Facebook and Instagram are still struggling to shut down videos of the Christchurch mosque massacre

Associated Press

A man rests on the ground across the road from mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019.

• Facebook and Instagram are still struggling to rid their platforms of videos of the Christchurch mosque shooting livestream, CNN reports.
• The video was originally livestreamed to Facebook by the suspected shooter seven weeks ago.
• In the first 24 hours following the attack, Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos of the shooting which spread like wildfire across its platform.
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Facebook is still struggling to keep footage of the Christchurch mosque shootings off its platforms, seven weeks after the New Zealand terror attack.

The footage was originally livestreamed by the suspected shooter on Facebook. In a blog post, Facebook said the livestream was viewed less than 200 times, and was viewed a further 3,800 times before it was taken down.

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However, copies of the stream spread like wildfire and Facebook has not been able to keep up. Following the attack, Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos in the first 24 hours, blocking 1.2 million at point of upload.

CNN now eports that copies of the video are still findable on Facebook and Instagram. Nine videos were found by Eric Feinberg, a founding member of the Global Intellectual Property Enforcement Center, who provided the videos to CNN. All nine had been put up on the day of the attack, March 15.

Feinberg told Facebook that in recent weeks he has found 20 versions of the video, some of which he provided to the New Zealand Herald. All of the videos Feinberg found were accompanied by text in Arabic denouncing the attack.

Read more: Facebook says no one reported the New Zealand mosque shootings live video. But a reporter says he raised the alarm mid-attack.

In one instance on Instagram, the video had triggered the platform's "sensitive content" screen, which means users have to click through to see a video. It had more than 8,000 views.

When CNN showed Facebook two of the videos, it said it had failed to catch them because of the way they had been edited. Editing videos is a way uploaders can get around Facebook's "hashing" technology, which automatically identifies copies of videos which have been banned.

A Facebook spokesperson told CNN that while the company had hashed 900 iterations of the video, the edited versions Feinberg found had not been identified.

Facebook was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.