Happy Nice Mall

On March 30, the young man was charged. Shooting at a Tops store in Buffalo surfed a smorgasbord of racist and antisemitic websites online. He listened to a lecture by a Finnish extremist on the decline of the American middle class on BitChute, a video sharing site known for hosting far-right extremism. He found a scary video of a car driving through Black neighborhoods in Detroit on YouTube.

Over the following week, she lingered in online post shows, hidden chat rooms on Reddit and 4chan, as well as reading race-related articles on HuffPost and Medium. She watched the local television news about the gruesome crimes. He alternated between “documentaries” on extremist websites and gun tutorials on YouTube.

young man who indicted by grand jury Last week, he was portrayed by authorities and some media outlets as a troubled vagrant acting alone when he killed 10 Black people and injured three others at the grocery store. In fact, he lived in numerous online communities where he and others consumed and shared racist and violent content.

As the number of mass shootings increases, experts say many of the disturbing ideas that fuel the brutality are no longer relegated to the dark corners of the web that are hard to find. More and more outlets, both external and mainstream, are hosting bigoted content, often in the name of free speech. And the inability or unwillingness of online services to host violent content threatens to draw more people into hateful posts.

Many images and texts of the young man’s extensive writings, including a diary and a 180-page “manifesto,” have been circulating the Internet for years. They have often infiltrated some of the most popular sites in the world, such as Reddit and Twitter. The path of radicalization illustrated in these documents exposes the limits of efforts by companies like Twitter and Google to moderate posts, images and videos promoting extremism and violence. Enough of this content can open a pipeline for users to find more edge websites just a click or two away.

“He’s pretty prolific on the internet,” said Eric K. Ward, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at the Western States Center, a research nonprofit research organization. the thing is, it starts raining profusely on a person.”

The Buffalo attack, with criticism from government officials as well as the public, renewed focus on the role social media and other websites continue to play in violent extremism.

“The fact that this act of barbarism, this execution of innocent people can be broadcast live on social media platforms and not removed in a second tells me there is a responsibility there,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul. aforementioned After the shoot in Buffalo. Four days later, state attorney general Letitia James announced that she was launching an investigation into the role played by platforms.

Facebook drew attention to its rules and policies prohibiting hateful content. A spokesperson said in a statement that the platform detected more than 96 percent of content linked to hate organizations before it was reported. Twitter declined to comment. Some social media posts on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, which The New York Times detected through reverse image search, were deleted; Some accounts sharing images have been suspended.

Payton Gendron, 18, charged with the murders, detailed his attack on Discord, a chat app that emerged in the video game world in 2015, and broadcast it live on Twitch, owned by Amazon. The company was able to remove its video within two minutes, but many of the disinformation sources it cited are online even now.

The paper trail offers a chilling look at how he concocted a deadly attack online, collecting tips on weapons and tactics, and drawing inspiration largely from other racists and previous attacks he emulated. Altogether, the content created a distorted and racist view of reality. The gunman considered the ideas an alternative to mainstream views.

“How can you avoid a hitman like me you ask?” He wrote to Discord in April, more than a month before the shoot. “The only way is to prevent them from learning the truth.”

His posts map in detail the websites that motivate him. Much of the information he gathered in his writings included links or images that he carefully selected to fit his racist views reflecting his online life.

According to his own account, the young man’s radicalization began shortly after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when he, like millions of other Americans, was largely confined to his home. He revealed that he mostly got his news from Reddit before joining the online message board 4chan. He pursued guns and the outdoors before finding someone else dedicated to politics and eventually settled in a place that allowed a toxic mix of racism and extreme disinformation.

Although he frequently visits sites such as 4chan that are known to be extreme, he has spent significant time on mainstream sites, notably YouTube, where he finds graphic scenes from police cameras and videos explaining gun tips and tricks, according to his own record. As the day of the attack drew near, the gunman watched more YouTube videos of mass shootings and police officers involved in gunfights.

YouTube said it’s reviewing all the videos that appear in the diary. Three videos removed for linking to websites that violate YouTube’s rules firearms According to YouTube spokesman Jack Malon, the policy “prohibits content intended to teach viewers how to make a firearm, manufacture accessories that convert a firearm into automatic fire, or livestream content that shows someone holding a firearm.”

Central to the filming was the mistaken belief, like those before it, that an international Jewish conspiracy aimed to replace white voters with immigrants who would gradually seize political power in America.

The roots of the conspiracy known as the “great substitution theory” date back to at least BC. Tsarist Russian antisemitic hoax It was called the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, allegedly a Jewish conspiracy to convert to Christianity in Europe.

More recently, it has resurfaced in the works of two French novelists, Jean Raspail and Renaud Camus, that imagine waves of immigrants seizing power in France forty years apart. it was Mr. CamusA socialist, a far-right populist who popularized the term “le grand replacement” in a novel in 2011.

According to the documents he published, Mr. Gendron did not seem to have read any of this; instead, he attributed the concept of “major substitution” to the gunman’s online writings. killed 51 Muslims At two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.

Following this attack, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern spearheaded an international agreement. Christchurch CallThis has seen the commitment of the government and major tech companies to eliminate terrorist and extremist content online. Although the deal has no legal enforcement, the Trump administration refused to signreferring to the principle of freedom of expression.

Mr. Gendron’s online experience is a mix of articles and video clips about the Christchurch attack. stay available to inspire other acts of racially motivated violence. He referred to both of them several times.

Anti-Defamation League warned Last year, the “great substitute” had slipped from the fringes of white supremacist beliefs into the mainstream, citing the cheers of protesters at the 2017 “Unite” rally in Charlottesville, Va. violence broke out and comments Photo by Tucker Carlson at Fox News.

“Most of us don’t know the original story,” said Mr Ward of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “What we do know is that the narrative of the narrative and the grand substitution theory has been endorsed by elected officials and personalities to such a degree that the origins of the story no longer need to be told. People are starting to understand it as if they could understand conventional wisdom. And that’s the scary thing.”

Despite all the efforts some major social media platforms have put into moderating online content, the algorithms they use – often used to show users posts to read, watch, and click on – can accelerate the spread of disinformation and other harmful content.

Media Matters for America, a liberal-leaning nonprofit, said: last month He said his researchers found at least 50 ads on Facebook in the past two years promoting the “big change” and features of related themes. Most of the ads came from candidates for political office, although the company now known as Meta announced it would ban white nationalist and white separatist content from Facebook and Instagram in 2019.

The organization’s researchers also found that 907 posts about the same themes on right-wing sites received more than 1.5 million interactions, far more than posts intended to refute them.

Although the video of Mr Gendron’s shooting was removed from Twitch, he resurfaced on 4chan while he was still at the crime scene. The video has since spread to other edge platforms like Gab and eventually to mainstream platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.

Angelo Carusone, head of Media Matters for America, said that the advent of social media within a very short period of time allowed despicable ideas and conspiracies that once simmered in relative isolation to proliferate in society and bring together people fueled by hatred.

“They are no longer isolated,” he said. “They’re connected.”