Five in the Morning — 18 December 2019

Dead feral horses are cleared from a dry creek bed in Australia’s Northern Territory. The horses starved to death because of a food scarcity being attributed to climate change. Photo: The Guardian Australia

5 in the Morning is a daily digest of interesting, relevant, and underreported news stories curated by Skylar Baker-Jordan.

A Mother’s Nightmare, Preserved Online — Huff Post

Bianca Devlin was a 17-year-old girl who was brutally murdered earlier this year. That is obviously a horrific tragedy for any family, but Bianca — and by extension her family — faced the added indignity of having photos of her murdered body posted on Instagram. Six months after Bianca was killed, her mother and friends are still receiving the gruesome photos and finding them online. It took Instagram an inexcusably long time to remove the initial photos, as they said they didn’t violate their terms of service (a position they’ve since reversed). Photos and videos of murders and gruesome killings have been posted online since the early days of the internet — in the 00s there was a debate surrounding the posting and viewing of videos showing Al Qaeda beheading people — but social media means they get more traffic than ever before and can be seen by people who aren’t specifically searching them out. Social media companies in the United States are largely protected from prosecution and civil suits over user-generated content, so its down to users to pressure them to remove such content.

Amy Klobuchar Was Late To A…