New York Attorney General Letitia James proposed criminalizing perpetrator-produced murder footage and changing violent crime content standards for online platforms, in a report issued Wednesday.
The report calls for holding murderers and accomplices criminally liable for producing images and videos of the crime, and recommends introducing new civil liability for distributing such content, with “sufficient exemptions to avoid overinclusion of content with social, educational, or historical value.” It suggests reforming the federal Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 and opening that civil liability to online platforms that fail to “take reasonable steps to prevent unlawful violent criminal content” from appearing there.
The investigative report focused on online platforms’ role in the May 14 mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, Tops Friendly Market grocery store, which left ten people dead and three injured. The 18-year-old alleged perpetrator went to the store intending to kill “as many blacks as possible,” livestreaming part of the massacre on Twitch, before the platform shut the livestream down. (RELATED: REPORT: FBI Undercounts Good Guys With Guns Who Stop Mass Shootings)
– Federal laws must change to require companies to take steps to prevent violent criminal content from being shared on their platforms.
– Companies need to identify and stop violence from being livestreamed before it can be shared.
Read our full report: https://t.co/KKKa1PsWJn
— NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) October 18, 2022
“The drafters of Section 230 wanted to encourage content moderation by providing protections to online platforms acting as ‘Good Samaritans’ in their attempts to monitor and remove offensive content on their platforms,” the report read. “However, the internet has changed dramatically since 1996, and in that time, courts have found that Section 230(c)(1), which protects companies from liability for the under-removal of user content, ‘should be construed broadly in favor of immunity.'”
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