BUTLER, Pennsylvania (NV) – A day after former President Donald Trump’s assassination attempt, calls for violence spiked online, and calls to spark modern-day civil war in particular — a detail that suggests a small group of cold-blooded users are amplifying messages in support of mass shooters and those who intentionally cause violence, CBS News reported Tuesday, August 6.
Moonshot, a company that tracks domestic violent extremism (DVE) and social media, has recorded a sudden surge in calls for violence. A team of six researchers recorded 1,599 calls for civil war — a 633% increase from a typical day — across social media platforms including 4Chan and Reddit, more mainstream sites like YouTube, and new sites dedicated to far-right discussions aimed at violent and delusional young people.
“The rise in incitement to violence on social media is pretty typical of online discussions in spaces that promote violence,” Elizabeth Neumann, Moonshot’s chief strategy officer, told CBS News. “There is, in fact, an online community that works day in and day out to promote violence in all its forms, from political civil wars to senseless school shootings,” she said.
These alarming statistics follow a long-standing pattern. Every mass shooting or attempted violence in the past decade has been followed by calls for violence on social media, and the trend is only increasing. In most cases, perpetrators post details of their violent intentions before committing the act in real life.
As for Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old man who shot Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month, the FBI is still working to piece together the full online trail of the shooter, but CBS News has learned that investigators believe Crooks has posted creepy content on social media in the past.
Investigators found “a social media account believed to be associated with the shooter, sometime in 2019, 2020,” FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees last week. “There were over 700 comments,” Abbate said, “that appeared to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant themes, advocates for political violence, and were described as extremist.”
On the day after the attack, Moonshot also detected 2,051 explicit threats or incitements to violence on social media — more than double the daily volume of threats Moonshot records as part of its ongoing campaign to monitor extremist social media spaces.
Everytown for Gun Safety, an anti-gun violence advocacy organization, partnered with Moonshot on a new report released Tuesday that tracked interest and engagement in online discussions related to mass shootings and targeted violence from January to June of last year.
Researchers found that cheering on mass shootings and targeted violence, as well as cheering on perpetrators, were common in online discussions of similar content. They also found that Google searches were a gateway to a range of social media platforms hosting disturbing conversations. The report found that calls for violence actually came from a small subset of online users.
More research is needed to understand the link between violent rhetoric on social media and real-world violent attacks, according to Everytown, but both have been on the rise for more than a decade.
Social networks like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube mobilize huge human resources to remove violent content and have achieved some success, but YouTube in particular has struggled as toxic content has mushroomed and is unable to be removed. (TTHN)