“The fact that this barbaric act, this act of executing innocent people, can be streamed live on social media platforms and not taken down within a second tells me there is a responsibility there. ,” Governor Kathy Hochul of New York speak after the shooting in Buffalo. Four days later, the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, announced that she had begun an investigation into the role of the foundations.
Facebook has outlined its rules and policies to ban content that incites hate. In a statement, a spokeswoman said the platform detects more than 96% of content related to hate organizations before it is reported. Twitter declined to comment. Several social media posts on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit that The New York Times identified through reverse image search have been removed; Some photo sharing accounts have been suspended.
The man charged in the murder, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, details his attack on Discord, a chat app that emerged from the world of video games in 2015 and goes live it’s on Twitch, which Amazon owns. The company managed to take down his video within two minutes, but many of the sources of misinformation he cited are still online even now.
His paper trail offers a chilling look at how he prepared a deadly attack online, weapon and tactical tips, and inspiration from racists and racists. previous attacks that he mostly mimicked his way. Overall, the content has formed a distorted and racist view of reality. The gunman sees these ideas as an alternative to mainstream views.
“How to stop a shooter like me, you ask?” he wrote on Discord in April, more than a month before shooting. “The only way is to prevent them from knowing the truth.”
His articles map in detail the sites that motivated him. Much of the information he has assembled in his posts involves links or images that he has chosen to align with his racist views, reflecting the online life he lives in. he lives.
According to his own account, the young man’s radicalization began not long after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when he was confined to his home like millions of other Americans. He describes getting his news primarily from Reddit before joining 4chan, the online message board. He followed topics about guns and the outdoors before finding another for politics, eventually settling in a place that allowed the dissemination of racist and harmful extremist information.
