The El Paso Shooting and the Virality of Evil | The New Yorker
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The national conversation will now turn, as it should, to gun control, to mental illness, and to the President’s practice of exacerbating racial tensions, which has been one of his avocations for decades and now appears to be his central reëlection strategy. But there’s also a more specific question: what can be done about the fact that so many of these terrorists—in Pittsburgh, in Poway, in Christchurch, in El Paso—seem to find inspiration in the same online spaces? Each killer, in the moment, may have acted alone, but they all appear to have been zealous converts to the same ideology—a paranoid snarl of raw anger, radical nationalism, unhinged nihilism, and fears of “white genocide” that is still referred to as “fringe,” although it’s creeping precariously close to the mainstream. On many social networks that bill themselves as bulwarks of “free speech,” including Gab, 4chan, and 8chan, this way of thinking is so dominant that it is often taken for granted. In April, the Anti-Defamation League wrote that such platforms “serve as round-the-clock white supremacist rallies.”
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Past New Yorker coverage of mass shootings and the battle over gun control.
Can these platforms simply be shut down? The answer is complicated, but basically binary: there is a lot that private companies can do to censor speech, but much less that the government can do. The United States has some of the most expansive free-speech protections in the world. There are exceptions, such as incitement to violence, but the bar to prove incitement is quite high. In the nineteen-sixties, a Ku Klux Klan leader was arrested under an Ohio law that prohibited advocating “crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism.” But the Supreme Court—at the time, arguably the most liberal Court in American history—ruled unanimously that the Klan leader’s First Amendment rights had been violated. This case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, laid out the standard that still applies: the government can only censor speech if it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action.” Some of the recent white-supremacist manifestos might meet this standard, and yet, even if one or several of them could be banned, this wouldn’t necessarily apply to the platforms on which the manifestos are posted. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, a site’s owner is not liable for the content on that site. In March, the Washington Post reported that the owner of 8chan, Jim Watkins, an American living in the Philippines, had “built a technical fortress to guard 8chan from potential takedowns.” The site’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, who no longer works at the company, told the Post that Watkins was “content to lose money” on the site: “8chan is like a boat to Jim.” A boat may be full of snakes, or explosives, but this doesn’t guarantee that the government will be able to seize it.