Discord had a major role in this shooters radicalization. The logs are available on KF, you won't gain anything from reading them, but I'll tell you that he'd been talking about this plan for a long time and that other individuals were extremely encouraging. There's a big difference, IMO, between watching low-budget white nationalism content on YouTube and having long, daily, hate-filled discussions with people who share your anger.
People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards and was much more active on reddit and Discord.
If Discord had "a major role" then wow - you'd put a huge burden on everyone who enables any kind of communication. All of them would have to implement a heavyhanded manual and automated censorship, with banning discussion of certain topics outright, use of machine learning to analyze sentiment... It would be the end of encryption (because if you don't combat encryption, you have a 'major role' in anything bad that happens).
Of course Discord has no responsibility in what people talk about on their system. Otherwise they should claim partial ownership on all good ideas that come out of it too.
I blame a divisive society pitting people against each other and allowing no middle ground, leading to radicalization, and the availability of guns that allow people to immediately act on their hate.
What does it mean to blame something as abstract as "a divisive society"? That's bit of a cop out, don't you think? There are real people, coming from conservative think tanks, conservative politicians, etc., that put these ideas into the shooter's head and allow guns to be so available. Lay the blame there.
The "divisive society" is a cop out insofar as it doesn't lead to a simple solution. But it is the ultimate problem in our society preventing any kind of progress.
We used to have a neutral ground of, say, a respected newspaper or TV show which had the ability to reign in radicalization, and would present issues by weighing both sides in a fair and representative way. This does no longer exist. It's us-vs-them, the other side is evil. Additionally our competitive society has no issue with creating and vilifying classes of losers and accepts a growing divide between rich and poor.
There you have your shooters. There you have Trump 2024 or who else comes along (what kind of politician can only thrive in this climate?)
My solution? I'd recommend everyone to smoke or drink some of your favorite drug or play some peaceful music and meditate over why the other side from your perspective is human, and what valid arguments they could have, or what made them think the way they do.
> We used to have a neutral ground of, say, a respected newspaper or TV show which had the ability to reign in radicalization, and would present issues by weighing both sides in a fair and representative way.
No, we didn't.
We used to have oligopolistic media with a fairly uniform set of biases and actively-pursued agendas across all outlets. Even farther back, media was more diverse and often hyperlocal, but still not “fair and representative”.
It wasn’t perfect but you're far too quick to reject the point about radicalization. Mass media had to be, well, mass and that meant that there was more of a centrist bias because advertisers didn’t want to be associated with fringe viewpoints. Before personalized advertising, if you sponsored something objectionable everyone knew it – quite different from where nobody sees the same ads and they can usually blame the marketplace for placements which attract criticism.
That doesn’t mean it was perfect but it absolutely did temper things a lot - they had to setup their own network to host a voice like Carlson for a larger national audience than Stormfront.
The U.S. also had a legal requirement to fairly present multiple sides of an issue until Republicans removed it in 1987. It is probably not a coincidence that this was around the same time that a handful or very wealthy people started pouring money into building highly-partisan networks.
Similarly in Germany we used to have only had 3 state TV channels, ultimately controlled by the ruling parties. Thinking about it now, I'm sure it was quite biased in all kinds of ways. And yet, people got their vaccinations without rioting.
This is false equivalence when you see conservatives, via, among other avenues, the biggest cable news network, pushing, for example, white replacement theory and other bits of society are not.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I don't think there's a double standard. People often jump to that conclusion after they see a few data points they dislike, but this is fraught with bias because data points you dislike stand out more.
Howe many people need to complain about double standard being in the same general direction (i.e. the ban hammer coming down much faster on anyone arguing against whatever the majority opinion is here) before it becomes enough data points to matter?
Well, it depends on what you mean. If you mean how many data points before we care—we already care. That's why I take the time to respond to these things.
If you mean how many data points before we change our mind—it's not a numeric function. I know how we do things and why, and I know that there isn't that kind of double standard.
It was 100% clear the Buffalo shooter verbatim quoted extremist conservative ideas and racism, even plagiarized another shooter's manifesto.
> put ideas into the Antioch shooters head, the Waukesha drivers head, the NYC Subway shooters head
I didn't follow those incidents - can you provide links/evidence that there were left/progressive political motivations in those acts? Or is this more so the same notion that McDonald's put ideas about food in the NYC subway shooters head?
I've been reading about similar incidents to compare media coverage with Buffalo, so I can share some of the links you asked for:
> [Accused NYC subway shooter Frank] James posted material on social media linked to black identity extremist ideologies, including the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army, BLM and an image of black nationalist cop-killer Micah Johnson [who killed five police officers in Dallas in 2016].
> [Accused Waukesha parade killer Darrell Brooks shared] numerous posts attacking cops, comparing them to Ku Klux Klan members and calling them “violent street gangs” — as well as calling for violence toward white people, according to screenshots.
> There are also real people, coming from progressive think tanks, progressive politicans, etc.,
> material on social media linked to black identity extremist ideologies, including the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army, BLM, Micah Johnson
Is there even one example of quote A dog whistling violence related to quote B? This sounds a lot like "This politician wanted milquetoast police reform, therefore is causing violent extremist black nationalism."
It looks like a desperate reach for an equivalency that isn't there.
> This sounds a lot like "This politician wanted milquetoast police reform, therefore is causing violent extremist black nationalism."
In much the same way that politicians wanting "milquetoast" restrictions on immigration are being accused of "dog whistling violence" in Buffalo.
A reasonable person can see that progressive politicians who support BLM aren't calling for violence against police. A reasonable person can also see that conservatives who call for immigration restrictions aren't calling for attacks like Buffalo.
You understand that "Black extremist ideologies" is a different thing from "progressive", right?
Also, what you post about Waukesha driver has no connection to their motivation in the killings, and what you quoted, again, has nothing to do with progressive politics.
And Tucker Carlson has never called for violence against black people.
I shared those links because sometimes it's easier to see how the media uses tragedy to demonize a political position when you see a different political position being attacked, perhaps one you support.
> talking points repeatedly brought up on his show were directly brought up in the Buffalo shooter's manifesto.
And talking points repeatedly brought up by BLM were directly brought up by other attackers. So what?
> "The media" is not a monolith.
No, but most media outlets do use the same techniques, whatever their stance or affiliation.
> That appears to be a tactic of low quality outlets like the NY Post.
The NY Post has broken news that most outlets you might call "higher quality" denied for months before finally admitting they were true. Might I suggest reading a variety of sources, including some you disagree with?
And if you think, say, the NY Times doesn't engage in these tactics, read some of their recent coverage of Tucker Carlson.
Edit: This was interesting, but HN isn't the appropriate place for long back and forth debates. You can have the last word.
Again, the Buffalo shooter didn't merely "bring up" white replacement theory some time in their life; they said this implicitly violent ideology was their motivation for murder.
There are also real people, coming from progressive think tanks, progressive politicans, etc., that put ideas into the Antioch shooters head, the Waukesha drivers head, the NYC Subway shooters head.
> People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards
From the shooter's diary:
> "I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior," he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people.
That’s a good point. I’m assuming he’s off his rocker because he killed 10 people. He doesn’t seem to be acting rationally in the sense that having such deep-seated racism as to plan and execute a mass killing is insane in and of itself. So anything he says is not trustworthy.
But I guess he is very different insane than the Son of Sam guy who thought God spoke to him.
Good point, but it's not like there's a diagnostic definition of "crazy" anyway. Replace that language with "deluded, ignorant, and sociopathic" and the statement you replied to makes more sense.
> Replace that language with "deluded, ignorant, and sociopathic"
I really wouldn't call him any of those terms, he simply has a completely different "tribe," value system, and morality than yours.
To simply throw some high-brow insults at him and walk-off is intellectually lazy, and blinds you to someone becoming what Buffalo boy became.
I live down the street from a pre-Revolutionary fort, a real facet of the settlers lives was dealing with Indian raids. They would sneak in and, under cover of darkness, kill as many as they could. This attack, ultimately, makes me think of a modern raid.
>Indigenous groups breaking into the forts of literal colonialists, for whom racism was a matter of religious doctrine, to try to force them away before they perpetrate another massacre
>A white supremacist walks into a public space and shoots the descendants of people brought to this country in bondage by, get this, the aforementioned colonialists
The situations seems somewhat different. Less a modern raid than a modern massacre.
Don’t you have to be at least a little bit more detached from reality than the median person (“crazy”) to shoot up a supermarket?
I don’t think crazy in a blank check to get away with whatever you want, you can definitely make yourself crazy in entirely foreseeable and avoidable ways that are your responsibility. This can still render you unreliable when it comes to your own motivations.
> Don’t you have to be at least a little bit more detached from reality than the median person (“crazy”) to shoot up a supermarket?
I would say, "yes," but this is crazy in some type of modern-day social sense of the term. If we're to consider the long, rich history of human violence it looks a bit pedestrian.
He's not a member of your tribe, your tribe attacks his tribe, he attacks yours.
He played by an older, darker, less civilized rule-book.
So he's not "seeing things schizo crazy" and so in some sense, no, he is not crazy.
I take your point. I think I was just reacting to various flavors of “he’s not crazy” as having a potentially normalizing effect but that may not be what was intended, or what other readers focused on.
The perpetrator in events like this is almost always written off as "crazy." Often the purpose of that is to dismiss the premise that any systemic factors may have been at play. If he was just some random loon, there's no need for the society that created him to examine itself, much less attempt to resolve its own issues.
This is what a lot of people are afraid of in the US, because these shootings exist at the nexus of first and second amendment rights. The first allows people like the shooter to be radicalized using the most powerful communication platforms ever created. The second allows them to be armed to the teeth. And then there is the systemic, deeply rooted racism in American culture that feeds the hatred behind these events, and intersects with the US Constitution, government and society in numerous ways the country still isn't capable of discussing rationally.
So "he was just crazy" starts to sound like "nothing to see here" after a while. Because if it's true, it's weird that so many people seem to be crazy in the same way. If they aren't crazy then there is a pipeline of radicalization and violence - an "extremist industrial complex" if you will - that's working as intended to maintain its own status quo... and a lot of Americans are fine with that.
I find virtually all mainstream discourse around mass-casualty attacks to be either normalizing or to just simply sweep the issue under the rug and ignore it.
There is no deep discussion on the topics, just further fiddling.
That's exactly what I said, no? The top of the pipeline. Millions and millions of people from all over the world browse 4chan. The number of people who sit in Discord chats actively discussing plans for how to efficiently kill others is much, much lower. That's what I'm getting at.
He was also sporting the same black sun as the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, so considering the timing should we blame Ukraine as well? I mean all we've been hearing in media is how they're hero's and this guy was wearing their same insignia..
> There's a big difference, IMO, between watching low-budget white nationalism content on YouTube and having long, daily, hate-filled discussions with people who share your anger.
But what is the actual end-goal here, have a "probe" and say "we did what we could" as did the NY police when they investigated and passed over the Buffalo shooter for his prior threats?
Oh I have no idea. I expect very little productive to come of this investigation. I think the only main point I'm trying to make here is that the true radicalization often happens in private, which sadly makes it all the more difficult to disinfect.
And out trots another case of certain interests looking for excuses to censor, prohibit, "regulate", control and generally blame tools that tend to be used for individual expression because of their supposed role in making a violently mentally unstable person do or discuss things that normal people wouldn't normally do regardless of what they read, wrote or saw.
Doesn't at all remind me of every previous case of certain books, video games, publishing tools and communication technologies being blamed in the name of "safety" as an excuse to clamp down.
Remember how E2E encryption is a "terribly dangerous" thing because it protects pedophiles? Yeah....
He had a history, he threatened a school but nothing was done. Seems like they are trying to point fingers when really we have a serious issue with treating mental illness and mental health. No one wishes to address the elephant in the room.
Mentally fit people also commit hate crimes and participate in white supremacy. Jumping to this betrays unwillingness to deal with three issues:
[1] Mental illness != immediate danger to people's lives
[2] Easy access to guns and ammo lowers the cost to perform mass shootings. Incendiary devices require special knowledge, knives make people's arms tired before "mass stabbing" threshold is reached, automobiles are typically blocked from driving into a store without damaging the vehicle before mass killing is achieved
[3] White supremacy is thriving in certain corners of the internet. Discontent in the marketplace of ideas because only losers adopt it, it lives in protected corners.
I consider your jumping to mental illness as a cause instead of a correlated factor as misguided given the three bullets above.
Point #2 is bullshit, there have been many mass stabbing events. Knife crime in general is also a problem. Same thing with vehicular killings. There are a number of high profile cases that have been in the news.
Point #2 you _consider_ bullshit, but are mistaken. It is a lot easier to pull a trigger than to stab. Murder still occurs, but at a much lower count per incident. The causal model holds: if you want lower mass shootings, restrict access to guns and ammo.
These are high profile because they are rare to accomplish relative to mass shootings.
The Buffalo shooter himself explicitly called out in his manifesto how much easier this act was to carry out due to his access to semiautomatic firearms.
You're just pointing fingers in a different direction. As it turns out, this is a complicated issue, with multiple contributing factors, and just because we're talking about one doesn't mean another factor isn't important (though in this case there isn't any indication of serious mental illness, and that is a very common scapegoat in situations like this)
I think his point is that the guy was already on the cop's radar as potentially being up to no good yet nothing was done. Law enforcement dropping the ball seems like a common fact pattern in these kinds of things. I get that you can't just imprison or otherwise institutionalize people without some offense being committed but there's got to be a better way than just ignoring it until they go postal.
> Seems like purely a stunt. What plausible legal violation could there have been?
The kind of referral from the Governor's office is not a criminal referral but more of a policy referral; while there are some kinds of legal liability that might be involved, that's not really even superficially the point of the referral and the legal authority under which it was made: understanding issues contributing to a public safety problem is.
The AG is, yes, the top prosecutorial authority of the state, but that isn't the whole of their role.
> If you want to and a company indirectly involved wouldn’t the gun manufacturer be more liable?
Probably not; there is probably far less evidence that the gun manufacturer knew, or should reasonably have known, about the specific act it was contributing to.
Sure, fair enough. I'm extremely skeptical of a legislative solution here too.
> Probably not; there is probably far less evidence that the gun manufacturer knew...
What acts do you think civilians use an AR-15 style rifle for? What percentage of AR-15 holders shoot a person versus the percentage of social media users?
It looks like the law allows the governor to ask the AG to investigate matters of public interest related to public safety. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a violation of the law.
“…New York Executive Law Section 63(8), which permits the attorney general to investigate matters concerning public peace, public safety, and public justice and to subpoena witnesses and compel the production of documents.”
What is the point of this arbitrary comparison? Yes, there are more automotive deaths than mass shooting deaths, so what? Are you trying to say mass shootings are no big deal because car accidents kill more people or do you have some kind of principled stance against government investigations?
> Government always uses emotional tragedies to grab authoritarian power
Is that what you think is happening here? If so, could you please elaborate on why you think this?
* "We should better monitor these sites" might be an entirely valid conclusion.*
No, we should not have to monitor sites for the minuscule chance that a psychopath is planning a mass shooting. Senators are already pushing this type of surveillance on social media, it's a matter of time before this type of surveillance is used against thought crimes, and people that don't agree with the establishment.
To be fair, there are already a lot of regulations about who can drive a car (on public roads) and which sorts of cars can be used.
Be careful that you're not inadvertently asking for social media to be regulated more like cars.
Fortunately, however, there are plenty of countries that have fewer mass shootings and arguably better protection of civil liberties than the US, so they might provide some inspiration.
> How many people die from mass shootings per year? Now compare that to the number of people that die in car accidents.
I mean, to take my car out in public, I'm required to have a license, registration, inspection, various safety devices, and follow a variety of usage rules.
You can still buy or build a car without any of that for use on your own property or other private places that allow it, but there's no practical barrier to you taking it out on public roads other than the risk of being pulled over and ticketed.
Yes, but there are still over 40,000 deaths per year in car accidents in the US alone. If car accident deaths had the same emotional reaction as mass shootings, people would demand the government setup checkpoints at every intersection to "better monitor the drivers"
All of that came out of law enforcement whining that cars made pursuits and catching criminals too difficult back in the day, turning one of the most fundamental freedoms, (freedom to locomote) into a government gated privilege. Laying the foundation for an eventual effective surveillance state.
Unless "do whatever you want on private property and do a pretty wide range of things in public with a trivially easy to get license" is your policy goal you probably don't want to bring up the car comparison.
We already generally subject firearms stuff to licensing if you want to have your armaments with you in public. Some states have basically none. Some states have onerous regulation. We'll split the difference.
Across the whole nation we have a fairly substantial set of restrictions on what you can and can't own, regardless of whether or not you only ever use it on private property (there are no such restrictions for cars).
So the net effect would be mostly no change in public and a massive net loosening of restrictions in private.
Personally I'm fine with this. But I think you'll probably be clamoring to have the status qou back as soon as your local extremists start posting youtube videos of 14yos firing mortars at their summer BBQ.
Huh? I can't even tell if you're arguing for the rights of gun owners or the rights of social media companies or the rights of citizens to say questionable things online.
But if your argument hinges on "mass shootings aren't a big deal" than let's agree to disagree.
Another valid outcome might be writing laws which hold social media companies liable for civil penalties for not properly moderating their platforms when events like this happen.
If Section 230 [0] were repealed (which is what those laws would do), I can't imagine any website would allow user-generated content without (a) requiring a lawyer's approval of every submission before hosting it, and (b) buying expensive insurance to pay for litigation. It's unlikely we'd still have hobby chat forums, HN, or GitHub.
Also, check out the cases where Section 230 has been used [1]. Without it, sites would have to prevent defamation (i.e., they need to know whether any content is untrue). Libraries would not provide computers connected to the internet.
Repealing Section 230 is a "common sense" proposal that falls apart when considering the actual results. If there's a good proposal for a replacement, I haven't seen it.
In your example, Toyota didn't host and ignore/hardly moderate content on a social media platform used to plan a racially motivated attack which could also be considered a domestic terrorist act. Toyota manufactured a truck. Your analogy would be like holding the keyboard manufacturer that the perpetrator used to type hateful things onto various social media sites.
I make the point not to be sarcastic but to note that there really are paradoxes and nuances within the concept of free speech. Trying to establish hard bound rules is more likely to lead to abuse then an honest discussion that acknowledges ambiguity.
So like a legally mandated takedown procedure for speech? Or you mean Discord should have employees individually review each message before it's transmitted?
1. The companies that run these giant platforms know about the problems they cause
2. Those companies are hiding data about the problem
3. Those companies are doing nothing to fix the situation
4. Those companies are actually doing everything they can to make the situation worse
Even worse than oil companies and lead in gasoline, these companies absolutely rely on generating hate, because that generates clicks/doomscrolling which brings them revenue. So they will continue to do nothing about this problem until they are forced to. The tool to force them to do this is government.
We absolutely should investigate the full extent of everything and potentially even find further criminals who may have incited or made the situation worse with criminal conspiracy can be caught and charged as well.
I very much doubt they are going to find discord or reddit were conspiring or involved. No punishments are due for social media but other users on social media could absolutely have been criminal.
Ok, sorry, I'm italian, here we don't have an "Attorney General", so I was doubtful if was better write "NY" or "General", both weren't fit in the characters limit.
Not sure the system is the same in Italy. In the US, states and the Federal Government have an "Attorney General" who lead state legal enforcement, like lawsuits, defending the state, or prosecuting violators of state law. If you've ever seen Law and Order (not sure if popular overseas) it's like the city's District Attorney.
> If New York City were all White, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent. In an all-White Chicago, murder would decline 90 percent, rape by 81 percent, and robbery by 90 percent.
This is way outside the extrapolation region and strongly asserts an unsupported hypothesis. What if it isn't the person's race that causes these reported and tabulated crimes (versus those unreported or let go)? What if it is poverty, intergenerational stress, and systemic differential treatment that drives people to commit crime?
"poverty, intergenerational stress, and systemic differential treatment"
None of those terms, nor their arbitrary meanings, account for people who are in a similar financial or socio-economic situation, and yet don't commit car-jackings, rape, robbery, white collar crime, or shootings. Neither does it account for people in the exact same socio-economic situation moving up and thriving instead of victimizing families in their communities.
"intergenerational stress"
What exactly does this mean in the context of one's behavior?
That the car-jacker who murdered a mother and her baby in order to escape prison bares a reduced responsibility for the crime? That at some point 200 to 10,000 years ago, some ill that befell someone with a similar skin color somehow absolves them of responsibility, or lessens the magnitude of their atrocity?
Crime, like racism, isn't limited to just one race. I never implied otherwise.
It is never the race that causes people to commit crime. Crime occurs in all races, globally.
And in ever single case, it is the individual's choice to commit crime.
What happened to their great-great-grandfather is irrelevant.
> Crime, like racism, isn't limited to just one race. I never implied otherwise.
Yes, you did when you said replace all people with white people and crime rate craters. Perhaps unintentionally, this plays both sides of the fence.
> And in ever single case, it is the individual's choice to commit crime.
Indeed. White collar crime rarely goes punished, however. And some crimes are made to target groups -- consider Nixon's to the present's war on drugs, which implicitly targets minorities. If a father is incarcerated for minor marijuana use for years, and the CEO down the street who embezzled gets months at Club Fed, they both "serve their time" however injust it may be implemented but the lost time with their children is irrecoverable -- and that is why it matters what happened to your great- great- grandpa, is society pushed them into the poverty cycle and reinforced it with Jim Crow to current inequitable laws.
People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards and was much more active on reddit and Discord.