Twitter yanks murder video posted by apparent killer of VA journalists

As news and confirmations piled up regarding the murder of two journalists at Virginia TV station WDBJ7, the story took a dark turn on social media when accounts in the name of another WDBJ7 staffer posted what appeared to be first-hand video of the fatal shooting.

Twitter and Facebook responded with suspensions of the offending accounts under the name Bryce Williams, but not before the accounts, which each appeared to have been created on August 18 with nothing more than innocuous cat videos at the time, had their video posts shared widely—and in Twitter's case, with the gruesome video of the murder of reporter Alison Parker and photographer Adam Ward auto-playing in silence for anybody who scrolled through it.

While the Facebook account in question contained little more than the horrific video—captured here the moment Facebook acted to suspend it—the Twitter account contained more confessional posts, which can be seen in the screencap at the top of this article.