Local journalist Alison Parker was shot and killed on live television. Years later, graphic videos of her death still plague YouTube.
- Alison Parker, a local broadcast journalist, was shot and killed on live television in Roanoke, Virginia, by a disgruntled former co-worker in 2015.
- Years later, her father, Andy Parker, claims graphic videos of her death remain on YouTube despite numerous requests to have them taken down.
- Parker filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that YouTube has violated its own terms of services by hosting content it claims to prohibit.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
On the morning of August 25, 2015, local TV news reporter Alison Parker was conducting a live interview about an upcoming celebration of the 50th anniversary of Smith Mountain Lake in Moneta, Virginia. In the middle of the interview, locals were horrified when they watched as Parker and her videographer, Adam Ward, were brutally shot and killed on live television by a disgruntled former co-worker.
Years later, her father continues to be haunted by graphic videos of the carnage that have been clipped, re-edited, and published online - and he claims that YouTube, which is owned by Google, refuses to take them down.
"Google monetizes my daughter's murder. It's not in their interest to take it down - and I won't tolerate it," her father, Andy Parker, told Insider.
On Thursday, Andy filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google, alleging that the tech company violates its own terms of service for hosting content it claims to prohibit.
"These videos have been edited in numerous ways-in almost every case to increase their shock value," the complaint, seen by Insider, said. "Moreover, the users who perpetuate this type of entertainment continue to harass Mr. Parker by discounting his suffering as fake."
Videos of Alison's death have been used by YouTube conspiracy theorists and hoaxers
To this day, YouTube users can find various videos from Ward's camera and those from the attacker's GoPro, which he posted on social media before his own death by suicide.
Raw, un-edited videos can still be found on the platform, in addition to ones that have been edited to emphasize the brutality of the incident. The complaint described clips on YouTube with "curtain of blood and 'James Bond' style music" and "a gun pointed directly at Alison and with a Star of David transposed over Alison's head with the word 'SHOOT' inside of it."
Although Andy has never watched the videos depicting his daughter's final moments, conspiracy theorists and hoaxers on YouTube have harassed Parker and his family since her murder, falsely claiming the shooting was staged. They have accused him of being a crisis actor playing Alison's father in an effort to take away Americans' gun rights - and he's not the only one accused of being a crisis actor.
Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, was harassed by conspiracy theorists who claimed the mass casualty at the Connecticut elementary school was a hoax and that he was a crisis actor. Pozner started the HONR Network to assist victims of highly-publicized, mass casualty events who have been revictimized by online conspiracy theorists.
Pozner and hundreds of volunteers with the HONR network have flagged thousands of videos of Alison's death on YouTube as violent or graphic content, according to the complaint.
Despite multiple attempts at flagging the videos, which YouTube's terms of service prohibit, the complaint alleges that the online video platform often takes little to no action to remove them from its site.
"To this day, Mr. Parker and his family have had only one tool available to defend themselves from such traumatic vitriol and the nightmare of seeing their daughter's death: watch these videos one-by-one in order to report them," reads the complaint.
The FTC complaint alleges that YouTube violates its own terms of service
Because there are no laws making it illegal to host disturbing videos, filing an FTC complaint is the Parker family's only real legal recourse. Rachel Guy and Spencer Myers, law students with the Georgetown University Law Center who helped draft the complaint, called on the FTC to "end the company's blatant, unrepentant consumer deception."
The complaint, seen by Insider, claimed that YouTube's community guidelines proclaim that violent and graphic videos are not allowed, "leading users to reasonably believe that they will not encounter it." However, it alleges that these videos are "commonplace" and have remained on its site for several years.
"The dark web is here - and it's called Google," Parker told Insider. "The founders started out saying they don't do evil. What they're doing with the content they're offering up, they're doing evil everyday."
The complaint also argued that Alison's video could be traumatizing to children who may accidentally stumble upon it on the platform. Guy told Insider that "YouTube isn't giving parents the truth about what can be exposed to."
A spokesperson for YouTube told Insider that YouTube uses a "combination of technology and people to enforce these guidelines," and that they specifically prohibit "videos that aim to shock with violence, or accuse victims of public violent events of being part of a hoax."
"Our Community Guidelines are designed to protect the YouTube community, including those affected by tragedies," a spokesperson told Insider. "We rigorously enforce these policies using a combination of machine learning technology and human review and over the last few years, we've removed thousands of copies of this video for violating our policies. We will continue to stay vigilant and improve our policy enforcement."
YouTube relies on users to flag content and to describe the violence within offensive videos to moderate the platform. The complaint claimed that YouTube fails to convey that the burden is on consumers to report graphic content, a process that they claim can re-traumatize victims who are forced to watch and describe these scenes repeatedly.
"After hundreds of reports, it takes, days weeks, or months before any certain action is taken, if at all," Guy told Insider.
The worldwide video platform has come under fire for how it moderates content on its site. Although conspiracy theories about Alison's death and the Sandy Hook shooting have proliferated on the site for years, Google only announced last June that it would ban Sandy Hook conspiracy videos, white supremacists, and Nazis from YouTube, the Verge reported.
Guy claimed they only began to scrub its platform of videos depicting Alison's last moments after they filed the FTC complaint. They hope the complaint will force YouTube to "live up to their terms of service" and ban these videos outright, instead of deleting them when it becomes clear that the company could be liable.
"Andy's larger goal is that these videos are taken down. He can't stand the idea that YouTube is profiting off these videos I can't imagine the trauma he feels thinking about it," Guy told Insider.
Andy said he's filing the complaint not only for himself and his family, but for others who feel traumatized by seeing videos of the violence they experienced over and over again.
Parker told Insider: "The day that she was killed I promised that I would honor her life in action."
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