Twitch, the livestreaming giant popular among video gamers, has been thrust into the national spotlight after the suspect in the Buffalo grocery store mass shooting tried to broadcast the attack on the platform. Twitch removed the livestream less than two minutes after the violence began on Saturday, a spokesperson for the company told CNN. Despite the quick action by Twitch to delete the content, clips and copies of the disturbing video of the shooting, which police says was a racially-motivated hate crime, quickly spread across other social media platforms over the weekend. While Twitch may not be as much of a household name as some other large social platforms, the Amazon-owned service has gained immense popularity in recent years beyond gaming. Twitch has become a destination to watch others play video games, raise goats and other animals, and even just sleep. But its core feature — livestreaming — poses a huge set of challenges. Live video and live audio have proven difficult for a number of social platforms to effectively moderate, given their real-time and ephemeral nature. (…) To address this issue, Twitch relies on a mix of machine detection systems, human moderators and user reporting to identify content that violates its guidelines, not unlike other social platforms. But as the Buffalo mass shooting shows, even taking action a couple minutes after a broadcast begins may not be enough to stop the video’s spread online. Twitch has been in the news for videos featuring violent content before: A gunman who killed two people in a 2019 shooting near a synagogue in Germany livestreamed the attack on Twitch before it was eventually removed by the platform. Twitch said in a statement at the time that it was “shocked and saddened” by the incident in Germany and stressed the platform “has a zero-tolerance policy against hateful conduct.” A 180-page document that has been attributed to the Buffalo shooting suspect allegedly references how the 2019 attack in Germany was streamed on Twitch and remained online before being removed. (The Twitch video of the Germany attack was 35 minutes long.)
via cnn: Twitch, a live-streaming giant, comes under scrutiny after Buffalo shooting