By Sebastian Herrera and Sarah E. Needleman
Amazon.com Inc.'s Twitch last year showed at least 8.4 billion
hours of video, but a 35-minute clip this week highlights the
challenge of preventing extremists from sharing their violent acts
in real time.
A German man was accused of killing two people Wednesday near a
synagogue and streaming the assault online. The suspect, identified
by a German security official as 27-year-old Stephan Balliet, was
charged with murder Thursday.
The shooting in Halle, Germany, was shown live on Twitch, a
platform typically used by avid gamers, and adds Amazon to the list
of tech giants that have had to deal with violent acts being live
streamed. Amazon's peers -- Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and
Alphabet Inc., which owns Google's YouTube -- most recently dealt
with stopping the spread of footage from a deadly attack on a pair
of New Zealand mosques earlier this year.
Twitch on Thursday didn't provide additional comment about the
company's investigation, and a Twitch spokeswoman didn't say
whether the company would consider adding stiffer controls to live
video. On Wednesday the company offered condolences to people
affected by the attacks and said it removed the video from the
platform and took steps to prevent it from being shared
further.
Live streaming is central to the business model of Twitch, which
Amazon bought for $970 million in 2014. Its live broadcasts have
helped differentiate it from YouTube, whose video content is mostly
prerecorded and edited, said Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter.
"Their core business is live streaming as it happens," he said of
Twitch, adding he doesn't expect that to change.
Every day, nearly half a million people stream live on Twitch,
according to the company. The account that live streamed the video
was created two months ago, Twitch said, and it had attempted a
live stream only once before.
Twitch said Wednesday that five people watched the 35-minute
live stream from the suspect. A recording of the video was viewed
on the platform by about 2,200 people in 30 minutes before it was
flagged and removed.
By then, the video or parts of it were uploaded to other sites,
including Twitter, fringe forums such as 4chan, instant messaging
site Telegram and hosting platform Streamable, according to
Storyful, a social-media intelligence company owned by News Corp,
which also owns The Wall Street Journal.
Companies such as Amazon and Facebook that stream live video
need to delay broadcasts or find a way to prevent acts of violence
from airing in real time, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human-rights group. "They can
solve this," he said. "The companies that don't want to cooperate,
I hate to say it, but there's something called regulation."
Video-sharing platforms haven't yet figured out how to apply
artificial intelligence or other technology to quickly flag
real-life violence, said Ben Nimmo, head of investigations at New
York-based Graphika Inc., a social-media-analytics firm. To do that
would be especially challenging for a platform like Twitch, he
said, since most of its broadcasters stream themselves playing
videogames and many games simulate gun violence.
"You would have to train the AI to distinguish between gaming
gunfire and real-life gunfire," Mr. Nimmo said. "That's a very
subtle distinction to have to make."
A man charged with carrying out shootings at mosques in
Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 people dead broadcast the
massacre in a 17-minute video on Facebook. After a user flagged the
video, it took another half-hour for it to be removed. The video
was also posted on YouTube and Twitter.
Online forums that offer platforms for hate speech and threats
of violent acts have been difficult for law enforcement to police,
especially with users who are able to post anonymously, and move
from site to site if one is shut down.
Mass shooters have deployed videogame-like tactics in the past.
The Christchurch shooter, for example, wore a body camera while
live streaming, framing his video into a first-person account,
similar to the primary camera angle used in many shooting
games.
But Joan Donovan, director of a Harvard University project on
technology and social change, cautioned against blaming the event
on the popularity of such games, pointing out that millions of
people each day play them without turning to real-life
violence.
Ms. Donovan said Wednesday's shooting speaks to the audience the
shooter aimed to reach. "The terrorist was using gaming culture as
a framing device to get media to pay even closer attention," she
said. "It's really about style. He's trying to reach a very
particular audience of young men and gaming is a way to do
that."
The shooting in Germany also wasn't the first time Twitch has
dealt with violent acts appearing in live feeds. In August of last
year, two people were shot and killed at a videogame tournament in
Jacksonville, Fla., and parts of the tournament were streamed live
on Twitch.
Internet companies including Twitch have bulked up their staffs
in recent years in efforts to moderate content. Facebook, for
example, earlier this year said it had more than 15,000 content
reviewers as part of a 30,000-person department working on safety
and security issues at the company.
Twitch relies on round-the-clock monitoring both from human
reviewers and machine-learning algorithms to flag violent or
inappropriate content. It also has centralized those operations
from multiple teams to one team.
When Amazon bought Twitch, it said the purchase would help it
round out its gaming business, which includes its game-development
division Amazon Game Studios.
Founded in 2011, Twitch is by far the most popular
game-streaming platform, accounting for 75.6% of live hours watched
during the most recent three-month period measured by industry
tracker Arsenal.gg. Twitch, whose competitors include YouTube,
Facebook and Microsoft Corp.'s Mixer, said an average of 1.3
million people are on its platform at any given moment and it sees
an average of more than 15 million daily visitors.
Amazon doesn't break out revenue for Twitch in its financial
reports. Twitch is free to use but people can access exclusive
in-game content by joining Amazon Prime. The platform also makes
money through the sale of advertisements.
Write to Sebastian Herrera at Sebastian.Herrera@wsj.com and
Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 10, 2019 18:10 ET (22:10 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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