But when a gunman opened fire at a New Zealand mosque late last week, broadcasting video of the shooting live on Facebook for anyone to see, the platforms enormous size became a complete and total liability. Suddenly that Super Bowl-size audience had access to something Facebook didnt want them to see, and the company couldnt take down fast enough the more than 1 million copies of the video uploaded by users in the next 24 hours.
The New Zealand shooting, which left at least 50 people dead, served as a horrendous reminder that Facebooks scale and YouTubes and Twitters are a serious problem.
While the original video reached only around 4,000 people, according to Facebook, it was online long enough for copies to start spreading to other internet forums, like the messaging forum 8chan. From there, people started uploading versions of the shooting video back to Facebook and YouTube, and the tech platforms simply couldnt keep up with the speed or volume.
Facebook had trouble removing all videos because people uploaded different versions of the original for example, videos of the original recorded off a separate screen, or watermarked that didnt fully match.
In YouTubes case, the company was so overwhelmed with uploads it eliminated human review for any videos flagged by its algorithms that had to do with the shooting, knowing it might take down legitimate or unrelated videos by mistake.
For the past year, weve been talking about Facebooks and Googles tremendous size for other reasons: There are some, like Sen.