The mass shooting in New Zealand was designed to spread on social media | Hacker News Reader

The mass shooting in New Zealand was designed to spread on social media

theverge.com

48 pointsTomte33 comments

This bellingcat post provides a more primary sources and deeper analysis than than theverge article: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2019/03/15/shi...

Is anyone disturbed by the amount of media coverage by the mainstream media? Here is how the New York Times is covering it, multiple articles saying the same thing. They want their own content to go viral: http://nytimes.com/trending

- New Zealand Shooting Live Updates: Attack on Christchurch Mosques Leaves 49 Dead

- A Mass Shooting of, and for, the Internet

- In Christchurch, Signs Point to a Gunman Steeped in Internet Trolling

- The New Zealand Massacre Was Made to Go Viral

- New Zealand Massacre Highlights Global Reach of White Extremism

- Christchurch Mosque Shootings Were Partly Streamed on Facebook

I don't think that, as a global society, we have much psychological protection against weaponized Streisand Effect yet.

I don't agree with their conclusion that this shows the internet is "inadvertently moderated" but I do agree with them not basically writing a biography of the perpetrator.

Every mass shooting or act of terror nowadays is met with calls not to lend exposure or notoriety to the perpetrators. Often I find it hard not to view such exhortations cynically (I suspect an ulterior motive when someone like Ben Shapiro urges quiet about a mass slaying of Muslims), but I generally think it makes sense. Still, we surely need to examine and discuss the causes of such violence to prevent it from happening again. And I wonder how exactly we are supposed to do that while also heeding an injunction against publicizing them.

i haven't seen widespread calls not to talk about mass shootings. i have seen calls to focus media coverage on the victims whose lives were cut short and not on the killers and their twisted motives.

https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1106500032503545856

Focus on victims and horror of terrorism.

There's some indication that mass shootings are contagious, so there is a possibility that not publicizing them does help prevent it from happening again.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> causes of such violence to prevent it from happening again.

It's fairly clear what the cause of a mosque shooting is: Islamophobia. It's also clear that there's not enough will to tackle the global far right that radicalise people like the shooter. Few countries are going to block 8chan at the router. So it's going to happen again.

(Although what is unusual here is that the terrorists survived and have been arrested. No doubt their names will be referenced in the next 4/8chan manifesto.)

>It's also clear that there's not enough will to tackle the global far right that radicalise people like the shooter.

Why do you say far right here? Did you not read the manifesto? He's far left. He's a communist environmentalist.

I have not read his manifesto, but it sounds as if he identifies as far right, espousing policies that are generally considered to be of the far right. According to [0], he identifies himself as a fascist.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/rightwing-extr...

You should read his manifesto. Here's a copy and paste from it. He is far left.

Were/are you a conservative?

No, conservatism is corporatism in disguise, I want no part of it.

Were/are you a fascist?

Yes. For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist. I am sure the journalists will love that.

I mostly agree with Sir Oswald Mosley’s views and consider myself an Eco-fascist by nature. The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.

Did you always hold these views?

No, when I was young I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before coming to be an eco-fascist.

Why do you blame immigrants and not the capitalists?

I blame both, and plan to deal with both.

I really don't think that he is far left. He is clearly an ethnonationalist. That is the primary feature of his ideology. The fact that he is an environmentalist is just a red herring.

He quotes Candace Owens as most influential upon him, someone who's Ben Shapiro adjacent - you are being very selective in your quotes from that paper.

Well I mean, Candace Owens is none of the things he cites in his own manifesto. I think you'd be hard-pressed to call her a communist, anarchist, or eco-fascist (words the killer uses to describe himself). Perhaps she is a fascist (I guess depending on your political viewpoints), but if she is one, she is certainly not an eco-fascist.

The shooter does not seem like one for clear thinking though. Or alternatively, if the intent is to get a rise out of people or incite a race war, choosing a prominent black conservative voice is a good way to do that.

I got sick of reading but he wrote something like "Trump is a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.". Candace Owens is pretty Trump positive in most ways I can tell as well, her being black has nothing to do with this matter, she's not a Muslim as far as I know. When he writes he supports China, that seems to be much more about totalitarian states and their mass incarceration of Muslims and like a child, he aspires to be in a totalitarian state where it does what he wants so the state does not have to compromise on anything, even to a majority of the people.

I've read the entire thing. He explicitly denounces Trump's politics, merely acknowledging that some white supremacists have centered on him. That is hardly an endorsement of Trump.

If anything, his motivation to me seems to be 'eco-fascism', a pagan movement centered around ecological justice and indigineous rights, with an emphasis on caucasian people. For one thing, he makes a big deal about global climate change as part of the reason why Muslims having babies is a bad thing. That is hardly Trump rhetoric (recall, Trump does not believe in manmade climate change).

It's rather incorrect to classify him as 'right-leaning' or 'left-leaning', the best characterization would be 'eco-terror', which has a long history (of both white supremacy, as well as just plain old terrorism). There are some things he agrees with conservatives on; some things he agrees with liberals on. That does not mean that well-meaning people espousing those same views on either side are responsible for this.

He just repeated memes from 8-chan and Anders Breivik, he suckered all of us who read it all the way through.

> It's fairly clear what the cause of a mosque shooting is: Islamophobia.

I disagree.. It's like saying people who murdered journalists in france were victim of "jounalistophobia".

It doesn't make sense to me. Shooter are mostly mentally ill / violent people FIRST at the root, and then find a motive which is picked randomly in their education.

And that's why we see such a huge diversity of thought in mass shooters political manifestos, because it's random?

Is that sarcastic ? It's true there are ideologies that are more enabling of violence though, but at the core it's just people that make no sense

> Shooter are mostly mentally ill / violent people FIRST at the root

Whenever someone says "mentally ill", what diagnosis are you giving and on what basis? The other Islamophobic mass shooter, Breivik, was declared sane by a court. These kinds of incidents are not spontaneous breaks in sanity but deliberate, premeditated crimes planned out like bank robberies.

> "jounalistophobia"

In both cases it's radicalization. The perpetrators are given some people to hate, and an encouragement to violence, and some emotional support in planning the attack.

I'm saying they are too much outliers that it doesn't make so much sense to listen to their "reasons" to annoy or suspect people with same sensibilities

When a court determine someone to be sane it just means that he fully knew what he was doing.

You can absolutely be sure that you want to kill people, knowing the implications of your acts and going though with it, that makes you sane for a court.

Now is someone showing so much hate and violence mentally ill in a way? I guess it depends on who you ask. Imho these kinds of views/acts are not very compatible with my definition of mental sanity.

Terrorism is essentially propaganda and "the global far right" is mostly supported by state actors both domestic and foreign. Islamophobia is of course not the cause, although it could be one of the goals. It's the same way as hatred towards enemy cannot be the cause of war, because it is itself fueled by war propaganda.

No. It's like saying that a too loud sound cannot be the cause of a feedback loop, because it is itself fueled by that feedback.

Unless it a loud sound near a microphone, when it can be the cause of overwhelming feedback whine unless someone takes steps to either filter out the noise or turn down the gain.

(Both a technical description and a close metaphor for radicalisation...)

There are no feedback loops in propaganda. Other people don't get to make a loud enough sound to influence anyone on any significant scale.

Sure there are. Successful propaganda in democratic countries loops back in elections, for instance.

> It's fairly clear what the cause of a mosque shooting is: Islamophobia

Very sloppy thinking. Islamophobia is a phenomenon, but it is not a philosophy (Or if it is, it is an extremely sloppy one). Nevertheless, it seems wild to claim that Islamophobes of the west (typically, white, pagan/atheist, alt-righters, etc) share much common ground with Islamophobes of Asia (for example, the Chinese government, or radical Hindus).

If you want to understand why all these groups turn out Islamophobic, it's worth studying their motivations, and they are different. For example, China's motivation is a general antagonism towards all religions and a distrust of religions such as Islam and Christianity that purport a higher power to which the state is subject. On the other hand, the neo-Nazi motivation is simply that Islam is not their religion, thus Muslims are evil. Conflating the two and attempting to construct intervention programs based on the other's motivations is an exercise in futility.

EDIT: For example, after reading the manifesto, this shooter is islamophobic because he thinks overpopulation is killing the planet and muslims have more babies than white people. That certainly requires different de-radicalization than someone who thinks Allah is a false god that ought to be replaced with the Christian one.

> Few countries are going to block 8chan at the router. So it's going to happen again.

Good. Blocking websites is not the answer. But you're probably wrong. The powers that be are itching for an excuse to just start blanket banning speech they don't like.

So many people who claimed to be so against censorship when China did it are now coming around to their way of doing things.

I think we owe China an apology for criticizing their censorship policies, when we ourselves are now just re-implementing their great firewall for ourselves. Their justification is identical; they wanted to protect the people from "dangerous misinformation" (fake news).

I have seen so many people in the last few years say that they're be happy to throw out all of our hard won freedoms because they are afraid of some 4chan trolls.

I'm sorry that you are so fearful and easily manipulated. I'm sorry for you that you support pernicious censorship policies so that you don't have to think about what really goes on in your country.

>Often I find it hard not to view such exhortations cynically (I suspect an ulterior motive when someone like Ben Shapiro urges quiet about a mass slaying of Muslims), but I generally think it makes sense.

You're accusing ben shapiro of having an ulterior motive for why he wants to be quiet? Are you suggesting ben shapiro supports this terrorist attack or is somehow ideologically or literally linked to the attack?

Well seeing as he talked extensively about Omar Mateen after that attack... yes. And the Canada Mosque shooter was a fan. And his quote about Muslims deserving to having their land occupied because they're uncivilized... and claiming during the run-up to the Iraq war that anti-war journalists should be tried for treason... I can go on.

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