News and information from our partners

Twitter tries to block images of Foley killing

﻿

AMSTERDAM — Twitter and some other social media outlets are trying to block the spread of gruesome images of the beheading of journalist James Foley by Islamic State militants, while a movement to deny his killers publicity is also gaining momentum.

In a Tweet, CEO Dick Costolo said his company “is actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery,” and he gave a link to a New York Times story about Foley’s killing.

Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler on Wednesday confirmed Costolo’s Tweet, which was published late Tuesday California time, and referred further questions to a company policy page. Twitter allows immediate family members of someone who dies to request image removals, although the company weighs public interest against privacy concerns.

Twitter users who oppose spreading the images are using the trending hashtag #ISISMediaBlackout. However, preventing links to the images has not had universal success.

By mid-afternoon in Europe on Wednesday, Tweets could still be found linking directly to the footage on some video sharing sites, such as Vimeo.

Vimeo could not be immediately reached for comment.

On YouTube, which is owned by Google, the video was reportedly posted for some period of time Tuesday before being removed.

By Wednesday afternoon in Europe, searches for the incident mainly turned up links to news reports of Foley’s slaying.

Some included original footage from the video, but left out shots of the act of killing.

Google and YouTube could not immediately be reached for comment.

READ NEXT TOP STORY: Windermere joins revitalization

﻿

Comments

Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.

Sign in to comment

CLOSE X

Information from The Chronicle and our advertisers (Want to add your business to this to this feed?)
http://www.thedalleschronicle.com/news/2014/aug/20/twitter-tries-block-images-foley-killing/
www.thedalleschronicle.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-09
35358
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KTRN464TGVBXC2LEGUEFJNPIXX5OMAS3
<urn:uuid:42946c2f-fb4a-4dca-a762-dc873da376f0>
2018-02-26T01:39:43Z
208.91.60.6
text/html
sha1:TY3R4F5OPS6CEVDDCUF27AJGORLFT4G2
<urn:uuid:8ebf9988-3487-47dc-b596-93961fb9fc5c>
http://www.thedalleschronicle.com/news/2014/aug/20/twitter-tries-block-images-foley-killing/
response
<urn:uuid:0c5a196c-b2c6-4730-9f2c-83bac854f242>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-170-163-162.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-09
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf