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Stamos pointed out that the verboten nature of the offensive material made it a popular search on Google. He also noted that the \"shooter was an active member of a rather horrible online community (which I will not amplify) that encourages this kind of behavior. He posted the FB Live link and mirrors to his manifesto right before, so thousands of people got copies in real-time,\" he tweeted.

\"So now we have tens of millions of consumers wanting something and tens of thousands of people willing to supply it, with the tech companies in between. YouTube and Facebook/Instagram have perceptual hashing [digital fingerprints] built during the ISIS crisis to deal with this and teams looking,\" Stamos tweeted. \"Perceptual hashes and audio fingerprinting are both fragile, and a lot of these same kinds of people have experience beating them to upload copyrighted content. Each time this happens, the companies have to spot it and create a new fingerprint.\"

Comparing the livestreamed New Zealand shooting video to content from ISIS, Stamos told ABC News, \"The ISIS problem was partially cracked because the [tech] companies infiltrated all their [messaging app] Telegram channels. So you could grab a video and block it before the first upload attempt. No equivalent chokepoint here.\"

The other problem in policing the broadcast of murder is that technology relies on artificial intelligence to first spot problem content. But algorithms are mostly reactive and not predictive. If the programs detect content that's disturbing, they can flag it and create a digital fingerprint, or hash.

\"You can create a content fingerprint of something that has been previously recorded (even if it ended just moments ago). But live content is problematic as there is no way to fingerprint something that occurs in the future,\" Ashkan Soltani, the former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, wrote ABC News in an email.

\"There are AI techniques that can combine attributes of a scene along with metadata (i.e., where it's being uploaded from, who the uploader is, what words might occur in the title, etc.) but they’re not as robust,\" Soltani wrote.

\"PHOTO:
Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images
PHOTO: The New Zealand national flag is flown at half-mast on a Parliament building in Wellington, New Zealand, March 15, 2019, after a mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch.
>

Soltani also echoed Donovan in saying tech companies have prioritized copyright infringement over problem content.

\"This has more to do with priorities,\" he said. \"If the same level of scrutiny was placed on these platforms for hosting controversial content as there was copyrighted content (for which they can be sued) -- they would dramatically increase their investment in technical solutions to deal with some of these problems.\"

The other problem is that the shooter was so adroit at referencing coded language and familiar tropes of white supremacists that it provided cover for his intentions to actually commit an attack. He was posting on online messaging boards popular with hate groups just prior to the attack.

\"So much reads like alt-right trolling you wouldn’t know, just by reading it, that he’d go out and shoot 49 people. Until he’d done it. You can tell it took the channel a while to figure out he was really shooting people. Some were asking if it was live-action role-playing. And then, as they realized, the community split. Some took the position: delete everything, we’ve got to get out of here, and others were cheering him on,\" Ben Nimmo, of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told ABC News.

\"The thing is hindsight is no good, you’ve got to have foresight,\" Nimmo added.

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