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"Allen, Texas mall shooting: How graphic videos spread on Twitter" proclaimed the headline. It was one of four stories the BBC had up on its web page about the incident. And it seemed ironic for the BBC to be critical of Twitter for allowing graphic images of the event to stay up for a day, while posting story after story themselves.

Clearly, people are, for whatever reason, interested in these stories. That's why so many news outlets are devoting space to it. And if it's big in the news media, both domestic and international, those people who are attempting to get the attention of the attention economy are also going to jump on that bandwagon. And some number of them will be rewarded well enough for it that others will want to emulate that next time.

So maybe the problem isn't that Twitter's moderation staff is too small for the job given to them. They're caught between powerful sets of incentives, from both the people posting the content, and the people looking for it. It's legitimate to say that large companies should be in the business of protecting people from themselves; but then it should be recognized what a difficult task that is.