Buffalo massacre prompts N.Y. proposal to curb violent videos online

New York officials on Tuesday proposed creating new laws to prevent people from frivolously sharing violent videos online in conjunction with the state attorney general’s office releasing a report about a livestreamed mass shooting in May.

Police say Payton Gendron, then 18, posted racist screeds online before opening fire in a grocery store in a largely Black community in Buffalo, New York. Ten people were killed — all of them Black.

Gendron is awaiting trial and has pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime and firearm charges.

Authorities also said the gunman modeled the massacre off of a racist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, including his choice to broadcast the shooting live online from a first-person camera. 

As The Washington Post reported earlier this year, “extremists and the morbidly curious” have made it hard to wipe the video of the Buffalo massacre from the internet completely. 

With that difficulty in mind, in the wake of the massacre, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked state Attorney General Letitia James to investigate the role social media networks played in the video’s spread — and methods to avoid similar incidents in the future. 

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In a statement Tuesday, James’ office said the report determined multiple factors contributed to this particular massacre being spread online: 

The report concludes that fringe online platforms, like 4chan, radicalized the shooter; livestreaming platforms, like Twitch, were weaponized to publicize and encourage copycat violent attacks; and a lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability of these platforms allowed hateful and extremist views to proliferate online, leading to radicalization and violence.

Studies have repeatedly linked the heavy absorption of violent imagery to post-traumatic stress disorder, which suggests platforms that host these images could be passively or deliberately doing harm that can precipitate further harm. 

From video platforms like WorldStarHipHop to more community-based platforms like Reddit, both of which have been widely condemned for disturbing violence routinely shared on their sites, internet users can gorge themselves on violent imagery and obscure it from view with the swipe of a finger. But James’ report and reforms urge us to think of the impact as more lasting. Removing something from your news feed doesn’t mean it’s out of your mind. 

Here are some key recommendations from James’ report:

• Establish new criminal statutes for people who commit homicides and create images or videos out of the content.
• Establish laws to hold people liable in civil court for frivolously distributing images of a homicide. “Importantly, appropriate legislation should avoid covering videos created by bystanders or passively, such as those captured by police officers’ body-worn cameras,” the report stated.
• Adjust livestreaming capabilities on social platforms like Twitch so there’s a time delay, allowing moderators to identify and remove videos of first-person violence.
• Reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the provision protecting online platforms from liability for content users post to their sites. Democrats and Republicans alike hate it —albeit for completely different reasons. Many progressives say it gives platforms too much cover for allowing hatemongers (even people who stoke violence) to use their services. Conservatives, on the other hand, who have claimed some hatemongers who have been booted from social media platforms are examples of unfair censorship, have essentially tried to severely restrict companies’ ability to moderate posts at all. James’ report stops short of saying Section 230 should be nixed. Instead, it says, platforms should be required by law to take “reasonable steps” to keep videos of violent crimes off their sites.