The man accused of the Buffalo massacre used a private Discord channel to plan the attack

The man accused of the Buffalo massacre used a private Discord channel to plan the attack

The man suspected of the Saturday massacre in Buffalo, New York, in which ten people died and three others were injured, allegedly used a private Discord server to discuss his plans. The Bloomberg agency reports. Starting last December, the man allegedly used the instant messaging application to share white supremacist content and racist slurs. He also reportedly mentioned the attack on the Christchurch mosque, which took place in New Zealand in 2019 at least thirty times. The man has been identified by the authorities as Payton S. Gendron, aged eighteen, and is currently accused of first degree murder, a crime of which he pleads not guilty. The massacre took place in a supermarket, in the heart of a community with an African American majority: investigators confirmed the motive of racial hatred behind the carnage. Out of thirteen affected, eleven are African American. A Discord channel called the "to-do-list", with messages dating back to early March, contained a detailed explanation of the assailant's plans.

A Discord spokesperson said, “As soon as we learned about it. , we have taken action and removed the server in accordance with our anti-violence policies ”. Discord had talked about its policies against violent extremism after the attacks on the Capitol in January 2021. The Trust & Safety team, according to the company's blog, makes up fifteen percent of Discord's total workforce, and is divided between the active research of violent content and the response to user reports. It is not the first time that Discord has been used by right-wing extremists to organize racist demonstrations: it had already happened in Charlottesville in August 2017, on the occasion of the gathering of white supremacists known as Unite the Right Rally.

Gendron also aired a live stream of the Twitch attack, using a go-pro camera mounted on a military helmet. Twitch paused the broadcast after two minutes. However prompt and effective the platform moderation interventions may be, there is still the risk that violent content can be disseminated on the web and viewed by many people. According to NPR, the Buffalo video was viewed by around three million users before it was removed. Discord extended its condolences to the families of the victims and expressed its willingness to cooperate with the authorities in the investigation phase. Twitch and Discord, as well as so many other content sharing platforms, still have a lot of steps to take to stop the spread of extremist violence on their channels. It is also the opinion of Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, who in a press conference after the attack stated that social media must be more vigilant in monitoring what is happening on their platforms. Lei hochul added that she found it unforgivable that the livestream was not deleted "within seconds".