Buffalo Shooting: New York AG Launches Probe on Social Media Platforms Used by Suspect

The top prosecutor in New York state has begun an inquiry into the involvement of social media companies in the mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday.

The attorney general's office said the investigation will look at how social media platforms were "used to stream, promote, or plan the event." The governor of the state has said that digital companies are partly to blame for the attack. Critics claim that the firms took too long to delete the suspected shooter's violent posts.

New York AG Launches Investigation

"The terror incident in Buffalo has once again highlighted the depths and danger of online forums that transmit and promote hate," Attorney General Letitia James said in announcing the inquiry on Wednesday.

Per BBC, the white suspect is accused of posting a manifesto on Google and livestreaming the deadly shooting of ten people at a grocery in a mostly black neighborhood on Twitch, an Amazon company.

Twitch reported the feed was pulled down less than two minutes after the violence started, but it was replicated on other streaming platforms. For more than 10 hours, Facebook did not delete a link to the copied clip, by which time it had been shared over 46,000 times. Before being pulled down, a copy that had been posted elsewhere had been seen over three million times.

The probe will also look at the internet boards 4chan, 8chan, and Discord, where the gunman allegedly wrote about his plans, according to James. Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul launched the investigation and urged the New York State Police to establish a team dedicated to monitoring social media for extremist threats.

She's also urging the state legislature to enact stricter gun laws. Republicans in the state legislature have chastised her for not doing enough to prevent mass shootings before the incident. The crime is being investigated as a hate crime by the US Department of Justice.

In theory, the massacre in Buffalo might be a major turning point for the great replacement theory, which says that non-white groups are "changing" white people and which Gendron refers to repeatedly in a 180-page manifesto uploaded online prior to the spree.

However, given the political pressure on social media companies and the embracing of similar language by some of the right's most famous individuals, it's unclear how things will really play out, as per The Star.

Twitch, Facebook, and Twitter representatives did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the precise tactics or procedures they employ to control great replacement theory content. A YouTube spokesperson did not respond right away.

Buffalo Shooter's Livestream Sparks Criticism Against SocMed

Hate speech directed at a specific group, as well as linked threats of violence, would normally be considered a terms of service violation on most of the popular social media platforms, according to Courtney Radsch, a fellow at UCLA's Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy. She believes the Buffalo shooting will give tech firms greater leeway to enforce such regulations more forcefully.

Experts on internet extremism told ABC News that they hope the horrific shooting on Saturday would serve as a wake-up call for more stringent regulation of online remarks. Experts told ABC News that policing material on tech platforms is particularly challenging with livestreams, citing the difficulty of monitoring and deleting posts in real time.

Furthermore, online message boards that promote bigotry, such as 4chan, traffic in odious ideas that often fall short of breaking the law, leaving the door open for platforms with a less stringent content monitoring policy, according to Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Three years ago, a self-identified white supremacist livestreamed a mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people. The live footage of the shooting on Facebook lasted 17 minutes, significantly longer than the two minutes it took Twitch to remove the video on Saturday.

According to Alice Marwick, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in the study of social media, digital platforms regulate material using both automatic methods and manual choices made by individuals. Livestreams are challenging to manage because they elude automatic systems, requiring platforms to rely on human moderators who are often overwhelmed by the volume of incoming content, she explained.