Buffalo gunman clips proliferate on social media following Twitch removal

Following Saturday’s horrific mass shooting in Buffalo, online platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Twitter are seemingly struggling to prevent various versions of the gunman’s livestream from proliferating on their platforms. The shooter, an 18-year-old white male, attempted to broadcast the entire attack on Twitch using a GoPro Hero 7 Black. The company told Engadget it took his channel down within two minutes of the violence starting.

“Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against violence of any kind and works swiftly to respond to all incidents,” a Twitch spokesperson said. “The user has been indefinitely suspended from our service, and we are taking all appropriate action, including monitoring for any accounts rebroadcasting this content.”

Despite Twitch’s response, that hasn’t stopped the video from proliferating online. According to New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, one link to a version of the livestream someone used a screen recorder to preserve saw 43,000 interactions. Another Twitter user said they found a Facebook post linking to the video that had been viewed more than 1.8 million times, with an accompanying screenshot suggesting the post did not trigger Facebook’s automated safeguards. 

A Meta spokesperson told Engadget the company has designated the shooting as a terrorist attack and added the gunman’s footage to a database it says will help it automatically detect and remove copies before they’re uploaded again. The spokesperson added the company’s moderation teams are working to catch bad actors who attempt to circumvent the blocks it has put in place.       

Responding to Mac’s Twitter thread, Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz said she found TikTok videos that share accounts and terms Twitter users can search for to view the full video. “Clear the vid is all over Twitter,” she said. We’ve reached out to the company for comment.

“We believe the hateful and discriminatory views promoted in content produced by perpetrators are harmful for society and their dissemination should be limited in order to prevent perpetrators from publicizing their message,” a Twitter spokesperson told Engadget. They added the company was “proactively” working to identify and take action against tweets that violate its guidelines.   

Preventing terrorists and violent extremists from disseminating their content online is one of the things Facebook, Twitter and a handful of other tech companies said they would do following the 2019 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. In the first 24 hours after that attack, Meta said it removed 1.5 million videos, but clips of the shooting continued to circulate on the platform for more than a month after the event. The company blamed its automated moderation tools for the failure, noting they had a hard time detecting the footage because of the way in which it was filmed. “This was a first-person shooter video, one where we have someone using a GoPro helmet with a camera focused from their perspective of shooting,” Neil Potts, Facebook’s public policy director, told British lawmakers at the time.

Update 6:39PM ET: Added comment and additional information from Meta and Twitter.

‘Zenless Zone Zero’ is a new action RPG from the studio behind ‘Genshin Impact’

Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse is working on a new project. On Friday, the studio shared the first trailer for Zenless Zone Zero, an action RPG set in a modern urban setting. Reminiscent of titles like The World Ends With You and Scarlett Nexu…

‘Kirby 64’ comes to Switch Online’s Expansion Pack on May 20th

If your childhood gaming was defined more by Kirby than Mario, don’t worry — Nintendo has you covered. As VGCreports, Nintendo is making Kirby 64: The Crystal Shardsavailable through the Switch Online Expansion Pack on May 20th. The Nintendo 64 title was the first 3D Kirby game, although it was really more of a “2.5D” platformer — you set out to reassemble a shattered crystal by copying and combining your enemies’ powers.

The Switch experience is effectively what you would remember playing circa 2000, complete with low-polygon 3D visuals. As you might guess, though, the multiplayer mini-games are now available online in addition to at home.

This is the 15th N64 game to come to the Switch Online Expansion Pack, which costs $50 per year or $80 for families. While Kirby 64 might not be as immediately appealing to veteran gamers as the likes of Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time, it’s still a notable addition that may be great for introducing kids to the games of your youth.

The ‘Alan Wake’ remaster is coming to Nintendo Switch

Fans of Alan Wake aren’t getting an update on the sequel this summer — but can look forward to a new TV series and a remastered version of the original game for the Switch. Remedy Entertainment’s creative director Sam Lake today revealed what’s in store for the franchise during the game’s 12th-anniversary celebration video. Switch owners can anticipate Alan Wake Remastered to be available on Nintendo’s eShop sometime this fall. The remastered original title is already available on the PS5, Xbox and PC.

The original 2010 Alan Wake game — which features a thriller novelist who tries to solve the mystery of his wife’s disappearance — has become a cult classic in recent years. Remedy and Microsoft Studios then released Alan Wake’s American Nightmare in 2012. Since then, the franchise has mostly been dormant, but that’s about to change.

Lake revealed that AMC bought the rights to the Alan Wake franchise and will be adapting it into a TV series. “We have been collaborating on making a TV show happen. Nothing more to share at the moment, but we will certainly let you know when there is something to announce,” said Lake.

Alan Wake 2, which many expected to preview this summer, is currently deep in the development stages. Unfortunately, Lake confirmed that the studio won’t be releasing any further updates on the game. It did release a number of stills from the upcoming sequel. As we’ve known for a while, the game is slated to arrive in 2023 for PS5 and other platforms.

“Everything [with Alan Wake 2] is going really well, and a great deal of the game is playable,” Lake said. “But we’ve been talking for the past couple of months and have come to a decision that we will not be showing anything big this summer,” said Lake.

Alan Wake devotees should watch the anniversary video in full, which also includes interesting behind-the-scene details about the remastered original and upcoming sequel. You can watch it below:

Mark Zuckerberg shows off what Meta’s next headset can do

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has provided a first proper look at the company’s next mixed-reality headset, codenamed Project Cambria, in action. The “high-end headset” is scheduled for release later this year and it will support a new augmented reality experience called The World Beyond.

We see Zuckerberg playing with and petting a virtual creature that’s superimposed onto the real world. The clip also shows a user in front of a virtual workstation before looking down at a notepad and writing on it. Reports suggested that Cambria’s image quality would allow users to clearly read text, and that seems to be the case.

In addition, the demo shows a virtual workout instructor who appears to be in the same space as the headset wearer. The World Beyond was built with Meta’s Presence Platform, which is designed to help developers create mixed-reality experiences.

Project Cambria will support full-color passthrough. Its onboard cameras can seemingly provide wearers with a higher fidelity view of their surroundings for mixed-reality purposes than existing Quest headsets can offer. The World Beyond will be available on Quest soon through App Lab, though you won’t be able to access the full-color passthrough experience just yet.

The new headset itself was blurred in the clip. However, it’s not that hard to imagine roughly what it will look like, especially given the teaser Meta released last year. Project Cambria (or whatever it will actually be called) will reportedly cost over $799.

A recent report noted that Meta employees likened Project Cambria to a “laptop for the face,” given that it’s said to have similar specs to a Chromebook. It’s believed Meta is planning to release a more advanced version of the Cambria headset in 2024 as well as two new Quest models over the next few years.

However, it seems Meta is scaling back some of its metaverse ambitions. On Wednesday, it was reported that the company is shutting down some projects at Reality Labs, the hardware and metaverse division that lost $10 billion last year, and putting others on hold. Meta is said to be hiring fewer staff than usual this year to reduce costs amid slowing revenue growth. Meanwhile, the company this week opened its first physical store for Reality Labs products.

‘The Pentaverate’ is a reminder of what Netflix took from us

Wanna know what I miss? Mid-budget studio comedies, the sort that filled the gaps in cinema’s annual calendar. The sort of lightweight, low-energy fare you and your friends could watch on a Saturday morning in the multiplex. Often they’d feature a Saturday Night Live alumnus on an initial foray into the movie industry proper, but just as equally not. Sometimes the films did well, but more often not, would underperform until it developed a second life on late-night cable, video rentals or even DVD sales. You know, stuff like So I Married An Axe Murderer.

There aren’t many cinema-released mid-budget comedy movies these days, and for good reason. Comedy is a more subjective artform than, say, action, and doesn’t travel as well around the world as, say, action. There’s no room these days for an unadulterated comedy movie with a budget in the low-double-digit millions given the economics. Hell, even something as flat and awful as Holmes and Watson cost $42 million, and couldn’t recoup that figure at the box office. I’m sure that film, too, will eventually catch on with some future generation of kids and stoners who delight in it as much as I have a soft spot for some of these early ’90s comedies I was too young to see in cinemas. 

Of course, these mid-budget comedies have been priced out of cinemas and straight into our homes, thanks to Netflix. Regardless of the quality, films like The Bubble and Don’t Look Up would, in a previous era, would have slotted into a multiplex roster quite easily. But Netflix’s desire to milk as much sitting-on-the-couch-time-as-possible from every piece of IP it owns is a big problem. Mostly because of its insistence of taking ideas that would have made brisk multiplex movies and dragged them out into time-wasting miniseries. There’s a reason that so many Netflix series have pacing problems as a fun 90-minute story is padded out to four, six, eight or twelve hours.

Which is a neat segue into talking about The Pentaverate, Netflix’s latest comedy featuring a depending-on-who-you-ask long overdue return by Mike Myers. On the surface, it’s a comedy about a secret society which has helped shape the course of human history, except they’re (apparently) nice. Myers plays eight characters, given his endless love of prosthetics and desire to be remembered as his generations’ Peter Sellers. He’s joined by Lydia West, Keegan-Michael Key, Debi Mazar, Ryn Alleyne, Neil Mullarchy, Jenifer Saunders and Ken Jeong. And there’s plenty of A-list talent behind the camera too, with Orbital on soundtrack duties and Tim Kirkby directing.

Our star is Ken Scarborough, a retirement-age Toronto-based local TV journalist who is destined to be retired. On the quest for a big story to save his career, he visits the Canadian Conspiracy Convention (CanConCon) and discovers The Pentaverate. From there, his journey is to infiltrate the organization and, with the help of his cameraperson Reilly, try to expose it. Except, of course, Scarborough is walking in on a conspiracy hatched by one of the Pentaverate’s own for reasons that are fairly obvious as soon as you see who’s running the thing.

Myers is a child of the ‘70s, but his British expat parents imbued in him a love of all things British and ‘60s. Much of The Pentaverate is lifted wholesale from legendary ‘60s series The Prisoner and fans of that show will get a kick out of spotting what’s been stolen. Myers’ love for the show even extends to stealing the best joke from the series, albeit the Canadian manages to blow the punchline here. Hell, even the shadowy cabal’s helicopters are the same brand as what was used to fly people in and out of the Village.

(An aside: Are we living in the age of celebrities producing big-budget fanfiction? After all, this The Prisoner riff comes only a few years after Seth MacFarlane was able to launch his own Star Trek series.)

Unfortunately, despite the wealth of talent here, The Pentaverate falls a little flat because it’s clearly in the wrong format. There’s no proof, far as I can see, that the film was originally a screenplay and then expanded out to a TV-friendly three hours, but it sure feels that way. You can feel the narrative stretching, as characters wait around for their plot thread to start back up. Do we need multiple sequences of people riding a “hyperloop” around pulling g-force faces? No, but you can imagine Reed Hastings behind the camera, tapping his watch and insisting the runtime gets as close to three hours as possible.

This stretching also means that every joke in the show’s arsenal gets repeated a little too many times. You know that friend who really got into Austin Powers and just kept shouting lines from the film into your face? Well, buckle in for plenty of jokes about how Canadians are nice, dicks are funny, no, Canadians are really nice, and dicks are really, really funny. Oh and sex jokes, the sort that your pre-teen nephew likes to make, you’ll get some of those, too. The neater, smarter touches, like the fourth-wall breaking Netflix spokesperson who goes back and edits some sequences to “remove” some of the “profanity” also grow tiresome with repetition.

Unfortunately, while the show can be funny, and it’s a delight to see Myers returning to his roots somewhat, the show drags. I’m sure it would have been a breezy, 89-minute movie that would have enabled viewers to forgive its faults. It would be an interesting experiment to hand this over to a talented editor and see if they couldn’t trim this down to something a lot pacier. Until then, however, it’s for Myers and Prisoner diehards only, at least until a whole new generation of kids are old enough to find it in the infinite scroll in twenty years.

Texas law that allows users to sue social networks for censorship is now in effect

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has put a controversial Texan law that allows users to sue social media companies back into effect. As Houston Public Media notes, Texas introduced HB 20 last year after high-profile conservatives, including Donald Trump, were blocked on social media websites. A federal judge put HB 20 under temporary injunction in December, but that injunction has now been paused. 

Under the law, users will be able to sue large social media platforms with more than 50 million active monthly users such as Facebook and Twitter if they believe they were banned for their political views. HB 20 also prohibits social networks from removing or restricting content based on “the viewpoint of the user or another person.” 

Trade industry groups NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) managed to secure an injunction against the law last year. They argued that HB 20 would lead to the spread of misinformation and hate speech on social networks and that it also violates the websites’ First Amendment rights. The federal judge overseeing the case agreed that social networks have the right to moderate content under the First Amendment and also said that parts of the law are “prohibitively vague.”

In a hearing for the appeal filed by Texas, the state’s lawyers argued that social media platforms are “modern-day public squares.” That means they can be required to host content that they deem objectionable and are banned from censoring certain viewpoints. The 5th Circuit judges sided with Texas, with one even telling the trade groups during the hearing that social networks like Twitter are not websites but “internet providers” instead.

NetChoice counsel Chris Marchese called HB 20 “an assault on the First Amendment” and “constitutionally rotten from top to bottom” on Twitter. The trade groups plan to appeal immediately, but for now, HB 20 is fully in effect. 

A federal court blocked a similar law in Florida last year after the judge ruled that it violates Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that shields online platforms from liability for what their users’ post. Florida also appealed that decision, which will be decided by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Twitter made a game to explain its privacy policy

Twitter has revamped its privacy policy to help you understand how it handles your data, but it’s not convinced that’s enough. The social network has launched a Data Dash game that it hopes will help you understand the trickier parts of the new policy in simpler terms. At its heart, it’s a simple platformer that has you guide your dog Data around unwanted ads (for cats, naturally), navigate through spam DMs and avoid trolls. Complete a level and you’ll learn more about Twitter’s approach and how you can take control of the experience.

Data Dash won’t exactly challenge hardcore gamers, and the mechanics are a bit crude. The 8-bit retro style is cute (if unoriginal), though, and the easy gameplay makes it more likely that you’ll learn something rather than give up in frustration.

The biggest issue may simply be the tone. While the game is glib, the issues it’s dealing with are potentially serious — we doubt people will enjoy this if they’ve been targets for harassment or hate speech. Data Dash is more for newcomers and other innocents who want to wrap their heads around privacy concepts before they encounter the sobering reality.