In fringe online forums known for extremist activity, users were asking, “Where can I find the livestream?” As information about the mass shooting in Kentucky from last week was revealed. On popular social media platforms, spammy links appeared, offering to display the horrifying event, which further intensified people’s curiosity.
“Please.” People have asked several times if they could see it emphasized by pairing it with all caps – “Have you sent it?” While discussing the existence of a livestream on a Reddit page where users could watch similar actions being promoted and filmed by shooters from the past who used GoPro cameras, some users commented that it would violate the rules of the subreddit. They also encouraged the emulation of these past shooters, particularly extremists, on Telegram, where they could view similar actions being promoted and livestreamed. Users who had seen a copy of the livestream were clamoring to know the location of it, as they revealed in comments on past livestreams and gleefully distributed footage on 4chan. Really, the user needed to see the footage.
Sturgeon, the 25-year-old employee, was killed and subsequently shot in a gunfight with responding officers. According to an unnamed city official cited by CNN, the gunman was greeted by a co-worker before shooting her and then firing at other colleagues. The livestream on Instagram, which was reported by CNN, showed the gunman, identified as Connor Sturgeon, engaging in workplace violence and killing five people. The parent company of Meta said that the footage was quickly removed. The attack took place on April 10 at the Old National Bank in Louisville, where Sturgeon worked.
Preventing the dissemination and circulation of a video after it has been shared, duplicated, and circulated is exceedingly difficult. This has been evidenced by past incidents of shootings. It seems that the rapid spread of the livestream video was effectively contained due to a combination of the shooter’s relative anonymity online and immediate removal. To illustrate, there was no promotion of the assailant’s actions on a platform such as 4chan prior to the assault.
I had never seen Krajcik’s video before, but when I watched it, I felt that it was very different from any other content I had ever seen. Maybe it was because of the fact that it was livestreamed, giving it a video-game-like or slaughter-like view of the whole event. In his manifesto, Tarrant wrote that watching Krajcik’s video was truly something else, unique. In October, Krajcik Juraj conducted his own attacks, killing two people and injuring three outside the LGBT bar in Bratislava. Subsequent killers have cited the livestream as a critical point of motivation and inspiration, as it continues to be readily accessible in various corners of the web. The shooting at the Al Noor Mosque began when Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist killer, walked into the mosque and started streaming live on Facebook in 2019. This event marked the accelerationism and white supremacism across the spectrum of extremists who continue to use it, causing harm to their victims.
The Livestream Spectators
There are reasons other than being connected to promotion content or extremist ideology movements that some people seek out the livestream of a targeted act of violence or mass shooting.
Wanting to see footage of a livestreamed attack is not just harmless curiosity, but rather a reflection of both desensitization to violence and a morbid curiosity that feeds on the sensationalism of violent acts. There is also the likelihood that those who harbor suicidal ideations or teeter on the edge of extremist ideologies may dangerously nourish themselves with this kind of first-person, bird’s-eye-view content.
Activism argues that in order to show the need for stricter gun laws, some social media calls for the release of livestream footage that has shocked viewers and further built support for violence.
Conspiracy theorists
If an individual believes that they need to use an act of force in order to stop what they believe is potential violence fueled by conspiracy theory extremism, etc., They assert that the government was behind the incident and attempt to disprove the theory by seeking livestream videos in which these individuals distract from another event or further intended policy agenda operations. Like clockwork, mass shootings are quickly branded as “false flag” operations by conspiracy theorists on social media.
Gamification
This is a trend in which the number of lives lost in a mass act of violence, which is a high count, is reduced as a “score” in a video game-like scenario, with viewers cheering on the protagonist shooter. The footage of the Christchurch shootings in 2019, for example, was doctored by “fans” of Tarrant to add messaging graphics, sounds, and themes that espouse similar racially motivated propaganda. This furthered the narrative of white supremacist extremists espousing the superiority of the white race, resulting in a joint report from the Department of Homeland Security and FBI to Congress in 2021, stating that attacks by future attackers could attempt to mobilize faster, inspire more lethal acts, and disseminate propaganda widely on encrypted chat applications and online forums.
Tactical emulation
In order to discuss what could potentially inflict more terror in a different manner next time, it is important to consider the acts of extremists who often perform postmortems on attacks, regardless of whether or not the individual is an adherent to their own ideology. The shooting at the Boulder supermarket in 2021 has not been classified as an act of terrorism by prosecutors. The attack, which was inspired by a special edition of the Guide and Praise magazine, studied the Arabian Peninsula lone shooting and offered recommendations based on the mass shooting perpetrated by al-Qaeda. This “method best” filming operation was conducted with a camera attached to the head, and it is often broadcasted live directly on YouTube or Facebook. Alternatively, someone else can also film the operation and send the message through social media. It is important to note that this approach would not be considered acceptable in New Zealand, as it would lead to the killing of Muslims who are not our enemies.
Inspiration
Livestreams can potentially act as a tool for “suicide-by-cop” shooters, but it is not necessarily limited to inspiring other attacks. In addition, these livestreams are intended to incite and recruit individuals through propaganda videos. The footage used in these videos includes attacks by individuals as well as propaganda from extremist movements such as accelerationists, neo-Nazis, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. The livestreams themselves encourage others to launch attacks and use memes to further their agenda. The video showing the ideology of the shooter will be used to fuel future perpetrators, regardless of the killer’s specific group affiliation.
Copycatting
Extremists aim to breed a chain of copycats by distributing livestreams behind their own footage, allowing those who come to see themselves in the killer’s viewpoint to leave and raise up the next mass shooter.
Here is the inverted version of the input paragraph: “In his 180-page document, Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron wrote, “Without his live broadcast I would probably have no knowledge about the genuine issues the West is encountering.” Brenton’s live broadcast initiated everything you observe here,” Gendron later clarified that he initially encountered a GIF of the Christchurch live broadcast while browsing 4chan then proceeded to search for the complete video, and watching that led him to discover Tarrant’s document. “I then discovered other assailants, such as Patrick Crucius, Anders Breivek, Dylann Roof, and John Earnest,” he stated. “…It was there I began to contemplate committing [sic] to an assault. To commit to aggression. I would follow Tarrant’s example and the attacks of numerous others like him.”
He expressed, “I believe that broadcasting this assault provides me with some encouragement because I am aware that certain individuals will be supporting me.” He pointed out that “The video will be streamed live and the manifesto will be posted online to expand the reach and disseminate my ideologies,” including a schedule where he would monitor Discord once filming commenced to verify the smooth functioning of the livestream. Further into the text, Gendron outlined his tactical strategy ranging from choosing targets to acquiring weapons and transportation.
By this point, the livestream had already been obtained by those who would distribute it. However, Twitch stated that it removed the video within the initial two minutes of the live footage starting, following the Buffalo attack. He acknowledged that if it is reported and taken down early, the intended outcome may not be achieved. The duration of approximately 35 minutes provided enough time for capturing all the significant events. This duration also reveals that a prior attack (the Halle Synagogue Shooting) was recorded on Twitch. His choice of Twitch as the live-streaming platform was influenced, in part, by Gendron’s discussion of his GoPro camera.
“After years of delaying, what needed to be accomplished, a fresh stimulus, a new inspiration was provided to me by Payton Gendron’s livestream. The decisive blow was Payton Gendron,” stated Krajcik in his manifesto as the Bratislava shooter transitioned from plotting violent acts to embracing radical ideology.
The livestream shooting will have an audience somewhere at home once, and the livestream shooting can be provided by constraints that aren’t ideologically limited, providing inspiration. What initially might be circulated out of morbid curiosity can end up being transformed into a deadly training tool or incitement meme that plays a role in fueling the next mass shooting.
Bridget Johnson.
Bridget Johnson. is the Managing Editor for Homeland Security Today. A veteran journalist whose news articles and analyses have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe, Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor and a foreign policy writer at The Hill. Previously she was an editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and syndicated nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. Bridget is a terrorism analyst and security consultant with a specialty in online open-source extremist propaganda, incitement, recruitment, and training. She hosts and presents in Homeland Security Today law enforcement training webinars studying a range of counterterrorism topics including conspiracy theory extremism, complex coordinated attacks, critical infrastructure attacks, arson terrorism, drone and venue threats, antisemitism and white supremacists, anti-government extremism, and WMD threats. She is a Senior Risk Analyst for Gate 15 and a private investigator. Bridget is an NPR on-air contributor and has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, New York Observer, National Review Online, Politico, New York Daily News, The Jerusalem Post, The Hill, Washington Times, RealClearWorld and more, and has myriad television and radio credits including Al-Jazeera, BBC and SiriusXM.