Twitch is again under fire after an armed gunman in Halle, Germany attacked people outside of a synagogue on Yom Kippur, one of the holiest days on the Jewish calendar, leaving 2 dead and injured others, and streamed it all on Twitch’s platform.
An estimated 2,200 people viewed it on Twitch, according to the New York Times,and the stream lasted for more than 35 minutes live, and was kept on the platform for around 30 minutes afterwards.
Twitch claims that “approximately five people” watched the stream while it was live, adding that a recording of the stream was then viewed by about 2,200 people “in the 30 minutes before the video was flagged and removed from Twitch.”
Twitch is now commenting further on what happened.
“We are shocked and saddened by the tragedy that took place in Germany today, and our deepest condolences go out to all those affected,” a Twitch spokesperson said, according to CNBC. “Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against hateful conduct, and any act of violence is taken extremely seriously. We are working with urgency to remove this content and permanently suspend any accounts found to be posting or reposting content of this abhorrent act.”
“This account was created about two months prior to streaming the shooting and had attempted to stream only once before,” said Twitch, according to Kotaku. “This video was not surfaced in any recommendations or directories; instead, our investigation suggests that people were coordinating and sharing the video via other online messaging services.”
It continues to build on a growing concern on how Twitch polices the content on it’s platform, and it seems to be overwhelmed by how much content is consumed on their platform, which is reaching epic heights in 2019 alone.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened as most will recall that the Christchurch mosque shooter who killed 51 people and injured 49 earlier this year, which was streamed on Facebook Live, and recordings of the shooting were uploaded to Twitch, which led to a lot of legal fallout.
Twitch seems to be having more and more issues as pornography, copyrighted videos, and other terms of service violations continue to plague the platform.