Alleged Virginia shooter Bryce Williams dies after shooting himself

The Facebook account, also under the name Bryce Williams, shows multiple videos of Flanagan as a reporter, including one of him holding a gun during a reporting assignment.

If you’d like to know how to disable autoplay for videos on your Facebook and Twitter accounts, we’ve gathered up the various ways below.

“I find most people in my feed have spoken against watching the footage”, said Jessica Ward-Ramirez of Los Angeles.

But social media were also employed to try to immortalize the killings, apparently by the chief suspect, Vester Lee Flanagan, who once worked at WDBJ under the name Bryce Williams. You didn’t ask for your cousin’s baby yelling cutely while destroying a pile of mashed potatoes or for yet another Ice Bucket Challenge video in living color and full volume, but you got it.

A manhunt followed the shooting, and Flanagan later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Part of the policy prohibits people from “celebrating any crimes you’ve committed”. But Marks said the allegations couldn’t be corroborated and the claim was dismissed.

Minutes after the videos were posted, the accounts were no longer accessible. “YouTube has clear policies against videos containing gratuitous violence and we remove them when they are flagged”, a spokesperson said.

“The fact that this shooter posted the carnage on Facebook and Twitter for the world to see demonstrates the extent of the rage this man felt”, says Patrick.

In other cases, Facebook or Twitter might be inclined to leave up an offensive post in the interest of community discussion of an important issue. When the video was put into the native players on Facebook and Twitter, viewers saw it whether they wanted to or not because of the recently added autoplay function, Mashable reports.

Another user, Corrine Marquez, said via Facebook that it’s “shameful to recirculate the video”. In their place is this message: “This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy on shocking and disgusting content”.