Social media yanking shooting videos faster - if not by much

NEW YORK (AP) — Social platforms have learned to remove violent videos of extremist shootings more quickly over the past few years. It's just not clear they're moving quickly enough.

Police say that when a white gunman killed 10 people and wounded three others — most of them Black — in a “racially motivated violent extremist” shooting in Buffalo Saturday, he live-streamed the attack to the gaming platform Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. It didn’t stay there long; a Twitch spokesperson said it removed the video in less than two minutes.

That's considerably faster than the 17 minutes Facebook needed to take down a similar video streamed by a self-described white supremacist who killed 51 people in two New Zealand mosques in 2019. But versions of the Buffalo shooting video still quickly spread to other platforms, and they haven't always disappeared quickly.

In April, Twitter enacted a new policy on “perpetrators of violent attacks” to remove accounts maintained by “individual perpetrators of terrorist, violent extremist, or mass violent attacks,” along with tweets, manifestos and other material produced by perpetrators of such attacks. On Sunday, though, clips of the video were still circulating on the platform.

One clip purporting to display a first-person view of the gunman moving through a supermarket firing at people was posted to Twitter at 8:12 AM Pacific Time, and was still viewable more than four hours later. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At a news conference following the attack, New York Gov, Kathy Hochul said social media companies must be more vigilant in monitoring what happens on their platforms and found it inexcusable the live-stream wasn't taken down “within a second.”

“The CEOs of those companies need to be held...