Vice News: Why Vehicles Are on the Rise as Weapons of Mass Killing
On Monday, a man turned a van against the pedestrians walking along Yonge Street in north Toronto, killing ten people and injuring over a dozen.It doesn’t take much time to think of other recent attacks that used this method—Nice, Berlin, London, New York City, Stockholm, and Charlottesville, just to name a few, have all experienced mass killings in which vehicles were the primary weapon. A 2017 paper by the nonprofit policy group Counter Extremism Project (CEP) suggests that tech companies can also do more. The paper points to YouTube in particular, which has failed to prevent a lot of propaganda on its site—YouTube has responded by ramping up AI efforts to flag and remove videos inciting violence. "Following the New York attack that occurred a few months ago, we discovered pieces of ISIS and Al-Qaeda propaganda online encouraging these types attacks,” CEP's senior research analyst Josh Lipowsky told VICE. “For an example, there was an ISIS video clip the encourage[d] truck attacks." Companies like YouTube should be more “proactive,” he said, in monitoring for this sort of content and removing it.
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