The slickly-produced, high-definition video was originally uploaded to YouTube, but was taken off the site within a matter of hours. YouTube also sought to take down duplicates whenever they were posted.
Kelly Foley, a cousin of the slain journalist, wrote on Twitter, "Don't watch the video. Don't share it. That's not how life should be." For me, Frontline Journalism is important. In 2014, I have been to #ChibokTwice, Maiduguri, #Liberia on a weekend, #TelAviv and each time I exit those assignment locations, the situation got worse and I escaped death. Some of you know that I was embedded in the US military in 2003 in Iraq when I was an NBC affiliate producer.
A YouTube representative said the site, owned by Google, has "clear policies that prohibit content like gratuitous violence, hate speech and incitement to commit violent acts, and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users."
"We also terminate any account registered by a member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and used in an official capacity to further its interests," the representative added.
Videos of ISIS executions are still accessible through other sites, however. One such site, LiveLeak, said Wednesday that it was "currently experiencing an abnormally high volume of traffic."
Twitter faced similar issues -- and a tremendous amount of pressure from its users about the balancing act between freedom of expression and basic human decency. "We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery," Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo wrote in an early Wednesday morning post on the site.
It all amounted to a particularly grotesque version of whack-a-mole. At one point Tuesday evening, simply tweeting the word "beheading" resulted in replies from spam accounts that attached a photo of Foley's severed head.
"We also terminate any account registered by a member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and used in an official capacity to further its interests," the representative added.
Videos of ISIS executions are still accessible through other sites, however. One such site, LiveLeak, said Wednesday that it was "currently experiencing an abnormally high volume of traffic."
Twitter faced similar issues -- and a tremendous amount of pressure from its users about the balancing act between freedom of expression and basic human decency. "We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery," Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo wrote in an early Wednesday morning post on the site.
It all amounted to a particularly grotesque version of whack-a-mole. At one point Tuesday evening, simply tweeting the word "beheading" resulted in replies from spam accounts that attached a photo of Foley's severed head.
With files from CNN
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