Crisis in Social Media

       Recently, a mass shooting at a mosque in New Zealand occurred. 50 people of the Muslim faith were killed, and more than 40 were injured. Mass shootings these days do not seem to be that uncommon. It is tragic, but it is the reality in which we live. After reading many articles on the incident, people decided to move on. Then it happens again, and the cycle repeats itself. One article I came across, however, got me to think differently.        

       The suspect in the case of the New Zealand mosque shooting had videotaped the incident while it was happening. This video ended up online. And once something is online, it spreads like wildfire. Sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter began to try and take these videos as down as soon as they began popping up. Copies started being created, which meant more videos for the sites to try to remove. The object was to try and remove them quickly so as few people as possible would see the horrific incident. All in all, millions of videos have been removed from multiple sites. It is hard to imagine that we live in a world where we have to worry about videos of mass shootings showing up on our news feeds. It is also hard to imagine working for a company like Facebook or YouTube and have to worry about videos like this being posted on your sites and then being responsible for trying to remove them all with little to no viewership.

       Crisis communications is an area in communications and public relations that interests me. This incident, however, would be one of my worst nightmares. I could not imagine having to try and rush to take down millions of horrible, evil videos down before anyone has the opportunity to be exposed to them. We all know that the internet works fast and things can duplicate and spread within minutes. In this case, some of these videos were changed and uploaded in a way that the sites, such as YouTube, could not detect them, so it became a needle in a haystack situation. In addition to deleting the videos of the shooting, sites also had to work to delete different accounts that were seeming to glorify the attacker. With the internet being as large, fast and global as it is, this seems like such an impossible task to me. Luckily, it is not for these people working for these different social media platforms. It is sad to have to be able to think and talk about having to take such actions, but unfortunately it is not the first time it has happened and it certainly won’t be the last.