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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

This has been....odd.

Reddit completely banned two subreddits: r/gore and r/watchpeopledie, despite having been on the site for 7+ years (and mods claiming they did admin's bidding and banned NZ videos).

On top of that, there is some sort of media blackout on the 74-page manifesto the shooter supposedly wrote.

Someone shot 50 people, left a detailed explanation, and no one can find out why. Was he anti-immigrant, anti-semetic, disaffected of government...no one knows.

I'm not a conspiracy guy, but if there is something that starts the mind racing it's an active, near-universal cover-up. What is going on?

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

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No it hasn't, stop the conspiracy talk.

It's easy to find the video and manifesto.

The shooter very obviously is trying to manipulate the media with a shock campaign. He blatantly admitted to this.

Websites are choosing to self censor, they don't want to encourage this type of behavior.

> shock campaign

They're definitely in shock, and are going to great lengths.

> It's easy to find the video and manifesto.

Link? (Actually, probably don't...IDK how HN mods would react to that.)

I've read through a dozen pages of search results...nothing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=new+zealand+shooter+manifest...

I'm with you. It's really hard to find. Even liveleak isn't carrying it.

Then you're google-fu is not very good. I easily found the manifesto and a 40s video of the massacre.

If you are actually looking for a copy, please reach out to me via email.

The manifesto is very easy to find in google (at least it was a few days ago). Not sure why you want to watch a video where 40 people are shot, documentation of historical significant massacres like the holocaust are hard enough to watch.

You asking for links just proves how dangerous this media is.

People are driven to fill their own sadistic curiosity with more information and media, I myself am guilty of this btw.

The manifesto is what you would expect from a sociopath driven by his own self importance.

This type of virality is unstoppable, this shooter was very familiar with how memes work. By consuming his media we are in essence taking the bait.

At this point I'm choosing to self censor and would encourage others to do the same.

I saw the manifesto on Scribd and the video on some alt streaming site both within a couple hours of the attacks.

Didn't watch the video past the first 10 seconds which just showed a first-person-view view of a guy with a gun walking down a sidewalk, but the manifesto I skimmed maybe 5-10 pages and it was basically just a series of little essays / blogposts kind of deals about different topics (in the sense that he'd just use a new giant heading and switch topics after a page or two randomly), but they pretty much all were just standard copy-paste level arguments about how the white race is at risk of extinction due to birth rates and immigration, basically just different little pieces about standard white supremacist stuff, not particularly original.

He wrote about his personal experiences in France, seeing how many immigrants are there and how it shocked him, and he wrote about how he was motivated by seeing some white girl killed by a Muslim attacker on the news, and how he decided to take action personally.

Nothing particular new or interesting. And it's hard to understand how his reaction to things that troubled him was to just double down on violence. He was clearly bothered by certain acts of terrorism in the past, but somehow he justified his own.

Personally I understand why the video and manifesto are censored. I am very free speech but in this case I think we've seen enough studies about copycat terrorism and copycat suicide and copycat mass shootings to know that it's harmful to propagate a murderer's identity and message.

> Someone shot 50 people, left a detailed explanation, and no one can find out why. Was he anti-immigrant, anti-semetic, disaffected of government...no one knows.

Seriously? No one can find out why?

What about all those journalists reporting about his motives, reciting his meme-infected nonsensical manifesto? How do these people know about his white supremacist views and his hate for Muslims?

Are they all making that up as part of a big cover-up?

> reciting his meme-infected nonsensical manifesto

I've seen sparse, five-word excerpts, picked and distilled by someone that presumably read the full text.

> nonsensical

Undoubtedly it is; that's never stopped nonsense from being available before. Hell, you can buy hard copies of Mein Kampf with 2-day shipping from Amazon.

There is a tremendous Streisand effect being created around this, and I cannot figure out why.

I kind of understand video ban, not really the manifesto. Someone's analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM2oWwNahEA

That video you referenced. I was literally watching it and youtube took it down. Do you know the channel name?

> understand video ban

Yeah, especially on YouTube. (Reddit is a cesspool; seems odd to suddenly have standards.)

> Someone's analysis

Thanks.

Reddit is trying to make money, get investors and better ads. It’s. No mystery why they’ve been trying to clean house lately. I wonder when they’ll realize that it’s a lost cause?

> ...there is some sort of media blackout on the 74-page manifesto ...Someone shot 50 people, left a detailed explanation, and no one can find out why.

There have been a bunch of articles about the manifesto. It’s not a detailed explanation. It is not at all like the manifestos of old such as the unibomber’s. It seems to be full of lots of contradictions and lots of memes and lots of things designed to spread. Based on what people have said in comments elsewhere you could read it and if you were looking for a motivation you’d find what you wanted to find. A left wing person might find right wing motivations. A right wing person would find he has left wing motivations. Etc.

Some people dont like being fed digests. Some people want the source material to make their own decisions

My response was to the assertion that there was a media blackout on the manifesto:

>>> ...there is some sort of media blackout on the 74-page manifesto...

Which there wasn't and isn't. It's just the media read it, found it was full of shit, and said as much.

>>> ...Someone shot 50 people, left a detailed explanation, and no one can find out why.

>> Some people want the source material to make their own decisions

People can find it, read it, and make their own decisions. But there wasn't a media black out on it, and the media isn't responsible for publishing in full anything a mass murderer writes just to make it easy for people to find.

Most people reading it seem to come away with conclusions that are driven more by their own ideologies than finding any real truth about "why" in there. Hence my point about how you see people debating the contents all coming to different conclusions and just arguing with each other that the problem is left wingers, or the problem is right wingers, or its Trumpism, or it's eco-warriorism, etc. Whatever they despise they seemingly can find and blame.

> Based on what people have said in comments elsewhere

Also known as "hearsay". Breeding grown for fake news.

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