My issue with it is that we live in a world of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Scrubbing stuff like this from everywhere is just going to make people invent conspiracy theories about it being fake or suppressed to hide stuff "the government" doesn't want you to know, etc.

So I don't see how hiding the artifacts of evil from the public helps anything beyond creating a Streisand-type effect. Likewise, I don't think it's correct to assume that everyone sharing something like this has ill intent.

Many people feel like the media is trying to hide the truth of events like this from them. My own Grandmother constantly asks me how I know what's true when there seem to be multiple stories and versions of everything because what she sees is mostly people telling her a (slanted) version of events and yelling at each other, maybe with a carefully selected 5 second soundbite, or stock footage, and not the event itself.

Now I'm not saying I think the footage should be plastered everywhere. I'm not saying I think it should shared all over the place on FB or YouTube, etc. But I think we live in an era where attempts at gate-keeping and information control, even when well intentioned, just add to the poison rotting the public sphere.

So all of the above said, I'm not entirely certain what the best and most appropriate response is. I'm just fairly sure that trying to bury everything isn't the greatest plan -- the worst case is that the kind of people who'd be prone to lionizing its contents find it anyway, whether from file sharing sites, niche forums, torrents, FireFox share links, the dark web, etc., and get more radicalized and more prone to do doing something similar, while the larger public, absent knowledge of some potentially evocative and significant moment that could become a rallying cultural touchstone against hate, kind of just muddle on with business as usual. (Now obviously I don't know if there's any such evocative moment in the footage, but if there is... well, nobody's really seeing it.)

It seems a bit similar to how many people tended to always believe police stories about "resisting arrest" until police started getting caught on camera just plain beating or shooting people. We don't really want to be seeing people get beat and shot by police on camera, and sure, there are people who do take grotesque pleasure in it, but by and large it has to come out somehow for people to see the problem and come around to wanting changes or reforms.

I also think the expectations being bandied around for internet sites and social networks are quite extreme. I heard NPR interviewing some expert advocating for people to be required to have licenses and use their real names in order to live stream anything not one or to days later and it was another "is this real life" moment (of many in the last few years). Not to mention the idea that things of this nature could always be peremptorily detected and blocked, which I have the impression there are people advocating for, seems beyond what's realistically possible.

In any case, I don't have the answers, but as seems to be common, everyone always wants things to be simple and black and white with some sort of simple and obvious blanket policy that will be magic, especially when something has emotional resonance. And I just don't think we live in that world.