On March 30, a young man accused of shooting at Buffalo’s top grocery store surfed the smoke board on racist and anti-Semitic websites online. At BitChute, a video-sharing site known for hosting right-wing extremists, he heard a talk about the decline of the American middle class by Finnish extremists. He found a funny video on YouTube about a car driving through the black district of Detroit.
For the next week, at his online writing show, he stayed in Reddit and 4chan’s chat room, but also read articles about the HuffPost and Medium races. He saw local television news coverage of a horrific crime. He switched between a “documentary” on the radical website and a YouTube gun tutorial.
A young man charged by a grand jury last week killed 10 blacks in a grocery store and acted alone when injuring three more, by authorities and some media outlets as troubled exiles. It was portrayed. In fact, he lived in many online communities, where he and others consumed and shared racist and violent content.
As the number of mass shootings grows, experts say that many of the disturbing ideas that fuel atrocities are no longer driven into some hard-to-find dark corners of the web. More and more outlets are hosting biased content, both in the fringe and in the mainstream, in the name of free speech. Also, the inability or undesiredness of online services to contain violent content can attract more people to hateful posts.
Many images and texts that the young man had in his extensive writings, including his diary and 180-page “manifest,” have been distributed online for years. Often, they are breaking into some of the world’s most popular sites, such as Reddit and Twitter. His path to radicalization, shown in these documents, reveals the limits of efforts by companies such as Twitter and Google to mitigate posts, images, and videos that encourage radicalism and violence. That content is so good that users can open a pipeline to find more extreme websites with just one or two clicks.
“”It’s very prolific on the Internet, “said Eric K. Ward, Senior Fellow of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Managing Director of the Western States Center, a non-profit research institute. “It doesn’t just fall on your lap. You have to start looking for it. But when you start looking for it, the problem is that it starts to rain on people who are rich in it.”
The Buffalo attack refocuses on the role that social media and other websites continue to play in violent acts of extremism, and has been criticized not only by government officials but also by the general public.
“This barbaric act, the fact that this innocent human execution is livestreamed on social media platforms and may not be deleted within a second, tells me that it is responsible.” Governor Kathy Hokul of New York Said After shooting in Buffalo. Four days later, the Attorney General of the State, Letitia James, announced that it had begun investigating the role played by the platform.
Facebook has pointed out rules and policies that prohibit offensive content. In a statement, a spokeswoman said the platform would detect more than 96 percent of content related to hatred organizations before it was reported. Twitter declined to comment. Some of the Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit social media posts identified by the New York Times in reverse image search have been removed. Some of the accounts sharing images have been suspended.
Payton Gendron, 18, accused of murder, details an attack on Discord, a chat app that emerged from the video game world in 2015, and livestreamed it on Amazon-owned Twitch. .. The company was able to remove his video within two minutes, but many of the sources of disinformation he quoted are still online.
His paper trails culled tips on weapons and tactics on how he prepared a deadly assault online, and were inspired by fellow racists and previous attacks he predominantly imitated himself. You can get a glimpse of how you got the ration. Overall, the content has formed a twisted and racist view of reality. Gunman thought the idea was an alternative to the mainstream view.
“How do you prevent a shooter like me asking?” He wrote about Discord in April, more than a month before the shooting. “The only way is to prevent them from learning the truth.”
His writing details the website that motivated him. Much of the information he compiled in his writing contained links or images that were cherry-picked to match the views of racists, reflecting the type of online life he lived in.
According to his own explanation, the radicalization of the young man began shortly after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic when he was largely restricted to his home, like millions of other Americans. rice field. He explained that he got the news primarily from Reddit before joining the online message board 4chan. Before finding another person to devote himself to politics, he followed the topic of guns and the outdoors and eventually settled in a place that allowed a toxic melange of racist and disinformation disinformation. did.
He frequently visited sites like 4chan, known to be in Fringe, but on his own records, especially YouTube, explain graphic scenes from police cameras and gun tips and tricks. I also spent a lot of time on the mainstream sites where I found the video. As the day of the attack approached, I watched more YouTube videos about the shootings and the police officers involved in the shootings.
YouTube said it has reviewed all the videos that appear in the diary. Three videos have been removed because they are linking to a website that violates YouTube Firearm According to YouTube spokesman Jack Maron, “tell viewers how to make firearms, how to make accessories that convert firearms to automatic firearms, or livestreaming content that shows who handles firearms. The policy of “prohibiting content for the purpose of doing so”.
At the heart of the shooting was the false belief that, like everyone else before, an international Jewish conspiracy was trying to replace white voters with immigrants.
The plot, known as the “Great Alternative Theory,” has its roots in at least the Russian anti-Semitic hoax called the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which claims to be a Jewish plot to overtake Christianity in Europe. I am.
It has recently resurfaced 40 years away with the work of two French novelists Jean Raspail and Renault Camu, who imagined a wave of immigrants in power in France. In 2011, it was Mr. Camu, who turned from a socialist to a far-right populist, who spread the term “Le Grand Replacement” in a novel of that name.
Gendron didn’t seem to read any of them, according to the document he posted. Instead, he attributed the concept of a “great alternative” to an online writing posted by a shooter who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.
After the attack, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern led an international agreement called Christchurch Cole, promising that the government and major tech companies would eliminate terrorist and extremist content online. There were no legal penalties for the agreement, but the Trump administration refused to sign because of the principle of free speech.
Gendron’s online experience shows that texts and video clips related to Christchurch shooting continue to be available to stimulate other acts of racially motivated violence. .. He mentioned both repeatedly.
Defamation Prevention League warning Last year, “great substitutes” moved from around the white supremacist beliefs to the mainstream, chanting protesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Point to violence Commentary Tucker Carlson’s Fox News.
“Most of us don’t know the original story,” said Ward of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “What we know is a story, and the story of the Great Replacement Theory is so proven by elected officials and personalities that it is no longer necessary to tell the origin of the story. As you understand, you’re starting to understand it, and that’s scary. “
For every effort made by some major social media platforms to moderate content online, the algorithms they use (often posts that users read, view, or click). (Aimed to be displayed) may accelerate the spread of disinformation and other harmful content
Media Matters for America, a liberal non-profit organization, said: last month The researcher has found at least 50 ads on Facebook over the last two years and confirmed that they are promoting aspects of the theme related to “The Great Replacement.” Much of the ads come from politician candidates, even though the company now known as Meta announced in 2019 that it would ban white supremacist and white separatist content from Facebook and Instagram. did.
Researchers at the organization also found that 907 posts on the same subject on the right-wing site elicited far more 1.5 million engagements than posts aimed at blaming them.
Gendron’s footage has been removed from Twitch, but reappeared on 4chan while he was still at the crime scene. Later, the video spread to other fringe platforms like Gab, and eventually to mainstream platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said that with the advent of social media, the advent of social media brought together people who were once relatively isolated, boiled down and spread throughout society, and were energized by hatred. Ideas and plots are now possible.
“They are no longer isolated,” he said. “They are connected.”
