Interesting times.'įacebook says that 12 minutes after the 17-minute livestream ended, a user reported the video to Facebook. 'It's kind of strange really, we've been blocked by governments before but not telecoms deciding themselves.

'It would appear we're either being blocked because a copy was temporarily available via sharing for a very short period, or by reputation,' Hewitt said. Optus and Vodaphone are also blocking LiveLeak, he said.

The block itself came as a complete surprise, said Hewitt, who noted his site is still shut out of New Zealand and Australia. 'We don't want it on our platform and we will continue to remove it whenever it is discovered,' a company statement reads. Liveleak co-founder Hayden Hewitt told NPR that Liveleak will not carry the video. 'We understand this may inconvenience some legitimate users of these sites, but these are extreme circumstances and we feel this is the right thing to do.' 'We've started temporarily blocking a number of sites that are hosting footage of Friday's terrorist attack in Christchurch,' Telstra said on Twitter. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says she has been in contact with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to ensure the video is entirely scrubbed from the platform.Īnd some websites accused of hosting footage of the attacks, such as 4chan and LiveLeak, have found themselves blocked by the country's major Internet providers.

But executives from the sites say they have been doing what they can to combat the spread of the video, one possibly designed for an age of virality. Social media and video sharing sites have faced criticism for being slow to respond to the first-ever live-streamed mass shooting, recorded from the first-person perspective of the shooter, the camera seemingly mounted atop the killer's helmet. Countless more views occurred in the hours afterward, as copies of the video proliferated more quickly than online platforms like Facebook could remove them. But the video was viewed about 4,000 times before Facebook removed it, he added.

Al Noor mosque is shaded by clouds in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Tuesday.Ī Facebook vice president said fewer than 200 people saw the Christchurch massacre while it was being streamed live on the site.

Christchurch shooting liveleak video