A teenager was among six people who have appeared in court, charged with distributing video of New Zealand's deadliest-ever mass shooting, at two Christchurch mosques last month.
The unnamed 18-year-old was among those charged with sharing a live stream of the massacre, along with a still image of Christchurch's Al Noor mosque captioned "target acquired."
He was taken into custody, as was businessman Philip Arps, on charges of supplying or distributing objectionable material. The crime carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.
Four other unnamed individuals also appeared in Christchurch District Court on Monday, although none were in custody.
The original footage was broadcast live on Facebook for 17 minutes, and remained up for an hour afterward. The video was then re-uploaded successfully to the social media site more than 1.5 million times, the news site Stuff reported.
There has been anger in the South Pacific country over Facebook's reaction to the streaming of the killings.
New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner John Edwards said Facebook "cannot be trusted," and also described the social media platform as consisting of "morally bankrupt pathological liars" in a tweet he later deleted.
New Zealand's chief censor has banned both the live-streamed footage of the attack and the manifesto written and released by self-described white supremacist Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who faces 50 murder charges and 39 attempted murder charges for the attacks on March 15.
Facebook executive Guy Rosen said that the video was viewed fewer than 200 times, and during the attacks the service "did not get a single user report," (via CBS).
Facebook's policy director Brian Fisherman told Congress that it failed to detect the live stream because there was "not enough gore" in the video for its algorithm to catch it, according to Newshub.
In neighboring Australia, tough new restrictions on social media giants have been legislated, and could result in big fines and possible prison terms if websites do not act fast enough to remove terrorist or objectionable footage from their platforms, Stuff reported.
The Australian government has met with Facebook, Google, Twitter and telecommunications companies to figure out how to handle future terrorist events.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Facebook would stop users from posting live videos if they had previously broken the company's community guidelines, an idea first mooted by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Facebook said in a blog post it would be impractical to impose a time delay on live videos, as it would "further slow down" the reporting and review of harmful videos, and delay first responders.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular ... Read more
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