German broadcaster heuteplus has apologized for implying that DreamHack had streamed the German mass shooting that recently appeared on Twitch. The broadcaster had released a (now-deleted) tweet as background for a video, and footage from the mass shooting was overlaid onto DreamHack’s Twitch channel.
The now-deleted tweet (available via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and seen in our header image) was a more than 2-minute long video that was talking about a mass shooting that had been livestreamed on Twitch on October 9, 2019. While the video is no longer available, the archive shows a thumbnail of the video. In it, we see a still image of the suspect in the mass shooting and the name “DreamhackCS” as the user streaming the video.
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Reddit’s /r/LivestreamFail subreddit highlighted the mistake that heuteplus made. It should be noted, of course, that DreamHack didn’t actually stream the video; this appears to be a case of someone making background graphics to simulate what had happened on Twitch and neglecting to remove the username.
heuteplus, for their part, has apologized for the error on their Twitter. Here is a machine translation of the tweet in question:
“In the first version of the report, images of the assassin were mounted on @DreamHack’s Twitch channel. We regret that this may have given the impression that the livestream of the attack had gone there. This was not the case. We corrected the video for that reason.”
The account that had actually streamed the shooting had been made two months before the mass shooting incident. It had only made a single prior attempt to the livestream before broadcasting the shooting to more than 2,200 people. Twitch says it has forwarded a hash of the video — essentially a digital fingerprint — to companies including Microsoft and Facebook in order to prevent the spread of the video.
DreamHack is a production company that is legendary in the gaming world. Essentially, it’s a convention that is more or less a massive LAN party featuring space for thousands of people to set up their own PCs. Game tournaments and other events take place at events created by the Swedish company around the world.
