The live footage of Friday’s attacks, New Zealand’s worst-ever mass shooting, was first posted to Facebook and has since been shared on Twitter, Alphabet Inc’s YouTube and Facebook-owned Whatsapp and Instagram.įacebook, Twitter and YouTube all said they had taken steps to remove copies of the videos. I still remember you.Bloodied bandages on the road following a shooting at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019.

“On a personal level you have fascinated and amused me with your content. You have been our constant companions and although we probably didn't get to communicate too often you're appreciated more than you realize,” Hewitt said on his blog. “To the members, the uploaders, the casual visitors, the trolls and the occasionally demented people who have been with us. LiveLeak is gone, replaced by a site that explicitly bans gory and violent imagery. As YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter removed video of the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shooting, LiveLeak continued to host it and faced mounting pressure from the Government’s of Australia and New Zealand. After Islamic State posted the video of it beheading journalist James Foley in 2014, LiveLeak banned Islamic State from posting beheading videos. If you wanted to see footage of America firing Hellfire missiles at fighters in Afghanistan, you looked to LiveLeak.Īs the world got more complicated and more people surged online, Hewitt and others tried to better moderate LiveLeak. If a friend wanted to show you footage of a drug cartel beheading via chainsaw, they were showing you on LiveLeak.

If you wanted to see footage of the Saddam Hussein execution you went to LiveLeak. LiveLeak contained much of the same footage but framed it in a more respectable way and the creators framed it as a place for citizen journalists to post uncensored videos of world events. Along with and others, Ogrish was a place people went to when they wanted to see the worst the web had to offer. LiveLeak began in 2006 as an offshoot of the early internet shock site Ogrish.

I'm sat here now writing this with a mixture of sorrow because LL has been not just a website or business but a way of life for me and many of the guys but also genuine excitement at what's next.” “The world has changed a lot over these last few years, the Internet alongside it, and we as people. “Nothing lasts forever though and-as we did all those years ago-we felt LiveLeak had achieved all that it could and it was time for us to try something new and exciting,” LiveLeak co-founder Hayden Hewitt said in a blog post explaining the change.

Video of christchurch shooting liveleak