Attorney General to investigate social media companies’ role in Buffalo attack
ag.ny.gov
ag.ny.gov
People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards and was much more active on reddit and Discord.
From the shooter's diary:
> "I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior," he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffalo-shooting-supermarket-67.... See https://archive.ph/0Nnj7 for a non-paywalled version.
If the goal is to prevent future shooters, I think log files of the shooters behavior is more important than what they say is most important.
I don’t think crazy in a blank check to get away with whatever you want, you can definitely make yourself crazy in entirely foreseeable and avoidable ways that are your responsibility. This can still render you unreliable when it comes to your own motivations.
I would say, "yes," but this is crazy in some type of modern-day social sense of the term. If we're to consider the long, rich history of human violence it looks a bit pedestrian.
He's not a member of your tribe, your tribe attacks his tribe, he attacks yours.
He played by an older, darker, less civilized rule-book.
So he's not "seeing things schizo crazy" and so in some sense, no, he is not crazy.
I find virtually all mainstream discourse around mass-casualty attacks to be either normalizing or to just simply sweep the issue under the rug and ignore it.
There is no deep discussion on the topics, just further fiddling.
This is what a lot of people are afraid of in the US, because these shootings exist at the nexus of first and second amendment rights. The first allows people like the shooter to be radicalized using the most powerful communication platforms ever created. The second allows them to be armed to the teeth. And then there is the systemic, deeply rooted racism in American culture that feeds the hatred behind these events, and intersects with the US Constitution, government and society in numerous ways the country still isn't capable of discussing rationally.
So "he was just crazy" starts to sound like "nothing to see here" after a while. Because if it's true, it's weird that so many people seem to be crazy in the same way. If they aren't crazy then there is a pipeline of radicalization and violence - an "extremist industrial complex" if you will - that's working as intended to maintain its own status quo... and a lot of Americans are fine with that.
I really wouldn't call him any of those terms, he simply has a completely different "tribe," value system, and morality than yours.
To simply throw some high-brow insults at him and walk-off is intellectually lazy, and blinds you to someone becoming what Buffalo boy became.
I live down the street from a pre-Revolutionary fort, a real facet of the settlers lives was dealing with Indian raids. They would sneak in and, under cover of darkness, kill as many as they could. This attack, ultimately, makes me think of a modern raid.
>A white supremacist walks into a public space and shoots the descendants of people brought to this country in bondage by, get this, the aforementioned colonialists
The situations seems somewhat different. Less a modern raid than a modern massacre.
But I guess he is very different insane than the Son of Sam guy who thought God spoke to him.
But what is the actual end-goal here, have a "probe" and say "we did what we could" as did the NY police when they investigated and passed over the Buffalo shooter for his prior threats?
Of course Discord has no responsibility in what people talk about on their system. Otherwise they should claim partial ownership on all good ideas that come out of it too.
I blame a divisive society pitting people against each other and allowing no middle ground, leading to radicalization, and the availability of guns that allow people to immediately act on their hate.
We used to have a neutral ground of, say, a respected newspaper or TV show which had the ability to reign in radicalization, and would present issues by weighing both sides in a fair and representative way. This does no longer exist. It's us-vs-them, the other side is evil. Additionally our competitive society has no issue with creating and vilifying classes of losers and accepts a growing divide between rich and poor.
There you have your shooters. There you have Trump 2024 or who else comes along (what kind of politician can only thrive in this climate?)
My solution? I'd recommend everyone to smoke or drink some of your favorite drug or play some peaceful music and meditate over why the other side from your perspective is human, and what valid arguments they could have, or what made them think the way they do.
No, we didn't.
We used to have oligopolistic media with a fairly uniform set of biases and actively-pursued agendas across all outlets. Even farther back, media was more diverse and often hyperlocal, but still not “fair and representative”.
Similarly in Germany we used to have only had 3 state TV channels, ultimately controlled by the ruling parties. Thinking about it now, I'm sure it was quite biased in all kinds of ways. And yet, people got their vaccinations without rioting.
That doesn’t mean it was perfect but it absolutely did temper things a lot - they had to setup their own network to host a voice like Carlson for a larger national audience than Stormfront.
The U.S. also had a legal requirement to fairly present multiple sides of an issue until Republicans removed it in 1987. It is probably not a coincidence that this was around the same time that a handful or very wealthy people started pouring money into building highly-partisan networks.
https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Buffalo-Shoo...
Doesn't at all remind me of every previous case of certain books, video games, publishing tools and communication technologies being blamed in the name of "safety" as an excuse to clamp down.
Remember how E2E encryption is a "terribly dangerous" thing because it protects pedophiles? Yeah....
context - https://www.thewrap.com/tucker-carlson-faces-backlash-over-r...
So let's focus on fighting privacy and encryption, and forget about gun access/fetishism for a moment.
PS I agree with tour point 100%, just wanted to add another one to the list
PPS Discord doesn't support e2ee, so it's not like we could've avoided this issue with banning it in the first place.
[1] Mental illness != immediate danger to people's lives
[2] Easy access to guns and ammo lowers the cost to perform mass shootings. Incendiary devices require special knowledge, knives make people's arms tired before "mass stabbing" threshold is reached, automobiles are typically blocked from driving into a store without damaging the vehicle before mass killing is achieved
[3] White supremacy is thriving in certain corners of the internet. Discontent in the marketplace of ideas because only losers adopt it, it lives in protected corners.
I consider your jumping to mental illness as a cause instead of a correlated factor as misguided given the three bullets above.
These are high profile because they are rare to accomplish relative to mass shootings.
If you want to and a company indirectly involved wouldn’t the gun manufacturer be more liable?
"We should better monitor these sites" might be an entirely valid conclusion.
It’s not even close.
I do not want our civil liberties eroded in any way because of mass shootings. Government always uses emotional tragedies to grab authoritarian power.
Be careful that you're not inadvertently asking for social media to be regulated more like cars.
Fortunately, however, there are plenty of countries that have fewer mass shootings and arguably better protection of civil liberties than the US, so they might provide some inspiration.
I mean, to take my car out in public, I'm required to have a license, registration, inspection, various safety devices, and follow a variety of usage rules.
Across the whole nation we have a fairly substantial set of restrictions on what you can and can't own, regardless of whether or not you only ever use it on private property (there are no such restrictions for cars).
So the net effect would be mostly no change in public and a massive net loosening of restrictions in private.
Personally I'm fine with this. But I think you'll probably be clamoring to have the status qou back as soon as your local extremists start posting youtube videos of 14yos firing mortars at their summer BBQ.
Not buying it.
The airbag requirements certainly have nothing to do with it, either.
> Government always uses emotional tragedies to grab authoritarian power
Is that what you think is happening here? If so, could you please elaborate on why you think this?
* "We should better monitor these sites" might be an entirely valid conclusion.*
No, we should not have to monitor sites for the minuscule chance that a psychopath is planning a mass shooting. Senators are already pushing this type of surveillance on social media, it's a matter of time before this type of surveillance is used against thought crimes, and people that don't agree with the establishment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
19 384 homicides in total.
It is probably a better comparison than car deaths.
But if your argument hinges on "mass shootings aren't a big deal" than let's agree to disagree.
False positives are already awful without adding legal liability for not acting to the mix.
Also, check out the cases where Section 230 has been used [1]. Without it, sites would have to prevent defamation (i.e., they need to know whether any content is untrue). Libraries would not provide computers connected to the internet.
Repealing Section 230 is a "common sense" proposal that falls apart when considering the actual results. If there's a good proposal for a replacement, I haven't seen it.
“…New York Executive Law Section 63(8), which permits the attorney general to investigate matters concerning public peace, public safety, and public justice and to subpoena witnesses and compel the production of documents.”
Not that I’m saying what that individual did wasn’t 100% wrong but any politician who is worth their beans will not let a tragedy go to waste.
I make the point not to be sarcastic but to note that there really are paradoxes and nuances within the concept of free speech. Trying to establish hard bound rules is more likely to lead to abuse then an honest discussion that acknowledges ambiguity.
Yes. All Cretans are liars.
“Im gonna kill all you fools” when talking about the company kickball tournament shouldn’t result in a swat team breaking down your front door.
The kind of referral from the Governor's office is not a criminal referral but more of a policy referral; while there are some kinds of legal liability that might be involved, that's not really even superficially the point of the referral and the legal authority under which it was made: understanding issues contributing to a public safety problem is.
The AG is, yes, the top prosecutorial authority of the state, but that isn't the whole of their role.
> If you want to and a company indirectly involved wouldn’t the gun manufacturer be more liable?
Probably not; there is probably far less evidence that the gun manufacturer knew, or should reasonably have known, about the specific act it was contributing to.
> Probably not; there is probably far less evidence that the gun manufacturer knew...
What acts do you think civilians use an AR-15 style rifle for? What percentage of AR-15 holders shoot a person versus the percentage of social media users?
People tend to bend over backwards to give Toyota the benefit of the doubt where possible.
If it was a FCA product they'd be out for blood.
1. The companies that run these giant platforms know about the problems they cause
2. Those companies are hiding data about the problem
3. Those companies are doing nothing to fix the situation
4. Those companies are actually doing everything they can to make the situation worse
Even worse than oil companies and lead in gasoline, these companies absolutely rely on generating hate, because that generates clicks/doomscrolling which brings them revenue. So they will continue to do nothing about this problem until they are forced to. The tool to force them to do this is government.
I very much doubt they are going to find discord or reddit were conspiring or involved. No punishments are due for social media but other users on social media could absolutely have been criminal.
I suppose the population can be divided between those who find these levels of violence unacceptable, and those who find it acceptable.