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Facebook has revealed the viewership figures of the Christchurch shooting video.
A horrific shooting attack happened at a mosque in New Zealand last week in which more than 50 prayer-sayers were killed by a right-wing terrorist shooter of Australian origin. As the attack happened, the killer live streamed the entire shooting on Facebook. Although the video was later removed by the social media company, millions of its digital copies had already been made. Facebook has now publicly unveiled the statistics about the viewership of the video.
According to Facebook, the live stream of killing as it happened in real-time was viewed fewer than 200 times and none of the users reported the video to the Facebook authorities. The first report came 12 minutes after the broadcast had added, the original live stream was then removed. Facebook mentions that before the company was alerted about the video, a user had already shared a copy of the video on a file-sharing site.
The video was, however, was copied by users and shared millions of times. Facebook later mentioned that it deleted 1.5 million videos of New Zealand terror attack during the first 24 hours of the attack. The re-shared videos were viewed at least 3,800 times on the platform, the company further revealed.
The tech companies involved have come under a lot of criticism over the fact that they weren’t able to timely stop the videos from being shared on the platforms. The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern mentioned this Sunday that she wanted the tech giants to answer how a mass shooting by a killer was allowed to live stream on their platforms. As the social media and its associated technology keeps extending its penetration, the privacy and data-control activists have started voicing their concerns about the nonexistence of ample safeguards that could stop these tools from being wrongly used.
