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Comment by identity-haver | Hacker News Reader

Just a thought experiment: so it's after 9/11. Nobody will show a video of the planes flying into the towers. The only place you can watch the video is ISISchan.org, and there are news articles about how many countries banning ISISchan.org & how problematic ISISchan.org is (don't go to ISISchan.org, kids!). Now instead of watching a clip on CNN you've got people absorbing all the extremist propaganda on ISISchan.

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I think this is really a different situation. The NZ video was made by the perpetrator as a vehicle to disseminate his views. 9/11 videos were made by bystanders as they watched their city being attacked.

A better comparison would be videos produced by terrorist organizations which use 9/11 footage to promote their own views: that would be something I could see being argued for a ban.

I'd argue that the shooting video is much worse - psychologically, graphically, and in terms of inspiring others, since the act was so much easier than the extravagant plane attacks. For God's sake, it was a first person video of the murder of individual people, one by one, played for jokes by the murderer ("remove kebab").

I'm not saying it's right or wrong to ban host sites under certain conditions - I just think the analogy is just way too disparate to be viable.

Alternatively, look how bad the conspiracy theories are about 9/11 despite video of the planes hitting WTC and Pentagon.

Now imagine that the same unfounded rumors start and sites are barred from displaying the videos so people can "make up their own mind".

There will always be conspiracy theories but hiding the footage, IMHO, will increase it dramatically.

To be clear, it's terrible footage and I think it's good FB, Youtube, and other private sites are choosing to bar it from their platforms.

But I worry that in the long run, if you start doing things like banning any domain that hosts it, you'll feed into some of the worst elements of the internet.

> ISISchan.org

No need for that, 4chan is a free for all. It's where I saw most ISIS execution videos.

I'm very biased against video. I don't watch TV news or reshared political videos. I'm quite happy that Hacker News doesn't host video; you can link if needed. So, I have questions:

There are specialized uses, but for most of us, I'm skeptical that it's important to have video of news events as they happen. If nobody caught 9/11 on video, what would be different?

For many years, no cameras were allowed in courtrooms or in Congress. It seems like that was fine?

Different people's brains process information in different ways. Others are better at absorbing information through text, and yet others need hands-on experience to learn something. There's a reason for the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words".

The New Zealand video is orders of magnitude more viscerally graphic than the famous videos of the planes flying into the towers. This is not to say one is more tragic than the other, just that the video for the NZ shooting may be one of the worst videos on the Internet. It would never be on CNN, so this comparison doesn't hold very strongly.

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