8 ms·

Attorney General to investigate social media companies’ role in Buffalo attack

moistly 4y ago
One thing is certain: without change, mass killings in schools and of minorities will continue unabated. I suppose the population can be divided between those who find these levels of violence unacceptable, and those who find it acceptable.
eli 4y ago
I don’t get it. Seems like purely a stunt. What plausible legal violation could there have been? If you want to and a company indirectly involved wouldn’t the gun manufacturer be more liable?
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  Obviously the social media companies need to police wrongthink. Not that I’m saying what that individual did wasn’t 100% wrong but any politician who is worth their beans will not let a tragedy go to waste.
  - Bostonian 4y ago
    When someone writes that they are going to kill people, that should be taken down.
    - teddyh 4y ago
      All calls for censorship should be taken down.
      - avs733 4y ago
        Isn’t this also a call for censorship? I make the point not to be sarcastic but to note that there really are paradoxes and nuances within the concept of free speech. Trying to establish hard bound rules is more likely to lead to abuse then an honest discussion that acknowledges ambiguity.
        teddyh 4y ago
        > Isn’t this also a call for censorship? Yes. All Cretans are liars.
        towaway15463 4y ago
        All comments critical of censorship should be taken down.
        avs733 4y ago
        hear, hear!
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      Depends on the context, really. “Im gonna kill all you fools” when talking about the company kickball tournament shouldn’t result in a swat team breaking down your front door.
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        In the UK it does and I would say it is a bad thing. It is more or less delegalizing working class sociolect.
    - eli 4y ago
      So like a legally mandated takedown procedure for speech? Or you mean Discord should have employees individually review each message before it's transmitted?
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Seems unlikely to be any charges out of this, criminal or civil, but that doesn't mean you can't learn something from what happened. "We should better monitor these sites" might be an entirely valid conclusion.
  - sixQuarks 4y ago
    How many people die from mass shootings per year? Now compare that to the number of people that die in car accidents. It’s not even close. I do not want our civil liberties eroded in any way because of mass shootings. Government always uses emotional tragedies to grab authoritarian power.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      To be fair, there are already a lot of regulations about who can drive a car (on public roads) and which sorts of cars can be used. Be careful that you're not inadvertently asking for social media to be regulated more like cars. Fortunately, however, there are plenty of countries that have fewer mass shootings and arguably better protection of civil liberties than the US, so they might provide some inspiration.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > How many people die from mass shootings per year? Now compare that to the number of people that die in car accidents. I mean, to take my car out in public, I'm required to have a license, registration, inspection, various safety devices, and follow a variety of usage rules.
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        You can still buy or build a car without any of that for use on your own property or other private places that allow it, but there's no practical barrier to you taking it out on public roads other than the risk of being pulled over and ticketed.
        4y ago
- sseagull 4y ago
  It looks like the law allows the governor to ask the AG to investigate matters of public interest related to public safety. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a violation of the law. “…New York Executive Law Section 63(8), which permits the attorney general to investigate matters concerning public peace, public safety, and public justice and to subpoena witnesses and compel the production of documents.”
  - eli 4y ago
    I wasn’t doubting the legality of the investigation itself, just what she will find.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Seems like purely a stunt. What plausible legal violation could there have been? The kind of referral from the Governor's office is not a criminal referral but more of a policy referral; while there are some kinds of legal liability that might be involved, that's not really even superficially the point of the referral and the legal authority under which it was made: understanding issues contributing to a public safety problem is. The AG is, yes, the top prosecutorial authority of the state, but that isn't the whole of their role. > If you want to and a company indirectly involved wouldn’t the gun manufacturer be more liable? Probably not; there is probably far less evidence that the gun manufacturer knew, or should reasonably have known, about the specific act it was contributing to.
  - eli 4y ago
    Sure, fair enough. I'm extremely skeptical of a legislative solution here too. > Probably not; there is probably far less evidence that the gun manufacturer knew... What acts do you think civilians use an AR-15 style rifle for? What percentage of AR-15 holders shoot a person versus the percentage of social media users?
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Would Toyota be liable if someone rammed a Tacoma into a crowd?
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    <insert "well yes, but actually no" meme here> People tend to bend over backwards to give Toyota the benefit of the doubt where possible. If it was a FCA product they'd be out for blood.
    - dotadegenerate 4y ago
  - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
    In your example, Toyota didn't host and ignore/hardly moderate content on a social media platform used to plan a racially motivated attack which could also be considered a domestic terrorist act. Toyota manufactured a truck. Your analogy would be like holding the keyboard manufacturer that the perpetrator used to type hateful things onto various social media sites.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      The post I was replying to was asking if the gun manufacturer could be held liable
- vegai_ 4y ago
  I think a great comparison to the current situation with social media is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead -- because of the following: 1. The companies that run these giant platforms know about the problems they cause 2. Those companies are hiding data about the problem 3. Those companies are doing nothing to fix the situation 4. Those companies are actually doing everything they can to make the situation worse Even worse than oil companies and lead in gasoline, these companies absolutely rely on generating hate, because that generates clicks/doomscrolling which brings them revenue. So they will continue to do nothing about this problem until they are forced to. The tool to force them to do this is government.
dragonwriter 4y ago
HN Headline uses “NY Attorney” instead of “Attorney General” or, if space is an issue, “AG”, which is somewhat misleading.
- giuliomagnifico 4y ago
  Ok, sorry, I'm italian, here we don't have an "Attorney General", so I was doubtful if was better write "NY" or "General", both weren't fit in the characters limit.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Not sure the system is the same in Italy. In the US, states and the Federal Government have an "Attorney General" who lead state legal enforcement, like lawsuits, defending the state, or prosecuting violators of state law. If you've ever seen Law and Order (not sure if popular overseas) it's like the city's District Attorney.
honkdaddy 4y ago
Discord had a major role in this shooters radicalization. The logs are available on KF, you won't gain anything from reading them, but I'll tell you that he'd been talking about this plan for a long time and that other individuals were extremely encouraging. There's a big difference, IMO, between watching low-budget white nationalism content on YouTube and having long, daily, hate-filled discussions with people who share your anger. People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards and was much more active on reddit and Discord.
- jbullock35 4y ago
  > People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards From the shooter's diary: > "I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior," he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffalo-shooting-supermarket-673-page-diary-reveals-suspects-descent-into-racist-extremism-11652814938 https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffalo-shooting-supermarket-67.... See https://archive.ph/0Nnj7 https://archive.ph/0Nnj7 for a non-paywalled version.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I don’t think shooter diaries are terribly authoritative when the shooter is crazy. We definitely have an unreliable narrator. If the goal is to prevent future shooters, I think log files of the shooters behavior is more important than what they say is most important.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - guelo 4y ago
      There's no evidence that the shooter is crazy.
hackererror404 4y ago
He had a history, he threatened a school but nothing was done. Seems like they are trying to point fingers when really we have a serious issue with treating mental illness and mental health. No one wishes to address the elephant in the room.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  "we must protect the children!" So let's focus on fighting privacy and encryption, and forget about gun access/fetishism for a moment. PS I agree with tour point 100%, just wanted to add another one to the list PPS Discord doesn't support e2ee, so it's not like we could've avoided this issue with banning it in the first place.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    I think his point is that the guy was already on the cop's radar as potentially being up to no good yet nothing was done. Law enforcement dropping the ball seems like a common fact pattern in these kinds of things. I get that you can't just imprison or otherwise institutionalize people without some offense being committed but there's got to be a better way than just ignoring it until they go postal.
    - lancesells 4y ago
      I have no answer for any of this but there's ~700k police in the US and a population of ~333M. 7 police for every 3330 citizens or 1 for every 475.
- JshWright 4y ago
  You're just pointing fingers in a different direction. As it turns out, this is a complicated issue, with multiple contributing factors, and just because we're talking about one doesn't mean another factor isn't important (though in this case there isn't any indication of serious mental illness, and that is a very common scapegoat in situations like this)
- tomrod 4y ago
dfxm12 4y ago
They shouldn't stop at social media and should also include cable news media connected to the attack, like Fox News. context - https://www.thewrap.com/tucker-carlson-faces-backlash-over-replacement-theory-rhetoric-after-buffalo-mass-shooting/ https://www.thewrap.com/tucker-carlson-faces-backlash-over-r...
notRobot 4y ago
Previous (rather low quality) discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31429883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31429883
incomingpain 4y ago
We absolutely should investigate the full extent of everything and potentially even find further criminals who may have incited or made the situation worse with criminal conspiracy can be caught and charged as well. I very much doubt they are going to find discord or reddit were conspiring or involved. No punishments are due for social media but other users on social media could absolutely have been criminal.
helloworld11 4y ago
And out trots another case of certain interests looking for excuses to censor, prohibit, "regulate", control and generally blame tools that tend to be used for individual expression because of their supposed role in making a violently mentally unstable person do or discuss things that normal people wouldn't normally do regardless of what they read, wrote or saw. Doesn't at all remind me of every previous case of certain books, video games, publishing tools and communication technologies being blamed in the name of "safety" as an excuse to clamp down. Remember how E2E encryption is a "terribly dangerous" thing because it protects pedophiles? Yeah....
jmyeet 4y ago
[flagged]
- meatsauce 4y ago
  - jmyeet 4y ago
    QED
  - tomrod 4y ago
    > If New York City were all White, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent. In an all-White Chicago, murder would decline 90 percent, rape by 81 percent, and robbery by 90 percent. This is way outside the extrapolation region and strongly asserts an unsupported hypothesis. What if it isn't the person's race that causes these reported and tabulated crimes (versus those unreported or let go)? What if it is poverty, intergenerational stress, and systemic differential treatment that drives people to commit crime? Hint: white people commit a lot of crime too.
    - meatsauce 4y ago
      "poverty, intergenerational stress, and systemic differential treatment" None of those terms, nor their arbitrary meanings, account for people who are in a similar financial or socio-economic situation, and yet don't commit car-jackings, rape, robbery, white collar crime, or shootings. Neither does it account for people in the exact same socio-economic situation moving up and thriving instead of victimizing families in their communities. "intergenerational stress" What exactly does this mean in the context of one's behavior? That the car-jacker who murdered a mother and her baby in order to escape prison bares a reduced responsibility for the crime? That at some point 200 to 10,000 years ago, some ill that befell someone with a similar skin color somehow absolves them of responsibility, or lessens the magnitude of their atrocity? Crime, like racism, isn't limited to just one race. I never implied otherwise. It is never the race that causes people to commit crime. Crime occurs in all races, globally. And in ever single case, it is the individual's choice to commit crime. What happened to their great-great-grandfather is irrelevant.

One thing is certain: without change, mass killings in schools and of minorities will continue unabated. I suppose the population can be divided between those who find these levels of violence unacceptable, and those who find it acceptable.

eli 4y ago

I don’t get it. Seems like purely a stunt. What plausible legal violation could there have been? If you want to and a company indirectly involved wouldn’t the gun manufacturer be more liable?

UncleEntity 4y ago
Obviously the social media companies need to police wrongthink. Not that I’m saying what that individual did wasn’t 100% wrong but any politician who is worth their beans will not let a tragedy go to waste.
- Bostonian 4y ago
  When someone writes that they are going to kill people, that should be taken down.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    All calls for censorship should be taken down.
    - avs733 4y ago
      Isn’t this also a call for censorship? I make the point not to be sarcastic but to note that there really are paradoxes and nuances within the concept of free speech. Trying to establish hard bound rules is more likely to lead to abuse then an honest discussion that acknowledges ambiguity.
      - teddyh 4y ago
        > Isn’t this also a call for censorship? Yes. All Cretans are liars.
      - towaway15463 4y ago
        All comments critical of censorship should be taken down.
        avs733 4y ago
        hear, hear!
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    Depends on the context, really. “Im gonna kill all you fools” when talking about the company kickball tournament shouldn’t result in a swat team breaking down your front door.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      In the UK it does and I would say it is a bad thing. It is more or less delegalizing working class sociolect.
  - eli 4y ago
    So like a legally mandated takedown procedure for speech? Or you mean Discord should have employees individually review each message before it's transmitted?
ceejayoz 4y ago
Seems unlikely to be any charges out of this, criminal or civil, but that doesn't mean you can't learn something from what happened. "We should better monitor these sites" might be an entirely valid conclusion.
- sixQuarks 4y ago
  How many people die from mass shootings per year? Now compare that to the number of people that die in car accidents. It’s not even close. I do not want our civil liberties eroded in any way because of mass shootings. Government always uses emotional tragedies to grab authoritarian power.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    To be fair, there are already a lot of regulations about who can drive a car (on public roads) and which sorts of cars can be used. Be careful that you're not inadvertently asking for social media to be regulated more like cars. Fortunately, however, there are plenty of countries that have fewer mass shootings and arguably better protection of civil liberties than the US, so they might provide some inspiration.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > How many people die from mass shootings per year? Now compare that to the number of people that die in car accidents. I mean, to take my car out in public, I'm required to have a license, registration, inspection, various safety devices, and follow a variety of usage rules.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      You can still buy or build a car without any of that for use on your own property or other private places that allow it, but there's no practical barrier to you taking it out on public roads other than the risk of being pulled over and ticketed.
      - 4y ago
sseagull 4y ago
It looks like the law allows the governor to ask the AG to investigate matters of public interest related to public safety. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a violation of the law. “…New York Executive Law Section 63(8), which permits the attorney general to investigate matters concerning public peace, public safety, and public justice and to subpoena witnesses and compel the production of documents.”
- eli 4y ago
  I wasn’t doubting the legality of the investigation itself, just what she will find.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Seems like purely a stunt. What plausible legal violation could there have been? The kind of referral from the Governor's office is not a criminal referral but more of a policy referral; while there are some kinds of legal liability that might be involved, that's not really even superficially the point of the referral and the legal authority under which it was made: understanding issues contributing to a public safety problem is. The AG is, yes, the top prosecutorial authority of the state, but that isn't the whole of their role. > If you want to and a company indirectly involved wouldn’t the gun manufacturer be more liable? Probably not; there is probably far less evidence that the gun manufacturer knew, or should reasonably have known, about the specific act it was contributing to.
- eli 4y ago
  Sure, fair enough. I'm extremely skeptical of a legislative solution here too. > Probably not; there is probably far less evidence that the gun manufacturer knew... What acts do you think civilians use an AR-15 style rifle for? What percentage of AR-15 holders shoot a person versus the percentage of social media users?
HideousKojima 4y ago
Would Toyota be liable if someone rammed a Tacoma into a crowd?
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  <insert "well yes, but actually no" meme here> People tend to bend over backwards to give Toyota the benefit of the doubt where possible. If it was a FCA product they'd be out for blood.
  - dotadegenerate 4y ago
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  In your example, Toyota didn't host and ignore/hardly moderate content on a social media platform used to plan a racially motivated attack which could also be considered a domestic terrorist act. Toyota manufactured a truck. Your analogy would be like holding the keyboard manufacturer that the perpetrator used to type hateful things onto various social media sites.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    The post I was replying to was asking if the gun manufacturer could be held liable
vegai_ 4y ago
I think a great comparison to the current situation with social media is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead -- because of the following: 1. The companies that run these giant platforms know about the problems they cause 2. Those companies are hiding data about the problem 3. Those companies are doing nothing to fix the situation 4. Those companies are actually doing everything they can to make the situation worse Even worse than oil companies and lead in gasoline, these companies absolutely rely on generating hate, because that generates clicks/doomscrolling which brings them revenue. So they will continue to do nothing about this problem until they are forced to. The tool to force them to do this is government.

dragonwriter 4y ago

HN Headline uses “NY Attorney” instead of “Attorney General” or, if space is an issue, “AG”, which is somewhat misleading.

giuliomagnifico 4y ago
Ok, sorry, I'm italian, here we don't have an "Attorney General", so I was doubtful if was better write "NY" or "General", both weren't fit in the characters limit.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Not sure the system is the same in Italy. In the US, states and the Federal Government have an "Attorney General" who lead state legal enforcement, like lawsuits, defending the state, or prosecuting violators of state law. If you've ever seen Law and Order (not sure if popular overseas) it's like the city's District Attorney.

honkdaddy 4y ago

Discord had a major role in this shooters radicalization. The logs are available on KF, you won't gain anything from reading them, but I'll tell you that he'd been talking about this plan for a long time and that other individuals were extremely encouraging. There's a big difference, IMO, between watching low-budget white nationalism content on YouTube and having long, daily, hate-filled discussions with people who share your anger. People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards and was much more active on reddit and Discord.

jbullock35 4y ago
> People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards From the shooter's diary: > "I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior," he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffalo-shooting-supermarket-673-page-diary-reveals-suspects-descent-into-racist-extremism-11652814938 https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffalo-shooting-supermarket-67.... See https://archive.ph/0Nnj7 https://archive.ph/0Nnj7 for a non-paywalled version.
- prepend 4y ago
  I don’t think shooter diaries are terribly authoritative when the shooter is crazy. We definitely have an unreliable narrator. If the goal is to prevent future shooters, I think log files of the shooters behavior is more important than what they say is most important.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - guelo 4y ago
    There's no evidence that the shooter is crazy.

hackererror404 4y ago

He had a history, he threatened a school but nothing was done. Seems like they are trying to point fingers when really we have a serious issue with treating mental illness and mental health. No one wishes to address the elephant in the room.

rpastuszak 4y ago
"we must protect the children!" So let's focus on fighting privacy and encryption, and forget about gun access/fetishism for a moment. PS I agree with tour point 100%, just wanted to add another one to the list PPS Discord doesn't support e2ee, so it's not like we could've avoided this issue with banning it in the first place.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  I think his point is that the guy was already on the cop's radar as potentially being up to no good yet nothing was done. Law enforcement dropping the ball seems like a common fact pattern in these kinds of things. I get that you can't just imprison or otherwise institutionalize people without some offense being committed but there's got to be a better way than just ignoring it until they go postal.
  - lancesells 4y ago
    I have no answer for any of this but there's ~700k police in the US and a population of ~333M. 7 police for every 3330 citizens or 1 for every 475.
JshWright 4y ago
You're just pointing fingers in a different direction. As it turns out, this is a complicated issue, with multiple contributing factors, and just because we're talking about one doesn't mean another factor isn't important (though in this case there isn't any indication of serious mental illness, and that is a very common scapegoat in situations like this)
tomrod 4y ago

dfxm12 4y ago

They shouldn't stop at social media and should also include cable news media connected to the attack, like Fox News. context - https://www.thewrap.com/tucker-carlson-faces-backlash-over-replacement-theory-rhetoric-after-buffalo-mass-shooting/ https://www.thewrap.com/tucker-carlson-faces-backlash-over-r...

notRobot 4y ago

Previous (rather low quality) discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31429883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31429883

incomingpain 4y ago

We absolutely should investigate the full extent of everything and potentially even find further criminals who may have incited or made the situation worse with criminal conspiracy can be caught and charged as well. I very much doubt they are going to find discord or reddit were conspiring or involved. No punishments are due for social media but other users on social media could absolutely have been criminal.

helloworld11 4y ago

And out trots another case of certain interests looking for excuses to censor, prohibit, "regulate", control and generally blame tools that tend to be used for individual expression because of their supposed role in making a violently mentally unstable person do or discuss things that normal people wouldn't normally do regardless of what they read, wrote or saw. Doesn't at all remind me of every previous case of certain books, video games, publishing tools and communication technologies being blamed in the name of "safety" as an excuse to clamp down. Remember how E2E encryption is a "terribly dangerous" thing because it protects pedophiles? Yeah....

jmyeet 4y ago

[flagged]

meatsauce 4y ago
- jmyeet 4y ago
  QED
- tomrod 4y ago
  > If New York City were all White, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent. In an all-White Chicago, murder would decline 90 percent, rape by 81 percent, and robbery by 90 percent. This is way outside the extrapolation region and strongly asserts an unsupported hypothesis. What if it isn't the person's race that causes these reported and tabulated crimes (versus those unreported or let go)? What if it is poverty, intergenerational stress, and systemic differential treatment that drives people to commit crime? Hint: white people commit a lot of crime too.
  - meatsauce 4y ago
    "poverty, intergenerational stress, and systemic differential treatment" None of those terms, nor their arbitrary meanings, account for people who are in a similar financial or socio-economic situation, and yet don't commit car-jackings, rape, robbery, white collar crime, or shootings. Neither does it account for people in the exact same socio-economic situation moving up and thriving instead of victimizing families in their communities. "intergenerational stress" What exactly does this mean in the context of one's behavior? That the car-jacker who murdered a mother and her baby in order to escape prison bares a reduced responsibility for the crime? That at some point 200 to 10,000 years ago, some ill that befell someone with a similar skin color somehow absolves them of responsibility, or lessens the magnitude of their atrocity? Crime, like racism, isn't limited to just one race. I never implied otherwise. It is never the race that causes people to commit crime. Crime occurs in all races, globally. And in ever single case, it is the individual's choice to commit crime. What happened to their great-great-grandfather is irrelevant.