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Discord: Buffalo suspect apparently shared attack plans online

2022-05-18T12:10:09.197Z


The 18-year-old, who is said to have shot ten people in the state of New York, invited like-minded people to a chat channel shortly before his crime. There he probably gave details of his project.


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Crime scene in Buffalo: The racist hate speech on the Internet did not ensure that the police were notified

PHOTO: BRENDAN MCDERMID / REUTERS

An 18-year-old man allegedly shot and killed 10 black people in Buffalo on Saturday.

Immediately before the massacre, the suspected gunman apparently shared his plans and details of his right-wing extremist ideology online.

30 minutes before the crime, he distributed invitations to his forum he runs on the Discord chat platform on the Internet to like-minded people, as reported by the New York Times.

Apparently nobody notified the authorities and the attack went largely as planned.

According to the media report, the 18-year-old has been keeping a kind of diary in his Discord channel for many months.

He posed with the gun that investigators say he later used in the killing spree and published hand-drawn plans of the supermarket that was the scene of the attack on Saturday.

He is said to have openly announced that he wanted to attack the supermarket.

He broadcast his killing spree live on the Twitch video platform, which belongs to the Amazon group.

The Halle assassin also used this platform.

"Invited a small group of people to the server"

Discord confirmed to the New York Times that a “small group of people have been invited to the server” and have joined.

The Discord platform originally started as a gaming platform, but now, with a user base of over 300 million registered users, it also competes with video conferencing programs such as Zoom and is also sometimes used in schools.

(Read more about the platform here.)

According to a company spokeswoman, only the 18-year-old suspect had previously been able to access his Discord forum.

Shortly before the attack, he is said to have tried to draw attention to his Discord forum, as reported by the magazine "Bloomberg".

Accordingly, he is said to have repeatedly used racist and anti-Semitic expressions on the platform for several months and repeatedly referred to the attacker of the right-wing extremist attack in Christchurch.

He used the word weapon around 200 times in his posts and the word shoot 119 times, the newspaper reported.

The man was apparently a supporter of the conspiracy myth of population exchange, which is widespread in right-wing extremist circles.

At its core, supporters of the so-called replacement cult believe that there is a targeted campaign by a global elite aimed at systematically replacing whites in the United States with immigrants of different races and religions.

(Read more about the background here.) President Joe Biden has condemned the massacre as “terrorism”.

The tech platforms are repeatedly criticized for not doing enough to stop the spread of terrorist content.

However, in the current case, Twitch had already deleted the live stream after two minutes.

Many tech companies have now joined together in the non-profit organization "Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism" in order to be able to react more quickly to terrorist content and have made progress compared to previous attacks broadcast live on the Internet.

However, after the attack in Buffalo, it was not possible to prevent a right-wing extremist pamphlet by the shooter and the video from spreading on the Internet after the attack.

According to social media analysis by Memetica, a link to a Google Drive folder containing the manifesto was shared more than 1,000 times on Twitter, Bloomberg reports.

Another social media analysis showed that a Facebook link to the attack video was shared, commented and liked over 40,000 times.

hpp/reuters

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2022-05-18

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