Dirty Money

The top New York prosecutor Letitia James is investigating the role social media played in the racially motivated mass shooting of black people at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York. The Governor of New York says tech firms are partially responsible for the attack and has ordered the State Police to create a new team dedicated to investigating extremism on social media. Furthermore, the US Department of Justice is also investigating.

Social Media responsible for spreading extreme racist ‘white replacement’ theories? Live streaming murder on Twitch and Facebook? Incrediblly, this is exactly the case and like a broken record we keep listening to the same track over and over with no progress towards real regulation or real solutions.

Murder by numbers

On May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron drove over 200 miles from his home to a primarily black neighbourhood grocery store in Buffalo. He entered the parking lot and started shooting. By the end of his rampage, 13 people were shot, 11 of them black, and 10 of his victims died. 

Among Gendron’s victims were:

  • Roberta Drury, 32, who had moved to Buffalo to be with her brother, who recently had a bone marrow transplant.
  • Heyward Patterson, 67, a dedicated church-goer who regularly drove neighbors to and from the supermarket.
  • Pearl Young, 77, who volunteered every Saturday at a local soup kitchen.

How could anyone think these hard-working people were secretly conspiring to overthrow the white race? It’s sheer lunacy.

Gendron is a self-described white supremacist, a cold-blooded murderer, and apparently a Tucker Carlson ‘white replacement’ theory supporter. He had been admitted to hospital for mental evaluation after screaming racist slurs at school, and then wrote a 180-page racist manifesto. 

Okay, so this guy was obviously seven cans short of a six-pack, but why blame social media?

Coming to you live

Well, Gendron like his racist hero in New Zealand a few years back, live streamed his murderous rampage on Twitch and Facebook. Kudos to Twitch for removing the video within 2 minutes of it being posted. Facebook, in it’s typical cavalier fashion, waited until the post was forwarded 46,000 times over ten hours before they pulled it. That’s right – Facebook generated revenue by selling ads to people watching a mass murder. Mark Zuckerberg absolutely profited from people dying in real time!

I am sick and tired of Big Tech platforms indiscriminately spreading lies and racist conspiracy theories, making their owners embarrassingly rich, while innocent people die. If Facebook were a traditional TV station, their license would have been revoked many years ago.

Do your job FFS!

Why aren’t regulators getting serious about ending racism on social media? Governments created regulators to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. Yet we are repeatedly presented with overwhelming evidence of social media’s complicity in murder. Have we forgotten Facebook’s admission of support for the genocidal killing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar?

It’s bad enough that murderers and terrorists are allowed to spread their online hate to an audience of millions. But the fact that Big Tech and the regulators who are supposed to control them are doing absolutely nothing, makes both just as guilty as Payton Gendron and his deranged heroes.