NZ terrorist attack

[Eoin McLove]

My personality and interests were more or less fully formed before I began to use the internet at around 18 years of age so I only ever used it to facilitate those interests.  For many young people the internet itself is the hobby and wields a massive influence over the formation of their identity.  If you are desensitized to hard-core imagery and see it as nothing more than entertainment then that is quite a huge shift in cultural outlook.  Of course it won't be to everyone's taste,  but for those who are drawn to such stuff there seems to be a world to explore.  That has to have a psychological impact. 

I am probably wrong about this but aren't the preventative measures not always playing catch up with the concerns of parents/ society? 'The kids' are a step ahead at all times.  And there are so many channels to disseminate information so as each one closes another two or three open. You really just need one tech savvy person in a community to figure out a way around the system and then everyone has access.

I'm not anti- internet but there's no denying it has completely changed society for better and worse. Saying that the internet is not the problem,  people are, is like saying the loaded gun didn't kill the person.  No,  but it had a massive part to play.

[hellfire]

A properly locked down phone, tablet or laptop is an extremely difficult thing to get around.  A state wide solution is far easier to get around (look at the number of Chinese people on Facebook). For every kid who is willing and able to learn privilege escalation there will be thousands who aren't. These softwares get patched regularly when workarounds become available.The truth is that most people make no effort to police what their kids are looking at. A lot act as though they are completely powerless to do anything so don't try. They then demand that the government do something to stop their Billy beating off to something really vile. It's not the states or anyone else's job to shield your offspring from harm, it's yours.


I completely disagree with the gun analogy. You are comparing a communication device to a weapon. It simply does not stack up. The very same arguments were made against horror films, music, video games and subliminal messages allegedly contained in LP's when they were played backwards. Tens of millions (myself included) have viewed the commentators this guy did and only one massacred a bunch of people. Terrorism, mass murder and political extremists existed long before the internet. Treating it as an entity with a personality of its own is silly. If there is vile pornography on there it's because someone put it there, not because a web server went rogue and decided it would be cool.

[Eoin McLove]

Fair points. 

[Pedrito]

Different perspectives on a topic there..v intersting. I would often have wondered exactly what McLove was saying there but Hellfire is bang on the money. People dedicate so much time to shit that doesn't matter in life and yet fail to pay attention to the really important issues. I do think parents need help somewhat with this stuff but as he said, there's loads of resources out there.

I would go in turn go back to the previous post related to the alt right and this whole troll killer coming up from the underground and posit that all the evidence says that this is not a trend or even a thing, though if we are looking for certain outcomes then we can organise the evidence in that way.

Just like that guy that killed his family up in Cavan and trying to find reasons or culprits or people to blame..essentially the killers are to blame, and nobody or nothing else. Just real bad apples. An amazing book to read on this topic is Columbine by Dave Cullen, where after years and years of searching and trying to find causes and reasons, the basic idea was that both kids, from what I recall, were just unfeeling psychopaths..horrible little bastards essentially. The media tried to pin it on white power, satanism, marilyn manson, but essentially they were a pair of horrible little cunts who just wanted to damage people and gain infamy as a result. I can't help but think that this tragedy is the same type.

[Eoin McLove]

Yeah of course,  that's exactly what it boils down to.  The concern is that the internet gives these people a place to anonymously 'meet' and perhaps validate each other. It has happened in the past and will in the future regardless of the internet.  I just wonder if the internet gives these people a server if community and then justification.  Just thinking out loud.  I have no answers.

[hellfire]

What seems to have eroded is any sense of personal responsibility. If this lad could kill fifty people and laugh about it afterwards the internet is the least of his problems. What I was saying about echo chambers earlier feeds into your point there. If mainstream politics and media fail to engage with people then someone on the fringes will happily tell them what they want to hear. I'm reluctant to tie this lad into the bigger political picture though. Anyone who can kill that many people without any conscience is fucked in the head from the start. He could just as easily have ended up a serial killer, except this was the vehicle he chose for his sick fantasies.

[Eoin McLove]

But is that echo chamber culture not a direct result of the internet as it allowed people to find their ideological allies and feed each other everything they want to hear? It was always there in terms of newspaper choice but it seems more exaggerated now with online forums etc. 

I'm not anti- internet I hasten to remind you.  I just think that the possibility that it has its part to play should be considered.

[Juggz]

I think McLove does have a point, though. The internet is absolutley being used as a weapon. Social media allows content to be targeted at an individual level (in fact, their revenue streams depend on it) and this is most definitely being exploited. The Internet Research Agency is spending a lot of time and money on content for consumption in places other than Russia, as well as providing funding for local protagonists of destabilisation like Aaron Banks in the UK. It's not as if Cambridge Analytica wanted to sell you car insurance either. The internet is far from an even or unbiased platform, it is becoming a tool of warfare. As far as I'm aware, there aren't many tools out there which will filter out targeted posts from a user's facebook or youtube channel. I'm not a facebook user but I've often wondered why youtube continually recommends "Jacob Rees-Mogg DESTROYS...." videos to me. I know it's not by accident. Phones and laptops, locked down or otherwise, are providing a direct channel for advertising as well as propaganda at individual level, the content AI can't tell the difference.

[Juggz]

But is that echo chamber culture not a direct result of the internet as it allowed people to find their ideological allies and feed each other everything they want to hear? It was always there in terms of newspaper choice but it seems more exaggerated now with online forums etc. 

A very important point. Most social media channels allow the user to build a coccoon of reinforcing opinions and filter out contrasting voices. One of the techniques the (Russian) IRA have used is creating pages and groups based on "pride". They entice people in by the likes of "Texas pride" or some such bullshit to sucker people in innocently, fill it with memes and harmless fluff and, every now and then, drop in something subtle to steer the group in a destablising way. It's not about right-wing white folk either. They had plenty of "black pride" type pages, usually filled with harmless memes and the like and, every now and then, drop in a "this is not my country" type of disenfranchising post because, when it comes to elections, persuading your opposition not to vote is almost as powerful as mobilising those who would vote the way you want. It has proved surprisingly powerful. The quality of journalism has declined with their revenue, you could argue, and you get what you pay for. Less dissent, more of the same opinion and you need only look at German history to see where it can end up.

[hellfire]

Hysterical nonsense. I'm not going down the Nazi rabbit hole with you because Hitler has been dead for a very long time now. Blaming a communication medium for human behavior is ridiculous. All of the things you described were happening already. There was no shortage of people getting brainwashed into doing unspeakable things in the 70s and 80s. A lot of people are dim and weak minded. The internet only mirrors this.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

One aspect that is new about this latest killing is how it connected to online gaming, both in aesthetic and community terms. You could argue that we had games in the past which involved killing enemies, but it would have been an extremely elaborate feat to make real-world killing look like Mario jumping on an evil turtle, for example. This guy streamed to an online community an experience which was an exact replica of a gaming situation, and they cheered for it in real time, in the disconnect between game-world and reality. The notoriety he got for it was both live and global. I'm no expert on these things, but those who are generally say that the desire for notoriety spreads like a virus, a virus affecting a minority, sure, but I think "statistical outlier" is far too dismissive a jump, especially within given communities. There have been incessant calls for the media to tone down their coverage of mass killings for this precise reason, so that's not new. But what is new, with the internet being used in this way, is that the initial and live audience who stoked the killer's notoriety, he was able to draw that together by himself (no mass media needed) as a relative "nobody". This audience were already specifically like-minded in several potentially disturbing ways, hence the conversation they were all involved in, and this bounced out in real time to communities members of that community were connected to, and so on and so on, to the point where Facebook ended up deleting the full video of the killings over one and a half million times. That's one and a half million uploads, not counting all the attempts to upload edited versions to avoid detection.

In this regard, could this latest event not be seen as a sociopathic equivalent of how the Arab spring mobilized social media and the internet? Sure, dissidents and rebels, etc., etc., existed beforehand, but there is a qualitative shift brought about by the internet, not merely a quantitative one, as far as I can see. I'm not saying the internet makes us worse people, but it absolutely changes how we think, just as the invention of writing and later the printing press did. A precedent form of echo chambers surely existed, but the notion only became tangible and instantly graspable with social media. Now we're being asked to consider not just left versus right or liberal versus conservative echo chambers, we're also being presented with a reality that includes echo chambers of genuine and/or mock sociopaths who revel in displaying a total disregard for human life (referring here not only to the killer but to the comments posted on 8chan as it happened).

No point blaming everything on the internet, no. But I'm not convinced we can so neatly dismiss the idea that it may have played a specific role that no other medium before it could have.

[Pedrito]

Jesus I wasn't aware of the video game element to all of this, and the relation to the online video. Christ that's grim, depressing stuff.

[Juggz]

Hysterical nonsense. I'm not going down the Nazi rabbit hole with you because Hitler has been dead for a very long time now. Blaming a communication medium for human behavior is ridiculous. All of the things you described were happening already. There was no shortage of people getting brainwashed into doing unspeakable things in the 70s and 80s. A lot of people are dim and weak minded. The internet only mirrors this.

I didn't blame the medium, I thought that was quite clear. I am saying the medium, as it is - unregulated and offering to inject custom content moderated only by AI direct into user feeds for a fee - is facilitating the attempted manipulation of human behaviour on a scale never previously seen. It is completely open to exploitation and is, without question, being exploited.

[Eoin McLove]

Again,  all internet phenomena.  Not that I think gaming should be banned or any such nonsense,  but you have to accept the part it played in influencing his operation.  There are a multitude of factors that lead a person to these types of events,  each one harmless enough in their own right and when in the hands of a rational human (like death metal etc). The broken mind is indeed the main issue here,  but as mentioned,  the ability for many fucked up individuals from across the world to gather and validate each other is new enough. The response from his pals is very curious.  You get a lot of extremist ideas championed in the metal scene,  a small handful of actual extremists and a multitude of hangers on. I wonder what that breakdown is on the likes of 8 Chan.  How many of his followers are in it to seem edgy and how many have been radicalized.

[Pedrito]

The Columbine killers were obsessed with Quake and it is gone over extensively in the book. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle of all this. A variety of influences, a perfect storm.as such, but ultimately it takes a real nut job to follow through on it.