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The U.S. government is planning to livestream the Fort Hood shooter’s execution by firing squad. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth revealed the plan on Thursday, which would revive public executions in the U.S. for the first time in 90 years.
U.S. Army major Nidal Hasan was convicted of murder after he shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, a military post in Texas, in 2009. Due to be carried out by a firing squad, Hasan’s execution will now be made available for the public to watch via livestream.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview on Thursday.
Hasan’s execution by firing squad is scheduled for Dec. 3, 1 p.m. CT / 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT at Fort Hood. If the livestream goes ahead, he will be the first person to be publicly executed in the U.S. since 1937. It will also be the first military execution since 1961.
Hasan was initially to be executed by lethal injection. However, in an X post on Monday, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell revealed that Hegseth had recommended Hasan be killed by firing squad instead, and that President Donald Trump had approved it. Hegseth stated on Thursday that this method of execution was a “no brainer” to him, and that it was “as it should be.”
YouTube, Twitch, X, TikTok: Who will livestream Hasan’s execution?
Details on exactly how Hasan’s execution will be livestreamed have not yet been released. Streaming platforms often have policies prohibiting graphic violence, which on the face of it would appear to include a firing squad execution.
Twitch’s community guidelines specifically ban users from showing “use of weapons to physically… kill others,” and warns that any accounts which do so will be suspended indefinitely. YouTube generally doesn’t allow shocking violence and gore either, including “corpses with massive injuries,” while TikTok typically prohibits content showing “the moment of someone’s death, or the shooting of an individual.”
However, YouTube states that such violent content may still be allowed if it “is in the public’s interest.” Similarly, TikTok carves out exemptions for “graphic footage of events that would otherwise violate our rules but are in the public interest to view,” though such videos are age-restricted and excluded from the For You feed.
Elon Musk‘s X is an outlier in that it allows graphic content provided it is properly labelled, not “excessively gory,” and doesn’t threaten, incite, or glorify violence. It’s unclear whether a U.S. government execution would be considered glorifying violence. X only prohibits footage of the moment a person dies if a representative of their family requests that it be taken down.
Mashable has reached out to Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, X, and the U.S. Department of War for comment.
Trump is famously a prolific and longtime user of X, many of his officials also having adopted the platform. The Trump administration is no stranger to other streaming platforms either. Last month, the U.S. government launched the 24/7 YouTube livestream “Trump TV” after it banned journalists from the White House. Earlier this year, multiple government departments launched official TikTok accounts, joining preexisting accounts belonging to the White House and Trump himself. The U.S. Army previously livestreamed esports on Twitch as well, though retreated from the platform in 2020 following criticism for its ostensible gaming giveaways that actually directed people to recruitment forms.
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