Vice President Mike Pence announced Tuesday that the United States intends to send astronauts back to the Moon within five years, with a woman first in line to set foot on the lunar surface.
"It is the stated policy of this administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the Moon, within the next five years," Pence said in a speech in Huntsville, Alabama.
"Let me be clear, the first woman and the next man on the Moon will both be American astronauts launched by American rockets from American soil," he said.
The first manned Moon mission in more than half a century had been scheduled for 2028.
But the program has encountered frustrating delays in the development of a new heavy rocket for the Moon missions, the SLS, whose first flight was recently pushed back to 2021.
In his speech, Pence criticized the "bureaucratic inertia" and "paralysis by analysis" that he said had resulted in the SLS delays, and called for a "new mindset" at the space agency.
He threatened to use commercial launch systems if NASA is not ready in time.
"If commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the Moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets it will be," he said.
"Urgency must be our watchword. Failure to achieve our goal to return an American astronaut to the Moon in the next five years is not an option."
NASA's chief, Jim Bridenstine, recently said a woman would undoubtedly be the first human to set foot on the Moon since 1972, the last time there was a manned mission to the Moon.
Just before his shooting spree at two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques, the alleged mass murderer posted a hate-filled manifesto on several file-sharing sites, and emailed the document to at least 30 people, including New Zealand’s prime minister. He also posted on several social media sites links to the manifesto and instructions on how to find his Facebook profile to watch an upcoming video. The video turned out to be a 17-minute Facebook livestream of preparing for and carrying out the first attack on March 15. In his posts, the accused killer urged people to make copies of the manifesto and the video, and share them around the internet.
On March 23, the New Zealand government banned possession and sharing of the manifesto, and shortly thereafter arrested at least two people for having shared the video. By then, the original manifesto document and video file had long since been removed from the platforms where they were first posted. Yet plenty of people appear to have taken the shooter’s advice, making copies and spreading them widely.
As part of my ongoing research into extremism on social media – particularly anti-Muslim sentiment – I was interested in how other right-wing extremists would use the manifesto. Would they know that companies would seek to identify it on their sites and delete it? How would they try to evade that detection, and how would they share the files around the web? I wanted to see if computer science techniques could help me track the documents as they spread. What I learned suggests it may become even harder to fight hate online in the future.
To catch a file
A few minutes of Google-searching for a hapax from the manifesto (which I’m intentionally not revealing) found copies of the document in Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF formats on dozens of file-sharing services, including DocDroid, DocumentCloud, Scribd, Mega and Dropbox. The file had been uploaded to blogs hosted on Wordpress and attached to message boards like Kiwi Farms. I also found numerous broken links to files that had been uploaded and quickly deleted, like the original versions that the author had uploaded to Mediafire and Zippyshare.To find as many different versions of the manifesto as possible, I chose an unusual keyphrase, called a “hapax legomenon” in computational linguistics: a set of words that would only be found in the manifesto and nowhere else. For example, Google-searching the phrase “Schtitt uses an unamplified bullhorn” reveals that this phrase is used only in David Foster Wallace’s novel “Infinite Jest” and nowhere else online (until now).
To determine whether all the files were the same, I used a common file-identification technique, generating a checksum, or cryptographic hash, for each manifesto document. A hash is a mathematical description of a file. If two files are identical, their hashes will match. If they are different, they will produce different hashes. After reviewing the file hashes, it became clear that there were only a few main versions of the manifesto, and most of the rest of the files circulating around were copies of them.
A hash can only reveal that the files are different, not how or why they are different. Within the different versions of the manifesto files, I found very few instances where entirely new content was added. I did find a few versions that had color graphics and new cover art added, but the text content itself was left largely unchanged. Most of the differences between the originals could be chalked up to the different fonts and paper sizes set as defaults on the computer of whoever created the copies. Some of the versions also had slightly different line spacing, perhaps introduced as the file was converted from Word to PDF.
The video file was another story. At least one person who watched the Facebook video made a copy of it, and that original video was subsequently compressed, edited, restreamed and reformatted until at least 800 different versions were circulating.
Any change to a file – even a small one like adding a single letter to the manifesto or one extra second of video – will result in an entirely different file hash. All those changes made my analysis of the spread of these artifacts difficult – and also complicated social media companies’ efforts to rid the internet of them.
Just 24 hours after the mosque attacks, Monster explained on Gab that he shared the manifesto and video file onto IPFS, or the “Interplanetary File System,” a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing network. Files on IPFS are split into many pieces, each distributed among many participants on the network, making the removal of a file nearly impossible. IPFS had previously been a niche technology, relatively unknown even among extremists. Now, calling IPFS a “crazy clever technology” that makes files “effectively uncensorable,” Monster reassured Gab users that he was also developing software to make IPFS “easy for anyone … with no technical skills required.”
Widespread adoption of artificial intelligence on platforms and decentralized tools like IPFS will mean that the online hate landscape will change once again. Combating online extremism in the future may be less about “meme wars” and user-banning, or “de-platforming,” and could instead look like the attack-and-defend, cat-and-mouse technical one-upsmanship that has defined the cybersecurity industry since the 1980s.
No matter what technical challenges come up, one fact never changes: The world will always need more good, smart people working to counter hate than there are promoting it.
Apple Inc brought in Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston and Jason Momoa to talk up its new television streaming service at a Hollywood-style event on Monday marked by standing ovations, hugs and soaring rhetoric.
The event ended almost 18 months of secrecy over Apple’s television project and featured some of the biggest names in entertainment promoting their original content shows. Apple is working to reinvent itself as an entertainment and financial services company as sales of its iPhones fall.
“We believe deeply in the power of creativity,” Chief Executive Tim Cook told an audience at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters.
He said Apple’s partners on the Apple TV+ service were “the most thoughtful, accomplished and award-winning group of creative visionaries who have ever come together in one place.”
Apple did not say how much the new television subscription service would cost but said it would launch in the fall of 2019 and would be available in 100 nations.
Apple has commissioned more than 30 shows, including a science fiction show from Spielberg, a horror series from movie director M. Night Shyamalan, a new Sesame Workshop show teaching coding to kids and a drama set in the world of morning television starring Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon and popular former “Friends” star Jennifer Aniston.
“This has brought me back to television, and I am really excited about it!” Aniston said on Monday.
In true Hollywood style, Apple saved the biggest performance until last, introducing producer and former talk show host Winfrey.
Winfrey, who ended her daily talk show in 2011 after 25 years to launch her OWN cable channel, said she would interview “artists, newsmakers and leaders,” present two documentaries - one about harassment in the work place and another about mental health - and launch a new, bigger version of her popular Oprah book club.
“My deepest hope is we all humans get to become the fullest version of ourselves as human beings, to join in that mission and unite for our common good and leave this world more enlightened, kinder and better than we found it,” she said in a rousing speech.
Winfrey said she had joined Apple because “they are the company that has re-imagined how we communicate.”
“They’re in a billion pockets y’all. A billion pockets ... The whole world’s got them in their hands and that represents a major opportunity to make a genuine impact,” she said.
Cook bade Winfrey farewell with thanks and a hug, wiping away a tear in his eye. “I will never forget this,” he told her.
Songstress Sara Bareilles performed an emotional new ballad that will serve as the theme song from her new musical drama “Little Voice,” while Pakistani-American comedian Kumail Nanjiani performed a brief standup routine to introduce his “Little America” series about immigrants in America.
“We hope ‘Little America’ will help viewers understand there is no such thing as the other. There is only us,” Nanjiani said.
“We are excited that we get to tell these stories with Apple. Connecting humanity is in their DNA,” he added.
Despite the celebrity appearances, there was only a minimal glimpse of the new shows either completed or in production.
A short compilation reel of clips ended with “Aquaman” star Momoa, who will appear in futuristic drama “See” about a world in which everyone has lost the power of sight.
“This is where we build our new home,” he said.
Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli
Apple Inc is expected to finally lift the curtain on Monday on a secretive, years-long effort to build a television and movie offering designed to compete with big media companies and boost digital services revenue as iPhone sales taper.
“It’s show time” is how the iPhone maker billed the affair slated for the Steve Jobs Theater at its Cupertino, California, headquarters. Analysts believe it will be the technology company’s first splashy launch event that will not feature new gadgets or hardware.
Hollywood celebrities are likely to trek to Apple’s Cupertino home to greet the debut of a revamped Apple TV digital storefront. Apple has commissioned programming from A-list names such as Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg.
The Apple original shows are expected to be offered alongside the option to subscribe to content from Viacom Inc and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp’s Starz, among others, sources have told Reuters.
Apple will join a crowded field where rivals such as Amazon.com’s Prime Video and Netflix Inc have spent heavily to capture viewer attention and dollars with award-winning series and films.
The big tech war for viewers ignited a consolidation wave among traditional media companies preparing to join the fray. Walt Disney Co, which bought 21st Century Fox, and AT&T Inc, which purchased Time Warner Inc, plan to launch or test new streaming video services this year.
Apple’s jump into original entertainment signals a fundamental shift in its business. Sales of hardware money-makers the iPhone, iPad and Mac were either stagnant or flat in its most recent fiscal year. Without another category-defining new gadget announced to the public, Apple is expected to rely on selling subscriptions and services like video, music and hardware insurance.
Revenue from its “services” segment - which includes the App Store, iCloud and content businesses such as Apple Music - grew 24 percent to $37.1 billion in fiscal 2018.
The services segment accounted for only about 14 percent of Apple’s overall $265.6 billion in revenue, but investors have pinned their hopes for growth on the segment.
Apple’s TV push has been cloaked in mystery. Even producers of Apple’s shows are unsure about many of the details about when and how audiences will be able to see their work.
On Monday, Apple also is expected to unveil an Apple News subscription option featuring content from major publishers and a new credit card with Goldman Sachs to bolster Apple Pay.
NOT TAKING ON NETFLIX
While Apple plans to spend $2 billion on original shows this year and has hired Hollywood veterans to oversee them, it is unlikely to take on Netflix or Amazon directly by including libraries of older shows. Instead, its model is expected to more closely resemble the App Store, offering paid subscriptions to other media companies’ programming and keeping a cut of sales.
Ahead of the launch, Apple negotiated deals that would let Apple bundle and sell networks at a discount, replicating a business model from the cable TV industry, one source familiar with the matter said.
Apple’s goal, other sources have told Reuters, is to bring together television shows in one place to make it easier to find, buy and watch them. Apple has worked to make it easier to watch the shows on traditional television from manufacturers such as Sony Corp, VIZIO Inc, LG Electronics Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
Apple’s pitch to Hollywood is that it has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of viewers. The company said in January there were 1.4 billion active Apple devices, 900 million of which are iPhones. It has positioned that as leverage against Netflix’s 139 million global customers and the 100 million subscribers to Amazon’s Prime shipping program, which includes the video service.
But the Silicon Valley company has a history of making quick progress when coming from behind: It launched its Apple Music streaming service years after rival Spotify Technology SA but has garnered 50 million listeners, nearly half of Spotify’s 96 million premium subscribers. And Apple in January said its Apple News service had 85 million active users after being released less than four years ago.
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles and Kenneth Li in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski
Somewhere lost in President Donald Trump's victory lap chanting "no collusion," is that special counsel Robert Mueller proved that Russia did interfere with the 2016 elections. In a Sunday tweet, CNN host Jake Tapper wondered what leaders plan to do to fix it and prevent it from ever happening again.
Tapper was referring to a tweet from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who tweeted, in all capital letters, that there were "multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign." Whether or not Mueller found enough evidence to implicate the president, he did find enough evidence that Russia did whatever they could to assist the Trump campaign and lead them to victory in 2016.
"Not an unimportant emphasis — the Russians tried and they were, per Mueller, behind the hacks and serious campaigns of election interference," Tapper tweeted. "What more will US leaders do to prevent that from happening again?"
On Friday, The Daily Beast reported that crowdfunding platform GoFundMe is banning anti-vaccine activists from fundraising to promote medical disinformation and conspiracy theories:
“Campaigns raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMe’s terms of service and will be removed from the platform,” spokesman Bobby Whithorne told The Daily Beast.
“We are conducting a thorough review and will remove any campaigns currently on the platform.”
“Antivaxxer” campaigns, at least those that promote an alternative product to vaccines, would appear to already violate GoFundMe’s terms of service, which prohibit “products that make health claims that have not been approved or verified by the applicable local … or national regulatory body.”
Nonetheless, such campaigns have been highly effective on the platform. Antivax activist Larry Cook, for example, has generated nearly $80,000 from various GoFundMe campaigns, and has used the money to take out attack ads against vaccines on Facebook — including some that targeted pregnant women during a measles outbreak. Cook’s website disclaims that he may also skim some of the proceeds from his campaigns to pay “personal bills.”
GoFundMe’s decision is the latest in a series of steps taken by tech companies in recent weeks to curtail false medical information on their platforms. Facebook is moving to prohibit antivax ads, and YouTube is trying to demonetize antivax videos posted to the site.
All available medical evidence shows vaccines are among the safest and most effective medical treatments in use today. But conspiracy theories about vaccine efficacy and side effects have caused many parents to delay or skip the recommended vaccine schedule, with the result that once-eradicated childhood diseases like measles, which can cause brain damage and death, are coming back.
Facebook Inc said on Thursday it has resolved a glitch that exposed passwords of millions of users stored in readable format within its internal systems to its employees.
The passwords were accessible to as many as 20,000 Facebook employees and dated back as early as 2012, cyber security blog KrebsOnSecurity, which first reported said in its report.
“These passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them,” the company said.
KrebsOnSecurity, citing a senior Facebook employee, said the an internal investigation by the company so far indicates that between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text
Facebook said the issue was discovered in January as part of a routine security review. Majority of the affected were users of Facebook Lite, a version of the social media app largely used by people in regions with lower connectivity.
The social network is also probing the causes of a series of security failures, in which employees built applications that logged unencrypted password data for Facebook users, the report said.
“We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users,” the company said.
Reporting by Shariq Khan and Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur
Facebook Inc has agreed to change its paid advertising platform as part of a wide-ranging settlement to prevent discriminatory and “harmful” practices, the company and U.S. civil rights groups said on Tuesday.
Under the agreement, Facebook will create a new advertising portal for ads linked to housing, employment and credit ads that will limit targeting options for those ads across all of its services, including Instagram and Messenger, the rights groups said in a joint statement.
Advertisers on the portal, which will be separate from the system used to advertise other sets of services, will not be able to target ads by age, gender, cultural affinity or zip code, the statement said.
They will also be required to use a minimum geographic radius for location-based targeting to prevent the exclusion of certain communities.
In addition, the company pledged to build a tool allowing users to search all current housing ads listed in the United States, regardless of whether the ads were directed at them.
“There is a long history of discrimination in the areas of housing, employment and credit, and this harmful behavior should not happen through Facebook ads,” Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a separate statement.
Facebook, the world’s largest social network with 2.7 billion users and nearly $56 billion in annual revenue, has been on the defensive over its advertising practices, while also fending off privacy scandals and disclosures that Russia used its platform to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Complaints over ads-based discrimination have dogged the company since 2016, when news organization ProPublica reported that advertisers could target ads on Facebook based on people’s self-reported jobs, even if the job was “Jew hater.”
ProPublica later reported that it was able to buy discriminatory housing ads and slip them past Facebook’s review process, despite the company’s claims it was blocking such ads.
Since then, Facebook has faced sustained legal pressure over the issue from the National Fair Housing Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Communications Workers of America, among other groups and individuals.
In five separate lawsuits, the groups alleged the company’s audience selection tools enabled advertisers to exclude specific demographics from seeing job postings and other opportunities.
Facebook’s settings “allowed advertisers to create ads that excluded people of color or families with children,” said Sandra Tamez, head of the Fair Housing Council of Greater San Antonio, which was part of Tuesday’s settlement.
Under U.S. law, including the federal Fair Housing Act, it is illegal to publish certain types of ads if they indicate a preference based on race, religion, sex or other specified classifications.
Facebook last year reached a similar settlement with Washington state to end discriminatory ad targeting. It said at the time that it had already removed thousands of categories of potentially sensitive personal attributes from its exclusion ad targeting tools.
Wit the new settlement, Facebook has committed to creating its ads portal by Sept. 30 and to implementing other changes by the end of the year.
Reporting by Katie Paul, Akanksha Rana and Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Tom Brown
A consortium of global technology firms has shared on its collective database the digital fingerprints of more than 800 versions of the video of New Zealand’s mass shootings that killed 50 people, it said on Monday.
While it was not the first internet broadcast of a violent crime, the livestream of the massacre showed that stopping gory footage from spreading online persists as a major challenge for tech companies despite years of investment.
Last Friday, social media users intent on sharing the mosque shooting video were said to have used several methods to create a new version with a digital fingerprint different from the original, so as to evade companies’ detection systems.
“This incident highlights the importance of industry cooperation regarding the range of terrorists and violent extremists operating online,” the grouping, which includes Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Twitter Inc, said of the attack.
The gunman who attacked the two mosques in New Zealand live-streamed the attacks on Facebook for 17 minutes using an app designed for extreme sports enthusiasts, with copies still being shared on social media hours later.
Late on Saturday, Facebook, the world’s largest social media network with around 2.3 billion monthly users around the world, said it had removed 1.5 million videos within 24 hours after the Christchurch attack.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said she wants to discuss live streaming with Facebook, and some of the country’s firms are considering whether to pull advertising from social media.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) was created in 2017 under pressure from governments in Europe and the United States after a spate of deadly attacks.
It shares technical solutions for the removal of terrorist content, commissions research to assist its efforts to fight such content and works more with counter-terrorism experts.
Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Clarence Fernandezre
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is furious at parody accounts on Twitter claiming to be his mom and one of his cows. According to Fox News, Nunes is sick of being mocked and ridiculed on Twitter and is striking back.
"In her endless barrage of tweets, Devin Nunes’ Mom maliciously attacked every aspect of Nunes’ character, honesty, integrity, ethics and fitness to perform his duties as a United States Congressman," the court filing says according to CNN's Andrew Kaczynski.
This was one tweet that Nunes was bothered by in particular:
Twitter allows for parody accounts as long as it's plainly stated in their profile that they are a parody. Presumably, it's known that DevinNunesCow is a parody account as cows don't have thumbs to tweet.
Nunes' case is not likely to move forward in court. The law clearly outlines parody and satire is allowed when it comes to public officials, as Saturday Night Live shows each week.
Nunes is claiming anti-conservative bias, though he would be hard pressed to find evidence of it.
The Apple Watch was able to detect irregular heart pulse rates that could signal the need for further monitoring for a serious heart rhythm problem, according to data from a large study funded by Apple Inc (AAPL.O), demonstrating a potential future role for wearable consumer technology in healthcare.
Researchers hope the technology can assist in early detection of atrial fibrillation, the most common form of irregular heart beat. Patients with untreated AF are five times more likely to have a stroke.
Results of the largest AF screening and detection study, involving over 400,000 Apple Watch users who were invited to participate, were presented on Saturday at the American College of Cardiology meeting in New Orleans.
Of the 400,000 participants, 0.5 percent, or about 2,000 subjects, received notifications of an irregular pulse. Those people were sent an ECG (electrocardiography) patch to wear for subsequent detection of atrial fibrillation episodes.
A third of those whose watches detected an irregular pulse were confirmed to have atrial fibrillation using the ECG technology, researchers said.
Some 84 percent of the irregular pulse notifications were later confirmed to have been AF episodes, data showed.
“The physician can use the information from the study, combine it with their assessment ... and then guide clinical decisions around what to do with an alert,” said Dr. Marco Perez, one of the study’s lead investigators from Stanford School of Medicine.
The study also found that 57 percent of participants who received an alert on their watch sought medical attention.
For Apple, the data provides firepower as it pushes into healthcare. Its new Series 4 Watch, which became available only after the study began so was not used, has the ability to take an electrocardiogram to detect heart problems and required clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Dr. Deepak Bhatt, a cardiologist from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who was not involved in the trial, called it an important study as use of this type of wearable technology is only going to become more prevalent.
“The study is an important first step in figuring out how can we use these technologies in a way that’s evidence based,” he said.
Researchers urged caution by doctors in using data from consumer devices when treating patients. But they also see great future potential for this type of technology.
“Atrial fibrillation is just the beginning, as this study opens the door to further research into wearable technologies and how they might be used to prevent disease before it strikes,” said Lloyd Minor, dean of Stanford School of Medicine.
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke belonged to one of the best-known groups of computer hackers as a teenager, Reuters revealed today.
In an exclusive interview with this reporter for a forthcoming book about the group, the former U.S. congressman from Texas confirmed that as a youth in El Paso, he belonged to the hacking group known as the Cult of the Dead Cow. He also acknowledged that, during those teenage years, he stole long-distance phone service to participate in electronic discussions. Others in the group committed the same offense and got off with warnings; the statute of limitations ran out long ago.
In the group, O’Rourke wrote online essays under the pseudonym “Psychedelic Warlord” that could provide fodder for political supporters and foes alike. One mocked a neo-Nazi, while another was a short piece of fiction from a killer’s point of view.
The Reuters article marks the ex-congressman as the most prominent former hacker in American politics. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen members of the group who agreed to be named for the first time in the book, titled “Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World.”
There is no indication that O’Rourke himself engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity - breaking into computers or writing code that enabled others to do so. After his active period in the late 1980s, the group became famous for releasing tools that allowed ordinary computer users to hijack other people’s machines. Though it was controversial, the resulting chaos forced Windows maker Microsoft to dramatically improve security.
For O’Rourke, the long-suppressed tale fills out an unusual portrait for a presidential aspirant. Born to a prominent El Paso family and sent to a boarding school and an Ivy League college, O’Rourke felt a misfit as a youth and played in a punk band before starting a small technology business and an alternative press outlet, launching him into local politics.
O’Rourke came to national attention last year when he came within three percentage points of defeating Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, energizing new voters and taking in record donations for a Senate campaign while eschewing special-interest money.
The few technology professionals let in on O’Rourke’s secret said it showed a deep understanding of technology and a healthy willingness to challenge traditions, attributes that O’Rourke stressed in his interview.
“There’s just this profound value in being able to be apart from the system and look at it critically,” O’Rourke said. “I think of the Cult of the Dead Cow as a great example of that.”
By Joseph Menn in San Francisco. Edited by Kari Howard
Social media platforms Facebook and Twitter said on Friday they would take down content involving mass shootings at two New Zealand mosques that killed at least 49 people and wounded more than 20.
A suspected gunman broadcast live footage on Facebook of the attack on one mosque in the city of Christchurch, mirroring the carnage played out in video games, after publishing a “manifesto” in which he denounced immigrants.
The video footage, posted online live as the attack unfolded, appeared to show him driving to one mosque, entering it and shooting randomly at people inside.
Worshippers, possibly dead or wounded, lay huddled on the floor, the video showed. Reuters was unable to confirm the authenticity of the footage.
“Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooter’s Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video,” Facebook tweeted.
“We’re also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we’re aware.”
Twitter said it had “rigorous processes and a dedicated team in place for managing exigent and emergency situations” such as this.
“We also cooperate with law enforcement to facilitate their investigations as required,” it said.
Alphabet Inc’s YouTube said: “Please know we are working vigilantly to remove any violent footage.”
Live streaming services have become a central component of social media companies’ growth strategy in recent years, but they are also increasingly exploited by some users to livestream offensive and violent content.
In 2017, a father in Thailand broadcast himself killing his daughter on Facebook Live. After more than a day, and 370,000 views, Facebook removed the video. That year, a video of a man shooting and killing another in Cleveland also shocked viewers.
Reporting by Arjun Panchadar; Writing by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Nick Macfie
