People stand and pay tribute to victims along a cordon in front of the Al Noor mosque after a performance of the haka in Christchurch on March 20, 2019. | ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/Getty Images Fourth Estate Don’t Censor the New Zealand Shooting Videos Averting our gaze from mass murder won’t keep it from happening—and it won’t even stop the murderers from spreading their sick ideas.

Jack Shafer is Politico's senior media writer.

The greatest danger to the republic, Republicans and Democrats alike have shouted in recent months, is tech companies like Google and Facebook. They wield too much power over free speech and commerce, the argument goes, and thus must be broken up into smaller, weaker companies to reduce their hold on us.

Then came last Friday’s massacre of 50 innocents at two New Zealand mosques, live-streamed on Facebook from the suspect’s body cam—an attack New York Times columnist Kevin Roose dubbed the world’s first “internet-native mass shooting.”


The new complaint was that big tech wasn’t powerful enough to block the shooter’s videos from appearing on the web. Even though Facebook deleted 1.5 million of the first-person videos inside of 24 hours and Google’s YouTube boasted of “unprecedented“ scale and speed in erasing the videos (one per second!) and temporarily disabling search functions, neither service could keep up with the uploaders. Some users subtly altered the videos to slip under automated screening processes.

At least two British tabloids ran edited footage from the suspect’s body cam and one published his 84-page “manifesto,” but they quickly self-censored the material off their websites. The Australian Broadcasting Company probably spoke for most media companies that limited their graphic coverage when it explained that it had deliberately denied the suspect a “platform” because his attack was “aimed not at the audiences of traditional news organisations but at reaching and triggering atomised and often extreme online audiences.” The ABC continued, “His every move appears to have been deliberate, calculated, web savvy and designed to grab attention.” The Aussie broadcaster seems to be saying it had no desire to reward the suspect’s media efforts and thereby encourage additional mayhem.

But limited coverage didn’t mean zero coverage. Every major media organization flooded the New Zealand story with reporters and photographers who told the story in tick-tock detail. You might think this would be a counterproductive tack for the news media to take if deplatforming the suspect and restricting the reach of his propaganda goals was the intent. And you’d be right. Far from “protecting” the impressionable from the suspect’s racist and murderous message, the press communicated it everywhere. This let the press have it both ways—to claim an imagined moral victory by not using the video and manifesto directly but by extracting every essential reportorial detail from them. The “atomized and often extreme online audiences” who clicked through to read the tempered coverage of Christchurch killings in the New York Times or viewed it on CNN surely got the suspect’s message.

Then why the charade? I can understand why the likes of Google and Facebook want to resist delivering maximum destruction, blood and massacre. They’re in the advertising business. But journalists are supposed to be hell-bent on chasing every angle on a story, to err by telling too much instead of not enough, to disclose and not conceal, aren’t they? Suppression of the news is the censor’s game.

I can understand why New Zealand journalists gagged themselves: The New Zealand government invoked its powers to ban “objectionable and restricted material,” thereby criminalizing the sharing of the video. And the government acted on the ban. One person arrested for sharing the video faces 28 years in prison. Both New Zealand and Australian ISPs have blocked sites like 4chan that have hosted the videos.

But no such law prevented the American press from running the videos.

When the 9/11 terrorists struck, the networks live-streamed that atrocity into American living rooms, including the human demolition of desperate people leaping from high windows to escape the flames. This attack was every bit as deliberate, calculated and web-savvy as the Christchurch assault, but the press didn’t retreat behind worries that the coverage might encourage another attack. Nobody said, We can’t be free to publish this material because we must make every effort to be safe first! To this day, YouTube finds such journalistic significance in the jumper videos that they still host them in easily searchable form. So much for their “standards.”

The “contagion” theory of mass killings, which instructs journalists to limit their coverage lest they inspire new villains to pick up the gun, is leaky. As Paul Farhi of the Washington Post noted in 2012, what are we to make of the fact that some killings, like Columbine, seem to have inspired additional killings, yet others, like the assault on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, which left six dead, didn’t? “School shootings have waxed and waned for more than 100 years; shootings in postal facilities are all but unknown these days,” Farhi writes. It’s magical thinking to imagine that murderous violence will disappear if only the press can be persuaded to report it in small doses.

If the logic of squelching the Christchurch video is to prevent another attack—which, as you can tell, I find dubious—have the censors thought through the unintended consequences of their plan? Although the video has been driven underground, it can still be found and shared, and its forbidden status will only lend it additional cachet for certain audiences. Call it a bloody version of the Streisand effect.

The censor is never somebody who doesn’t want to see things. He wants very much to see salacious and disturbing stuff! He just thinks it’s his calling to prevent his neighbors from seeing the same material. When everybody is a potential publisher—something the millions of video downloads counted by Facebook and Google help affirm—today’s censor can only delay and distort. Information may not, despite what Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand once said, want to be free. But some free people want access to it—even if it’s abominably unpleasant to consume.

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Sharp eyes will notice that I rejigged the excellent line, “We can’t be free because we have to be safe,” from the movie Page Eight in the third from the last paragraph. Send your favorite movie lines to [email protected]. My email alerts have seen all of John Ford’s work. My Twitter feed fancies Budd Boetticher’s Westerns. My RSS feed wants to go to a “The Wild Bunch” re-enactor camp and play the role of either Lyle or Tector Gorch.