Shootings prompt outcry over social media
Three attackers posted on extremist site 8chan, which has remained offline
Shootings in two US cities this month that left 31 people dead and 53 wounded have set off a national outcry over the role of social media in distributing extremist content online.
The platforms’ responsibilities have been debated in the news since the Aug 3 shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, which killed 22 people, followed by an Aug 4 shooting in downtown Dayton, Ohio, in which 9 people including the shooter died.
The suspect in the El Paso case is accused of publishing an anti-immigrant “manifesto” on the web forum 8chan about 20 minutes before the attack took place.
Patrick Crusius, 21, of Allen, Texas, has been charged with capital murder in the mass shooting that left more than two dozen wounded. He is being held without bond and prosecutors are handling the attack as a case of domestic terrorism.
The White House announced on Wednesday that it will host technology companies on Friday for a discussion about the rise of violent online extremism. US President Donald Trump is scheduled to attend fundraisers in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, on Friday and isn’t expected to attend the discussion.
The deadly shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, and at a synagogue in Poway, California, on April 27, also were preceded by posts by the attackers on 8chan. 8chan is a so-called imageboard website composed of usercreated boards.
The suspect in the El Paso shooting claimed in his posted document that he was inspired by the Christchurch massacre that killed 51 people and urged the viewers to “do your part” to spread the message.
The document is rife with white supremacist language and racist hatred aimed at immigrants and Latinos. The author says he opposes “race mixing” and encourages immigrants to return to their home countries.
8chan has a history of use by extremists celebrating racist, antiSemitic and white supremacist violence. The El Paso shooting prompted the site’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, who no longer controls it, to urge its current owner to “do the world a favor and shut it off ”.
The site has remained offline since Monday after the cybersecurity company Cloudflare, which had been hosting the site, cut off services to 8chan under public pressure. The company Tucows, 8chan’s domain name registrar, also said it would no longer provide services to the site.
“We have a white nationalist terrorism problem in this country and it’s being aided and abetted by our largest technology companies,” said the activist group Sleeping Giants in a tweet.
“If you’re doing business with a site that helps people spread violent, racist ideologies, you are just as culpable. Full stop,” said the group in a tweet.
The El Paso shooting came only a few days after a shooter killed three people and injured 13 others on July 28 at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California. The FBI has opened a domestic terrorism investigation into the shooting.
The shooter, who died in the incident, didn’t have a manifesto, but had a “target list” of religious institutions, political organizations and federal buildings, said police.
The authorities believe that the dead gunman in the Dayton shooting on Aug 3 was exploring “violent ideologies” before going on a killing spree.
“There is a direct correlation between the rise of hate groups on social media and the frequent attacks,” Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center advocacy group, told USA Today newspaper.
Hankes said Twitter “does one of the worst jobs of content moderation”, calling it an “absolute cesspool” of hate.
Sleeping Giants, criticized Twitter for still allowing 8chan to have a verified account on its site. In 8chan’s Twitter profile, 8chan owner Jim Watkin addressed the sites users on Tuesday: “Sorry for the inconvenience, common sense will prevail.”
Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, said “posting to 8chan is a tactic” for attackers to gain attention.
“It draws in reporters, police and experts and ensures amplification; content can’t be removed because users have developed a culture of reposting; journalists who refer to this board or manifesto increase its reach,” said Donovan in a tweet.
The manifesto of the El Paso suspect contains instructions and a weapons kit and a call for continued violence, said Donovan. “It is meant to inspire other white supremacists,” she said.
Experts said sites like 8chan have survived in part due to reluctance of some law enforcement and intelligence officials to categorize white supremacist and far-right movements as terrorism threats.
Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI counterterrorism expert, believes that white nationalist terrorism hasn’t been taken seriously enough in the US.
“We’d try close the gap between social media signal and law enforcement response by creating publicprivate Social Media Intelligence Fusion Center that protects privacy while rapidly detecting/responding leads,” said Watts in a tweet.
He also suggested legislation to designate white supremacy as domestic terrorism, policing small platforms and mandatory background checks for firearm purchases.
“What if the elected leader of a country put the full weight of the executive branch into solving the problem? Maybe we could stop it,” he said in a tweet. But then he said it’s a “crazy idea”.
The El Paso suspect’s words such as “Hispanic invasion” and “open borders” echo the rhetoric commonly employed in Trump’s tweets. The president has recently told a group of congresswomen to “go back” where they came from in a series of tweets.
At a “social media summit” last month, Trump rallied traditional conservative think tanks, far-right internet personalities and his most ardent online supporters to air claims of anti-conservative social media bias.
“Social media has become a tool of the powerful to dominate, harass and coerce vulnerable groups. If we do not acknowledge this shift, the freest speech will benefit only those who are already powerful,” said Donovan in an article for The Washington Post last month.