LiveLeak

About

LiveLeak was a video sharing website known for publishing extremely graphic content, such as murders, fights and terrorist beheadings.

History

Ogrish

Ogrish.com launched in 2000 and acted as a precursor to LiveLeak. It's intended purpose was to "Uncover reality," as their slogan stated, by publishing content mainstream media outlets censored. The site rose to prominence in 2002 after it hosted videos of people jumping from the Twin Towers during the September 11th, 2001 attacks. ^[1] The site shut down on October 31st, 2006 and began redirecting to LiveLeak.com.^[4]

Hayden Hewitt, the only public member of LiveLeak's founders, said of Ogrish:

"Ogrish had gone as far as it could go. It risked becoming a parody of itself. Ogrish was a very serious site, it wasn't like a lot of the gore sites you might see now that are based off that model. It was tremendously serious, everything was researched, there was no laughing at dead people or anything like that, the community was actually remarkably reserved.

"We'd gone as far as we could go with [Ogrish] … Traffic was still climbing, but we felt we reached a point where we didn't want to progress with it. We closed it down before we ran the risk of becoming like the imitators."

LiveLeak

LiveLeak launched on October 31st, 2006, offering a less explicit version of Ogrish.^[2]

Two years later, Dutch politician Geert Wilders produced a documentary short called Fitna. Due to the film's highly critical view of Islam, the film required a vast amount of security for public screenings. Veers had his personal website suspended for screening the film, so he enlisted LiveLeak to host the video. According to Hewitt, "half of the Netherlands logged into the site that day[…]quite literally half the country."

Shutdown

On May 5th, 2021, LiveLeak shut down after 15 years online.^[5] On that day, LiveLeak's co-founder and owner Hayden Hewitt posted^[6] an announcement about the reasons for the shutdown of the project in which xe wrote that "it was the right time to chart a new path" and announced that the LiveLeak team was switching to a new video hosting project ItemFix.

I hope some of you will enjoy ItemFix and find it useful and entertaining. It's something completely
different, completely fresh, and something we feel energized about tackling and whilst I know many of
you will be upset, possibly angry, about our decision I do hope you also understand our reasons and
appreciate that, alongside you, we have walked together through some interesting times and some crazy
ones. Sometimes it's just the right time to chart a new path.

Features

LiveLeak.com features a variety of ways to view videos. Users can log into their accounts and see videos from a variety of categories, including "News & Politics," "Must See," or by country like Ukraine and Syria.

The site also offers a "Safe More," which blocks explicit preview images and avatars. When a user turns off Safe Mode, they are given the following prompt:

"Turning the safe mode off will disable the current protection that prevents mature preview images and avatars from showing. By clicking OK you agree that you are 18 years and over and want to turn the safe mode OFF."

LiveLeak also has a section called "Yoursay," where users can upload their own videos and vlogs.

Highlights

In July 2007, British police urged sites like YouTube to remove videos of child fights.^[3] LiveLeak founder refused to remove videos. Co-founder Hayden Hewitt said at the time, "Of course it's horrible. It's not about me morally defending anything here. We have to take a stance of saying 'look all this is happening, this is real life, this is going on, we're going to show it."'

Isis Ban

On August 19th, 2014, LiveLeak hosted an uncensored version of the beheading of American journalist James Foley. Site traffic increased significantly after posting the video. On August 20th, 2014, the site had received more than three million unique visitors.

However, the site soon decided not publish anymore ISIS videos, banning the group from the site. In statement they wrote, "We've shown the world the true horror of this form of execution more than once in the past and we cannot find any compelling reason to even be thought of as promoting the actions of this group."^[4]

Search Interest

External Refrences