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NZ attack reveals social media’s basic flaw: it works as intended
- Tuesday | 19th March, 2019
The New Zealand shooter is hardly the first person to live-stream a murder on social media, let alone leverage social media as a platform to broadcast his message of bigotry and hatred. But it begs the question: why haven’t social media platforms gotten better at spotting and stopping such content before it goes viral? Social media sites struggle to stop things like the viral live-streaming of the Christchurch attack because their platforms are designed to do exactly that. But there’s no escaping the fact that the in the case of the Christchurch shooter, the social media platforms he used did exactly what they were designed to do. Social media may actually be contributing to that via their own algorithms – social media professor Zeynep Tufekci has been researching how YouTube’s recommendation algorithm appears to invite viewers to watch increasingly extreme content as a way to keep them glued to the screen.
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