On Saturday, May 14, an 18-year-old white male killed 10 people and wounded three others at the Tops Friendly Market grocery store in Buffalo, New York. According to an alleged manifesto said to be written by the shooter, identified as Payton Gendron of Conklin, New York, the attack was racially-motivated, with Gendron allegedly citing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory as a motivator for the attack.
The shooter was specifically targeting black people, with 11 of the 13 victims being black, and two being white. The shooter has since been arrested and charged with first-degree murder, but has pleaded not guilty, according to various news reports. Those same reports have shed light on other details surrounding the incident, including how the shooter utilized live-streaming platform Twitch as well ascommunication platform Discord.
According to a report byIntelligencer, Gendron used Discord to post a to-do list for the shooting. As far asTwitchgoes, the shooting could be seen on the live-streaming platform when it first started. Twitch toldThe Hollywood Reporterthat the live-stream was shut down “less than two minutes” after the shooting started and that the user has been “indefinitely suspended.” Twitch says that it is also working to monitor any users that may attempt to rebroadcast the footage of the shooting.
This is not the first time that a mass shooting has been streamed live on Twitch. As some may recall, the2019 mass shooting in a German synagoguewas streamed on Twitch for nearly 35 minutes before it was pulled.
Based on how quickly Twitch was able to pull the footage of the Buffalo shooting, it seems as though live-streaming platforms have been getting better at reacting when this kind of content is displayed. However, it’s clear that there is still more work that needs to be done. The very nature of Twitch streams andother live-streaming platformsmeans that it’s going to be very difficult to completely stop this kind of content from being displayed, unfortunately.
