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Crime

Gunman Livestreams Killing of 10 On Twitch - After Radicalization On 4chan (nbcnews.com) 481

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: 10 people were killed in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York this afternoon — and three more were injured — by a gunman who livestreamed the massacre on Twitch. "A Twitch spokesperson said the platform has investigated and confirmed that the stream was removed 'less than two minutes after the violence started,'" reports NBC News.

The Raw Story reports that the 18-year-old suspected gunman had also apparently posted a 106-page manifesto online prior to the attack. A researcher at George Washington University program on extremism studied the manifesto, and points out that the suspected shooter "states that he was radicalized online on 4chan and was inspired by Brenton Tarrant's manifesto and livestreamed mass shooting in New Zealand."

The suspect reportedly used an assault rifle.

Less than two weeks ago, Slashdot posted the following:

28-year-old Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in New Zealand in 2019. The Associated Press reports that at that point he'd been reading 4chan for 14 years, according to his mother — since the age of 14.

The year before, 25-year-old Alek Minassian, who killed 11 people in Toronto in 2018, namechecked 4chan in a pre-attack Facebook post.

But the Guardian now adds another a story from nine days ago — when a 23-year-old shooter with 1,000 rounds of ammunition opened fire from his apartment in Washington D.C. "Just two minutes after the shooting began, someone under the username "Raymond Spencer" logged onto the normally-anonymous 4chan and started a new thread titled 'shool [sic] shooting'. The newly published message contained a link — to a 30-second video of images captured from the digital scope of Spencer's rifle...."

NBC News reported that while Saturday's suspected shooter was livestreaming, "Some users of the website 4chan discussed the attack, and at least one archived the video in real-time, releasing photos of dead civilians inside the supermarket over the course of Saturday afternoon."
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Gunman Livestreams Killing of 10 On Twitch - After Radicalization On 4chan

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  • by zendarva ( 8340223 ) on Saturday May 14, 2022 @10:54PM (#62534336)
    Which is just.. the stupidest sentence I've typed in recent memory. Still better than the people already trying to claim false flag.
  • 4chan the issue? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Saturday May 14, 2022 @11:07PM (#62534354)

    He self identifies as a white supremacist fascist with Neo-Nazi beliefs who is anti "high fertility immigrants" under the white replacement theory

    Yeah, that shit runs rampant on 4chan, but this shit isn't new. I remember IRC rooms that would have people spouting this shit. It really seems that people want to hammer down on 4chan, but reality, if not there it would be somewhere else. The problem isn't 4chan, it's the lack of upbringing.

    The Raw Story reports that the 18-year-old suspected gunman

    Yeah, this shit didn't happen overnight. This is some kid who's parents didn't tell them that people on the Internet love to make shit up to get a rise out of you. Who didn't watch their time on the Internet.

    28-year-old Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in New Zealand in 2019. The Associated Press reports that at that point he'd been reading 4chan for 14 years, according to his mother — since the age of 14.

    Oh look, there's a pattern here. More parents not watching their kids on the Internet, not teaching them basics about how you should take shit on the Internet with a grain of sand. This isn't a 4chan or even an Internet issue. This is a parents letting their kids do fuck all and wondering why they're so easily corruptible. This is a society issue of people just fucking checking out of life, having kids they don't want, and the two of those things put together.

    • Re:4chan the issue? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by blackomegax ( 807080 ) on Saturday May 14, 2022 @11:12PM (#62534364) Journal
      I was basically raised by 4chan and turned out fine. That was back in its based days of taking down the church of Scientology and shit though, before the nazis came in.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Likewise.

        And the White Nationalist cadre was a joke. Use to post picks of white girls getting railed to get a rise out of them, and otherwise scoff at their conclusions. They were one of many voices there.

        And honestly, if not White Nationalism, it would have been something else. There's a lot of unease out there. Mix that with hormones and adolescence and you have a potent mix to do dumb, violent things (ask the Khmer Rouge).

      • Re:4chan the issue? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:33AM (#62534894) Homepage Journal

        The Nazis saw 4chan as a gateway to their ideology. Lots of young, angry guys, easily influenced by memes and sophistic arguments. Frame it all as being awake to what is really happening (woke, you might say), not like all the other sheeple.

        There are leaked emails from people like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos where they discuss exactly how it works. If you were not pulled down the rabbit hole then consider yourself lucky.

        https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]

        • The Nazis saw 4chan as a gateway to their ideology. Lots of young, angry guys, easily influenced by memes and sophistic arguments. Frame it all as being awake to what is really happening (woke, you might say), not like all the other sheeple.

          After the Eternal September brought Internet access to the masses, it seems as the Eternal 4chan has brought widespread trolling and misinformation.

          I'm still hopeful that some new development will bring us some kind of Eternal Wikipedia so that, even with its many flaws, the end result of people battling for dominance will be some kind of distilled and structured knowledge, instead of chaos and deception.

    • Clearly a lack of proper parenting was involved.

      having kids they don't want

      Shit's about to get real regarding that, too.

    • by quenda ( 644621 )

      He self identifies as a white supremacist fascist with Neo-Nazi beliefs who is anti "high fertility immigrants" under the white replacement theory

      That doesn't explain why he shot blacks. They have almost as low a fertility rate in the US as whites.

      We had that Norwegian shooter some years back , who was on par with Bin Laden as an evil genius (though far less dangerous as he acted alone), and since then just copycat morons like the Christchurch nutter, and now the NY one.

      I worry that these few nutjobs will distract public attention from the far bigger problem of handguns in America.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        > distract public attention from the far bigger problem of handguns in America

        That debate ended, died and was buried with the massacred kindergarteners at Sandy Hook.

        Your best bet at avoiding gun violence in the US is to not own one and to minimize the time you spend in crowded areas. That's about it for the options available to the average citizen at this point. Pursuing any kind of effective reduction in gun access will continue to miserably fail.

        Somehow, 'gun rights' became attached at the
    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @03:02AM (#62534700)

      I remember IRC rooms that would have people spouting this shit.

      You remember a past where the geekiest of geeks downloaded an IRC client and sought out specific chat rooms.
      The present is a world where Qanon conspiracy bullshit is plastered on every news site which everyone knows about, and every weak minded moron can just type www.4chan.org into a browser.

      There's a massive difference in scale.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It wasn't just 4chan. The Great Replacement conspiracy theory (the idea that immigrants are going to replace white people by out-breeding them in Europe and the US) was been promoted by many right wing commentators. Famously Lauren Southern made a video about it on YouTube, which was set to private after the Christchurch terrorist cited it in his manifesto.

      It's an example of stochastic terrorism. No one individual can be said to have radicalized this guy, and there is no suggestion that they cooperated or p

    • by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @06:31AM (#62535006)

      Yeah, that shit runs rampant on 4chan, but this shit isn't new.

      Tucker Carlson basically spews this shit every night on Fox News, and nobody seems to care.

    • I don't go to 4chan and never plan to do so, so I'm asking from a perspective of naivete:

      If 4chan were to go away, would anything of value to humanity really be lost?

  • Forget 4chan (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday May 14, 2022 @11:14PM (#62534366)
    the points in his manifesto have been all over Tucker Carlson's show for years, and have cropped up on Joe Rogan's show a few times even (without all that much push back, I might add).

    It's called "Great Replacement" theory, and it's all over, with a ton of people working full time to mainstream it. They're not even dog whistling anymore, so it's no surprise we've got stochastic terrorists acting on it now.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by t.reagan ( 7420066 )

      Here's a thread on replacement theory history if interested

      https://twitter.com/MsEntropy/... [twitter.com]

    • Re:Forget 4chan (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Saturday May 14, 2022 @11:28PM (#62534386)

      Its the worring thing for me. Traditionally far right extremists tended to be split between Neo-Nazis (think nazi skinheads and uniform loving heil-hitler type meatheads) and Nativists (think KKK, David Duke, etc), but we're seeing a new form that eschews the nazi and klansman trappings and claims itself to just be "conservatives" , as if Reagan would have ever put up with these clowns. Now this isn't to say conservatives in general agree, but malicious actors, some at the state and media level, have been quite intentionally blurring the boundaries hoping to smuggle some of the far rights more extreme ideas into the mainstream conversation and this should be alarming to everyone because frankly its kind of working.

      • Reagan is a leftist compared to the modern day party. Imagine a republican today saying he wants amnesty for people in the country illegally. Reagan said that in 1984. See my signature for another great point.

        What would the headlines be if BLM did an open carry protest in Texas?

        • Google Mulford is a weird name.

        • Reagan is a leftist compared to the modern day party. Imagine a republican today saying he wants amnesty for people in the country illegally. Reagan said that in 1984. See my signature for another great point.

          Reagan wanted Republicans to have good odds of winning Florida in the future, and converting illegal Cuban immigrants to citizens was the easiest way to do so.

      • The Southern Strategy goes back to the 60s, and it was a big party of the post Goldwater Republican party's strategy. Look into Nixon's drug war for a start and how it targets minority communities.

        OTOH Reagan didn't actively promote the white supremacists the way the modern GOP does. They were useful for organization, but it was all dog whistles, and they weren't allowed on national TV, let alone prime time slots like Tucker Carlson...
      • Re:Forget 4chan (Score:5, Informative)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @03:37AM (#62534756) Journal

        [...] but we're seeing a new form that eschews the nazi and klansman trappings and claims itself to just be "conservatives" , as if Reagan would have ever put up with these clowns. Now this isn't to say conservatives in general agree,[...]

        Wouldn't he?

        The Eleventh Commandment was a phrase used by President Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for Governor of California. The Commandment reads: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.

        It's because of Regan that these clowns are tolerated.

      • Or maybe it's just that these new young conservatives are making the long, deep-rooted historical connections between the GOP & lynchings, murders, bombings, etc. more explicit? These days, the NRA are what the KKK used to be. They're the ones keeping the racist mass-shooters armed & supporting "stand your ground" laws for racists who feel threatened & in fear for their lives by the presence of African American & Latino children.
      • by phlinn ( 819946 )
        Yeah, the manifesto is anti-capitalist, claims to be an eco-terrorist, hates fox news... But sure, he's a right winger.

        The vast majority of mass shooters have an ideology than can only honestly be described as incoherent. But everyone tries to tar their political opposition with blame if they can possibly justify it, and ignore it as much as possible if they can't.
    • if Great Replacement theory is remotely correct, wouldn't the pertinent thing to do be to go forth and multiply? You're an incel for fuck sake. Go and get laid. Preserve the white race. Shooting people will not keep you in the gene pool.
      • This is why the Supreme Court is making it illegal to abort children, and children of rape.
      • by definition it means he can't get laid. It's mostly dudes who can't get jobs to support a wife anymore. In the absence of those jobs they can't get women to settle for them, and they're not born lucky enough to be rich or super good looking. That's not their fault, but it means society is failing them, and rather than look to their community for solutions (e.g. turning left) they look to "Great Men" like Donald Trump (e.g. turning right).
        • Incels can't find a girlfriend because they've convinced themselves finding a girlfriend is about being rich and/or looking like a celebrity. Then they start talking with a bunch of other incels for some confirmation bias. It's the perfect storm for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

          I'm not sure what the heck has gone wrong with today's youth*, but in my day kids in high school were hooking up. Nobody had real jobs or "wife supporting income" levels at that age. I know this, because girls were more than happy

        • by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @01:59AM (#62534636)
          I had some pretty ugly friends in high school who still managed to get laid. I think this is 100% personality.
          If you're a toxic slime ball who think that women owe you something... and let yourself get taken in by an echo chamber of other toxic slime balls, there's a good chance that women, now being allowed to vote and own property, aren't going to fucking tolerate your ass.

          Society let these people down? Parents let these people down.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

        if Great Replacement theory is remotely correct, wouldn't the pertinent thing to do be to go forth and multiply?

        Or just get over it? If our hominid ancestors had the same concept of racial purity, there'd be no humans today. There'd only be whatever weird ape thing we would've evolved from, still hanging out in trees, eating bugs, and thinking to itself how great it is that it didn't let any of its mutated offspring to breed.

        Actually, there'd also be none of the problems on the planet that humans have caused, so maybe that's not the best analogy.

    • Well, we allow discourse that essentializes race to stay inside the Overton window. I'm honestly surprised there isn't more of this kind of thing.

  • I'm sure the US media are full today of stories that blame 4chan, the Internet in general, social media, young people spending too much time online and a bunch of other crap.

    While ignoring the fact that an 18 year old got hold of an assault rifle might be a bit of a problem. Especially in a society essentially built on pressure (to perform, to conform, to function, to succeed, etc.)

  • by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @02:07AM (#62534652)

    Traditionally mass shooters tend to finish by taking their own lives. It basically seems to be a way to kill yourself with maximum attention.

    But these right wing terrorists, all the ones mentioned in the article (not to mention Anders Breivik,j and the guy you shot Gabby Giffords, and..., well too many) all survived their massacres.

    It's a very different psychology going on.

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @03:10AM (#62534714)
    Part of the Kremlin agitprop strategy is grooming Far Right incels in the US to become mass-shooters. It's so blatant and organized, it's little different from if they had directly sent terrorists to attack American cities.
  • Radical meant a totally sick skateboard move. We called this "going postal". Although I guess that wouldn't be fair to postal workers anymore, who as a group have managed to get their shit pretty together.
  • by kbg ( 241421 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @08:57AM (#62535356)

    So everyone is talking about how he was "radicalized" on 4chan, but no one is talking about how he had obtained an assault rifle and ammo, which is the most prominent problem here. I feel sometimes like I am taking crazy pills, doesn't anyone see the actual problem here?

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