8chan was also where the accused terrorist had posted a manifesto before the rampage began.įrom there, the video spread rapidly across the internet, quickly surfacing on YouTube, Twitter and Reddit. At least one of them copied and posted the video to 8chan, the online message board frequented by alt-right trolls, incels (so-called 'involuntary celibates') and the alleged attacker himself. The roughly hour-long period that elapsed between the start of the live stream and the video being taken down would prove to be a crucial delay that enabled the video to spread uncontrollably.ĭuring that period, the original video had been viewed by 4000 Facebook users. The police alert triggered notifications to Facebook's most senior executives in Australia and New Zealand, including local policy chief Mia Garlick (who was at head office in California at the time) as well as content moderators in places such as the Philippines. Minutes later, the video was finally removed. A little after 2pm, or 21 minutes after the first emergency call, they had rammed into the attacker's vehicle outside a second mosque, Linwood, and detained him.īut it wasn't until 2.29pm, when New Zealand Police used a special escalation channel for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to alert Facebook to problematic content, that the social network acted.

At 1.47pm, according to local reports, and just six minutes after the first emergency call was made, police had arrived on the scene. It took until 29 minutes after the live stream began, and 12 minutes after it finished - when a user reported it - for Facebook to begin to realise what was happening.Īt around 1.40pm the alleged shooter entered the Al Noor Mosque and began firing.

The $US473 billion ($A663 billion) company's vaunted artificial intelligence technologies, designed to stop extremist and illicit content such as pornography or videos depicting violent acts from appearing on the platform, failed to detect anything objectionable in the Christchurch shooting stream.

Christchurch shooting live stream video