After the deadly attacks at two New Zealand mosques last week, telecom companies in New Zealand and Australia acknowledged they blocked websites that hosted video of the incident recorded by the murderer.
The news website Zero Hedge, however, said it also has been banned in New Zealand and Australia despite having never hosted video footage of the Christchurch attack.
“We were not contacted prior to the censorship. Instead, we have received a steady flood of people noting that the site is unavailable in the two countries unless a VPN is used,” Zero Hedge said.
The website reported the “chans” and video-hosting platform LiveLeak are among others banned Down Under.
The CEOs of three New Zealand companies acknowledged they banned sites that hosted the videos in a letter to Facebook, Twitter and Google. They urged the tech giants to follow European proposals for policing content in the name of “protecting consumers.”
NZ Spark’s Simon Moutter, Vodafone’s Jason Paris and 2degrees’ Stewart Sherriff wrote in their letter that consumers “have the right to be protected, whether using services funded by money or data.”
“Now is the time for this conversation to be had and we call on all of you to join us at the table and be part of the solution,” they wrote.
The massacre was broadcast over Facebook Live by accused gunman Brenton Tarrant to an initial audience of 200 viewers and had 4,000 overall views before it was taken down. Facebook said via Twitter it deleted 1.5 million videos of the attack, of which more than 1.2 million were blocked at the time of upload.
‘Unprecedented step’
Zero Hedge said Twitter has also been aggressively censoring content related to the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooting.
Journalist Nick Monroe was forced to delete a large number of tweets as he covered the incident in real time. Only one of the tweets, however, had a link to video of the shooting, Zero Hedge said.
Meanwhile, the document hosting website Scribd deleted copies of Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto.
The telecom CEOs acknowledged in their letter that they “took the unprecedented step to jointly identify and suspend access to web sites that were hosting video footage taken by the gunman related to the horrific terrorism incident in Christchurch.”
“As key industry players, we believed this extraordinary step was the right thing to do in such extreme and tragic circumstances,” they wrote. “Other New Zealand broadband providers have also taken steps to restrict availability of this content, although they may be taking a different approach technically.”
They said they “accept it is impossible as internet service providers to prevent completely access to this material.”
“But hopefully we have made it more difficult for this content to be viewed and shared — reducing the risk our customers may inadvertently be exposed to it and limiting the publicity the gunman was clearly seeking,” the CEOs said.
“Internet service providers are the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, with blunt tools involving the blocking of sites after the fact. The greatest challenge is how to prevent this sort of material being uploaded and shared on social media platforms and forums.”
They called on Facebook, Twitter and Google “to be a part of an urgent discussion at an industry and New Zealand Government level on an enduring solution to this issue.”
