoke, Virginia, were murdered by a gunman who posted the footage on Twitter. Not long after, Periscope, a live streaming app, came under fire after a teenager live-streamed her suicide.

Other murders have been broadcast live on Facebook, like the apparently random killing of Robert Godwin in 2017. There have also been numerous recording of encounters — sometimes fatal — with police. Since the live video tool debuted in late 2015, users have also broadcast rape and child abuse — a 2017 survey by BuzzFeed News found “at least 45 instances of violence” across the platform.

And yet the Christchurch shooting feels different, in part due to its perpetrator’s apparent familiarity with the darkest corners of the internet. The recording contains numerous references to online and meme culture, including name-checking a prominent YouTube personality shortly before beginning the attack.

The digital trail the shooter left behind appears to depict a white supremacist motivation for the attack. There is much, at this early date, that is unknown despite what’s been posted online. The 87-page manifesto, for instance, is filled with layers of ironic, self-referential commentary, apparently written to specifically enrage the communities that appear to have helped radicalize the gunman in the first place. It seems that the Christchurch shooter — who by his digital footprint appears to be native to the internet — understands both the platform dynamics that allow misinformation and divisive content to spread but also the way to sow discord.

As terrifying as the violence itself is, is how well the online community worked in the gunman’s favor. This may be our new reality. Not only has conspiratorial hate spread from the internet to real life; it’s also weaponized to go viral.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/opinion/new-zealand-shooting.html" id="ecd2715c-149b-34aa-a678-ebdab6db5c11">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer)

The Massacre in New Zealand Was Made to Go Viral

That’s understandable. The algorithms that govern the platforms are unknowable trade secrets. There are, in some cases, billions of users to account for. There are meaty issues of free speech and copyright law playing out in real time across borders. Technology is confusing!

And, yes, it’s true that the tech companies are dealing with thorny problems that most likely have no universally satisfying outcome. Big Tech’s problems are indeed dizzying and manifold, but the past few years have taught us that there’s an Occam’s razor quality to any explanation of the toxicity of our online platforms. The original sin, it seems, isn’t all that complicated; it’s the prioritization of growth — above all else and at the expense of those of us who use the services.

The most recent example came Tuesday morning when Bloomberg News published a story chronicling YouTube’s struggles to quash misinformation, conspiracies and incendiary content. According to the report, current and former YouTube employees said that the company had ignored warnings to change YouTube’s recommendation engine and that they were, in some cases, discouraged from seeking out videos that might violate YouTube’s rules to preserve a sense of plausible deniability.

Employee fears “were sacrificed for engagement.” Ambitious goals were set to hit 1 billion hours of viewing a day, and algorithms were tweaked accordingly. “We were so in the weeds trying to hit our goals and drive usage of the site,” one former senior manager confessed in the piece, “I don’t know if we really picked up our heads.”

The story shouldn’t be shocking. Reports from inside YouTube echo insider tales from other large tech platforms — a familiar pattern of ruthless optimization for users and of attention gone wrong.

The YouTube employee’s quote reminded me of a conversation I’d had a few years back with a former member of Twitter’s product team. “Leading up to IPO, it was all about revenue growth, from CEO on down,” the employee told me, suggesting that, in a frantic race to look good for Wall Street, the company deprioritized fixing systemic issues, including its rampant harassment problem. Others inside Twitter back then agreed.

“I did see a lot of decisions being made in terms of growth when it came to how to handle abuse, which I get,” Leslie Miley, a former engineering manager at Twitter, told me at the time.

Growth at any cost. It’s a mantra familiar inside Facebook as well, as an internal memo surfaced last year by BuzzFeed News revealed.

“We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified,” a Facebook senior executive, Andrew Bosworth, wrote in the memo in June 2016. In a separate section, while advancing the argument that more human connections via Facebook are a “de facto good,” he appears to grapple with the downsides of connection. “Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies ... maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools,” he wrote.

Bosworth has suggested the memo was a thought experiment. “I don’t agree with the post today and I didn’t agree with it when I wrote it,” he said.

But Facebook’s rapid rise to 2 billion-plus users, numerous privacy debacles and a steady stream of reported negative revelations suggest that, like its counterparts, the company’s quest for expansion trumped pressing concerns of privacy and transparency. A New York Times investigation last year reported that, “bent on growth,” Facebook executives “ignored warning signs” that Facebook could “disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe.”

Scale is also seductive at an engineering level, bottom line aside. Adding users and engagement, in one interpretation, might signal that you’re giving people what they want. In 2017, I asked a former senior Facebook employee if staff members had felt a sense of blame for Facebook’s inability to stop the spread of misinformation that plagued the platform during the 2016 election. Not exactly, the employee explained:

“They believe that to the extent that something flourishes or goes viral on Facebook — it’s not a reflection of the company’s role but a reflection of what people want. And that deeply rational engineer’s view tends to absolve them of some of the responsibility, probably.”

We can see this sensibility today in the way the platforms tend to obfuscate and deflect responsibility. Just last week, a YouTube executive argued that its recommendation algorithms weren’t designed to nudge users toward more extreme videos. Similarly, Twitter has and will continue to argue it was not designed specifically to be disproportionately hostile to women and people of color. And Facebook will argue that it was certainly not designed to help foreign countries interfere in our elections.

But this defensive posture seems only concerned with intent. Even if we take the platforms at their word that they did not intend to profit from extremism or to become hubs for radicalization online, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Intent is far less important than the actual outcomes. And the outcomes appear to suggest that these platforms were intentionally designed to keep you glued to your screen for one more video, one more retweet, one more outraged share of a hate read.

How can the mess be unwound? Can it be fixed? Those are the complicated questions. But the answer as to how we got here in the first place is much less complicated than Big Tech wants you to think. Intentionally or not, it was designed this way.

This article originally appeared in <a id="cc731d14-7710-4fa9-ad21-013684aea2bc" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/opinion/facebook-youtube-disinformation.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer): When it comes to explaining why Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have become hotbeds for extremism, propaganda and bigotry, there’s a tendency to overcomplicate things.

Big tech's original sin

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Charlie Warzel

Articles written by the author

The Massacre in New Zealand Was Made to Go Viral

Big tech's original sin