Many sites have tried taking down videos as they were uploaded but have been overwhelmed. Facebook said it deleted 1.5 million videos for 24 hours after the incident, despite many attempts to evade detection. On Reddit, a post with a video was viewed more than a million times before it was removed. Google says video is being shared faster than any tragedy it has seen before, according to a New Zealand government report.
Over the next few days, several people began discussing how to evade the platform’s automated system to keep Christchurch videos online. On Telegram on March 16, 2019, people from a group related to white supremacy sought to manipulate the video so it wouldn’t be removed, according to discussions seen by The Times.
“Just change the way it opens,” one user wrote. “Speed it up 2x and [expletive] couldn’t find it. ”
Within days, several clips of the shooting were posted to 4chan, an online message board. In July 2019, a 24-second clip of the murders also appeared on Rumble, as reviewed by The Times.
Over the following months, the New Zealand government identified more than 800 variations of the original video. Officials have asked Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others to devote more resources to removing them, according to government reports.
New copies or links to the video were uploaded online whenever the Christchurch shooting appeared in the news or on event anniversaries. In March 2020, about a year after the shooting, nearly a dozen tweets linking to variations of the video appeared on Twitter. More videos appeared when the gunman sentenced to life in prison in August 2020.
Other groups have jumped in to pressure tech companies to remove the videos. Group founder and director Adam Hadley said Tech Against Terrorism, a United Nations-backed initiative to develop technology to detect extremist content, has sent out 59 content warnings in Christchurch for technology companies and file hosting services from December 2020 to November 2021. That represents about 51% of the right-wing terrorist content the group is trying to remove online, he said.
