It’s one of those things where you wonder if anyone can really control what appears online. It is, after all, known as the world wide ‘web’, so when something goes viral it’s next to impossible to completely delete it.
Of course, when money is involved, it’s slightly easier. Leaking a movie online or sharing music can land you in jail if the distribution companies get hold of you.
Other things, such as the images leaked in the nude celebrity scandal, are a bit harder to get rid of. Jennifer Lawrence is having a tough time getting porn sites to take down her pictures, as they are demanding that she prove she has copyright on them. Poor J-Law.
The recent videos posted by ISIS in which two American journalists were beheaded are so horrifying to watch, and even if you didn’t (we didn’t), we were still able to catch screen shots on our Twitter timeline that were just awful. And we didn’t choose to see them, they were just there. Twitter did delete most of the images and threaten to ban users who continued to share them, but at that point it was too late, we’d already seen that stuff.
Now internet companies are devising new plans to handle this type of content. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were as blindsided by the James Foley beheading clip as the rest of us, and it took a while for them to deal with the content. In the case of the beheading of Steven Sotloff, you will notice that there were far fewer still shots of him, and most images accompanying news stories were from the James Foley video, when Steven’s life was threatened.
Basically, the companies seemed to be on serious alert with a new plan about what to do if any more videos like this appeared. The second ISIS video awas deleted almost instantly after it appeared on YouTube. The intent isn’t just to protect the average user from the distressing images, it’s to stamp out terrorist propaganda before it spreads. It may seem hard to believe, but some people are inspired by such groteseque violence to join ‘the cause’, as we’ve seen with British nationals who join ISIS.
There’s been no word if the White House contacted internet companies to make sure they were better prepared to wipe the offending videos or if it was just something they decided to do themselves but the laws of posting violent content are pretty strict for most sites anyway.
And yes, you can still find the videos and images if you go deep and dark enough into web but we do not recommend it.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/tech-insider-firms-halting-spread-grisly-video
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.