A lot of sickos out there

There are numerous first person shootout video games on the market where you aim to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Your screen shows video as if you have a camera strapped to you. However, these are games. No matter how convincing the graphics are, we know that it is not real and nobody actually dies. I have to say, they are not my cup of tea but everyone to their own.

The killer who went on the rampage at two mosques in New Zealand had a GoPro video camera strapped to his head. Whilst he was killing innocent worshippers, his actions were being streamed live over the internet. This was not a game, these were real people being slaughtered. Apparently, the video lasted for 17 minutes on Facebook.

Once Facebook was aware, they removed the footage and it was banned by all popular social media sites. Unfortunately though, the video had already been copied and was immediately being redistributed by users.

Facebook removed 1.5m copies of the video in the first 24 hours after the attack and tech companies are struggling to keep it off their servers.  Whilst it is straightforward for the servers to detect full copies of the video and remove them, it is more difficult for them to detect when people have extracted clips from the original and put them together in a different order.

It seems that we now live in a sick world where some people either cannot separate the fantasy world of a video game from reality or they find reality more compelling, more exciting.