Social Media Platforms Scrambled to Remove All Videos of New Zealand Terror Attack
WHITFIELD: Welcome back. New Zealand synagogues have closed their doors today in the wake of two deadly mosque attacks. The sign of solidarity marks the first time the country's Jewish community has ever done that on the holy day of Shabbat. At least 49 people were killed and dozens more injured in the horrifying massacres inside two mosques in Christchurch. But as some religious communities ban together in the aftermath of the terror attacks, so are far-right extremists around the world. CNN chief international correspondent, Clarissa Ward, has more.</s>CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Chants on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, echoed in a suspected terrorist manifesto thousands of miles away.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We will not be replaced.</s>WARD: White supremacists and Neo-Nazis who believe their culture is being erased by a growing population of minorities. In chat rooms and on the dark web, they talk about the invasion of Muslim migrants who threaten to replace them. One of their greatest inspirations, the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered nearly 70 students as a summer camp in 2011. The massacre, he says, was intended to defend Western civilization from a growing policy of multi-culturalization. Across the West, the far right is on the rise, bringing with it a vicious uptick in hate crimes and terrorist attacks.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We can ever say, what the price.</s>WARD: Just in 2017, Muslims were targeted and killed in a Quebec Islamic Center, and in London's Amesbury park, and on a train in Portland, Oregon, a man shouting anti-Muslim slurs fatally stabbed two people.</s>WARD: Last year, in Berlin, we attended a rally of hundreds of right- wing extremists. "Close the border," they shouted. "Resistance, resistance." Their hatred is not reserved for Muslim migrants. This man told us a shadowy cabal of globalist controls the world. (on camera): When you talk about elites and you talk about finance, is that another way of saying Jewish people?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.</s>WARD: Yes. It is? (voice-over): "Yes. Let me say it this way, the banking system for sure," he tells us. "Banks, finance, the economy, mainly Jews." In his 87-page manifesto, the suspected terrorist praised his predecessors and made nods to the online community that nurtured and shared his extremist views. But their ideology of hate has creeped out of the margins into the mainstream and is growing. Clarissa Ward, CNN.</s>WHITFIELD: The New Zealand attack is the latest example of hate being disseminated online. Social media companies scrambled yesterday to remove any videos showing the alleged attacker's live-stream of the massacre. Let's bring in now our CNN Business reporter, Donie O'Sullivan. Donie, good to see you. This is a really huge challenge for all of these social media online companies. They are struggling, are they not, with the responsibility they have versus the technology to kind of stop, you know, people from live-streaming or, you know, really seizing on the opportunity to spread hate?</s>DONIE O'SULLIVAN, CNN BUSINESS REPORTER: Yes, I mean they absolutely are struggling, Fred. I mean, particularly Facebook, a platform of more than two billion people sharing billions of posts every day. And sort of now they are trying to figure out a way, well, how do we police that, how do we prevent somebody like this streaming live on their platform for more 17 minutes a massacre with gunfire and death and weaponry. And we've heard a lot from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's executives over the last two years, given how much scrutiny they have been under with disinformation and hate speech, about all the steps they have been taking to try to crack down on this. They say they have hired more than 30,000 contractors and employees to try and -- human moderators who are supposed to search for and remove this content. But also supposedly investing millions in artificial intelligence, computer systems that could detect videos like this. This week, that didn't work. It was the New Zealand police that told Facebook that something was going on, on their own platform.</s>WHITFIELD: And Facebook actually released a statement saying, "New Zealand police alerted to us a video on Facebook shortly after the live-stream commenced and we removed both the shooter's Facebook account and the video." So while Facebook did act as fast as it could, how concerning is it, I guess, for other media outlets or even consumers that police would be notifying these companies about the type of content that could be on?</s>O'SULLIVAN: Sure. I mean, I think a lot of people do have sympathy in some ways for the social media platforms in that this is obviously not an easy thing to find. But at the same time, this is the platforms that they have built. Recently, in "Fortune" magazine, a technologist from Facebook, who is developing this artificial intelligence software to sort of figure out what is going on, gave an example of how their technology can determine the difference between pictures of broccoli and pictures of marijuana, with about a 90 percent accuracy rate. That is an example of how that technology could be potentially used to curtail the sale of narcotics on the platform. But even at a 90 percent success rate, 10 percent, when you are talking about billions of posts, that is a lot of stuff that this technology is missing. And experts are telling us that, in terms of A.I. being able to do what a human moderator could do, we're years away from that. Facebook says they have hired literally tens of thousands of people. But they haven't told us how many people they need.</s>WHITFIELD: All right. Donie O'Sullivan, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Still ahead, U.C. Berkeley is now considering revoking admissions offers and diplomas if any student is involved in that cheating scheme. Will students be forced to pay for the legal sins of their parents? We'll discuss, next.