Social Media's Blind Spot: Live Streams of Mass Shootings

In May, a 20-year-old man entered a Fort Wayne, Indiana, grocery store with a handgun and began livestreaming on Facebook from inside a bathroom. “I’m going to shoot 11 people,” he said, looking into his phone camera, before asking people to “record” the event.

The accused shooter, Richard Klaffthen walked around the store shouting racial slurs and asking onlookers who he should shoot, before unleashing a hail of gunfire on a black woman and other customers who were passing by. No one was injured; Klaff was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

More than a month later, dozens of videos of the attempted mass shooting remain on social media, racking up millions of views, a report says new report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and a review of Tech Brief.

Their spread, the researchers said, highlights gaps in how tech companies handle mass violence events that don't have a clear link to terrorism or ideology.

ISD, a London-based think tank that studies online extremism, found more than 40 videos of the shooting on X and Facebook in the two days after the attack, generating nearly 9 million views and plays. The vast majority of the views were on Elon Musk's X, with less than 30,000 plays recorded on Facebook videos during this period.

On Tuesday, a search by Tech Brief for the shooter’s name on X quickly turned up more than two dozen videos of the shooting, including several with millions of views. In both analyses, the videos that gained by far the most attention were shared by verified users on X. On Meta, at least a dozen videos were still online early Tuesday, albeit with far fewer views.

The researchers said they did not find a significant number of raw videos of the shooting on other platforms such as TikTok, Google’s YouTube or Meta’s Instagram. However, many of the videos on X appear to have come from Telegram, the researchers said.

According to the ISD report, one likely reason the videos were not removed as effectively across all platforms is that there was no “explicit link between a terrorist or violent extremist group and the perpetrator.”

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, and X, formerly known as Twitter, were both founding members of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, or GIFCT, an NGO dedicated to preventing “terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms,” according to its website.

The group, created in response to the livestreamed Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019, helps tech companies share intelligence when terrorist incidents are linked to their platforms. Those systems may not have been triggered because of the nature of the Indiana attack.

While Klaff used racial slurs and told viewers the day of the shooting that he was “shutting out” before discharging his gun into several black customers, the ISD wrote that “his social media footprint did not appear to indicate that he was connected to extremist groups.”

The videos, however, appear to violate company policies, also raising questions about their individual enforcement, the researchers said.

X’s rules prohibit any account from sharing “author-created media” related to acts of terrorism, violent extremism or mass violence, as well as those “glorifying” the perpetrator. X did not respond to a request for comment. GIFCT did not respond to a request for comment.

Meta Spokesperson Erica Sackin said the original live stream was removed less than an hour and a half after it was posted, and that the event and perpetrator had since been designated in accordance with the company's policies regarding dangerous organizations and individuals.

A Facebook page linked by researchers to the suspected shooter was still active Tuesday morning, but it was deleted after Tech Brief reached out to Meta for comment.

Although the shooting did not result in any deaths, researchers said it reflected a worrying trend of shooters using social media to treat attacks as a game.

Researcher at ISD Mustafa Ayad noted that during the live stream, the shooter asked viewers for their opinion on who he should shoot, responding at one point that he would not kill an older man.

“While there is no ideological link here, it is a relatively new and shocking aspect,” Ayad said. The “gamification” of these attacks, he added, is “disturbing to say the least.”

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