Member-only story
Social media has not done enough to stop hate. Now Texas wants to make it even harder!
On Saturday, an 18-year old radicalised white man walked into a grocery store wearing body armour and carrying a gun. He proceeded to open fire, shooting 13 people and killing 10 of them. Most of the victims were Black.
The thing is this: he live-streamed the shooting on Twitch. Which is going to make his “not guilty” plea somewhat challenging to defend!
To their credit, it only took 2 minutes before the live stream was taken down by Twitch. However, in so doing, Twitch may have violated Texas’ new social media laws (I’ll come to that in a minute).
However, the video was out and it quickly appeared on the streaming site Streamable.
The New York Times reported that the video was seen 3 million times before Streamable took it down. At the same time, links to the video of the live stream were being shared on both Facebook and Twitter for as long as 9 hours, even though the links violated Facebook’s rules.
A second video that claimed to show the shooter firing in the grocery store went up on Twitter. It took 4 hours for this video to be taken down.
Meanwhile, on TikTok, users were posting videos of the killer going into the store and others with instructions on how to find the video online.
