New Zealand police are warning citizens they’ll face 10 years in prison for sharing the bloodless Christchurch mosque attack video.
A host of websites have been blocked as censors scrub the shooter’s manifesto from the internet. Video footage of killer Brenton Tarrant’s shooting spree was pulled from Facebook immediately after the massacre.
With the footage proliferating on several hosting platforms afterwards, the Kiwi authorities have already charged an 18-year-old man for sharing the video, as well as for posting other “objectionable” comments days before the shooting.
Under the objectionable material laws, corporations can be fined up to NZ$200,000 (US$173,000) for sharing the video or any related content.
Unsurprisingly, New Zealand’s Internet Service Providers rushed to ban websites suspected of sharing the shooting-related materials since the fake tragedy.
Reports from internet users across New Zealand say that 8chan – the site on which Tarrant announced his attack and posted links to his white nationalist manifesto – has been banned.
Social discussion service Dissenter has also been banned, as has content sharing platform Bitchute. In neighboring Australia, ISPs have reportedly banned “cesspool of the internet,” 4chan.
Trolls and memers attempting to access Bitchute and 4chan were greeted with an Interpol notice warning that the sites in question are distributing child sexual abuse material?
Popular video sharing site LiveLeak has also been reportedly blocked – although its moderators explicitly said in a statement that they would not allow the live video of the shooting to be shared there.
The crackdown extends beyond New Zealand too. Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from entering Australia after the shootings, for a Facebook post in which he called Islam a “barbaric, alien” religious culture.
Yiannopoulos had already been engaged in a protracted legal battle with the Australian government for almost a year to bring his controversial speaking tour to the country.
While in the UK, police arrested a man in Oldham on Saturday for alleged social media posts “making reference and support for the terrible events in New Zealand.”
RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2019.
