On the chatroom app Discord, the gunman behind the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, detailed his violent plans up until just days before he carried them out. Why did the platform’s tools to root out hateful ideologies fail?
at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, last weekend, killing ten people and wounding three more, he spent many months developing his hate crime on the Internet. Logs from a weapons-focussed group called Plate Land on the social platform Discord, collected by the media nonprofit Unicorn Riot, reveal that he had been discussing the efficacy of body armor. “Wouldnt it hurt a lot being shot with any type of bulelt with armor on,” he wrote under the username Jimboboii, in early 2021.
Gendron, who was indicted by a grand jury on Thursday for first-degree murder, was hardly the first mass shooter to make use of a disturbing kit of Web sites and apps to plan, execute, and document an attack. The Christchurch killer, in 2019, also live-streamed his rampage, on Facebook, for as long as seventeen minutes. A German mass shooter the same year used Twitch to broadcast his attack outside a synagogue; it was seen by more than two thousand people on the platform.
As others have pointed out in recent days, “lone wolf” is something of a misnomer for right-wing terrorists whose ideas and methods are being explicitly nurtured through online communities. Such extremists don’t become radicalized solely by perusing the automated algorithmic feeds that the rest of us see on Facebook or YouTube. They seek out forums for those who have similar views, follow charismatic voices, and egg one another on.
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