How Tech Giants Gave the NZ Shooter More Firepower
The Mother Jones Podcast
Mother Jones
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2019
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last Friday, at least 50 people were killed at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. While the perpetrator’s exact path to radicalization is still unknown, one thing has become increasingly clear: This was an attack crafted by the internet and for the internet, representing a new level of super-viral violence. The Christchurch shooter exploited an unwitting ally in the form of giant tech companies, who have proven themselves unable or unwilling to stop the spread of hate speech on their platforms. In doing so, he immediately turned some of America’s most profitable and influential companies into distributors of a lurid white nationalist recruitment video. Joining host Jamilah King are two experts on social media platforms and how they operate, Mother Jones reporters Ali Breland and Pema Levy. Also on the show, our National Affairs Editor, Mark Follman, describes how the rise of a global white supremacist movement combined with the rise of Trumpism, to create a highly combustible fuel for this kind of extreme violence.
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Mother Jones Podcast. I'm Jamila King in New York. |
| 0:05.0 | On today's show, at least 50 people were killed in the Christ Church mosque shootings. |
| 0:19.0 | Now, finally, is there something of a reckoning for the kinds of online hate groups that |
| 0:25.5 | harbored the terrorists? In the first 24 hours Facebook says that it removed 1.5 |
| 0:30.7 | million videos of the attack. |
| 0:32.6 | How social media platforms became mega distributors |
| 0:36.8 | of his virulent white supremacy recruitment video. |
| 0:40.6 | They have |
| 0:45.0 | for something like, say, neo-Nazis. |
| 0:47.5 | How the attacker turned super violent into super viral. Also on the show, those people have his back and he apparently has |
| 0:56.5 | theirs, he's with them. How the rise of white extremism has combined with the rise of Trump into a highly combustible mix. |
| 1:06.0 | It has a real world effect. |
| 1:08.0 | I hope you can stick around. |
| 1:17.0 | It happened again. Okay, it's a confusing picture this afternoon. |
| 1:21.0 | Last Friday, I bet you sat like me. |
| 1:23.6 | Christchurch, the entire city is in lockdown. |
| 1:26.4 | Stunned and horrified. |
| 1:27.6 | This is very much a developing situation in Christ. |
| 1:30.5 | Cycling through social media posts on your phone, reading those grim early news reports of yet another mass shooting. |
| 1:37.0 | It's been more than 90 minutes now since the first reported shooting. |
| 1:40.0 | New Zealand police say they are hunting an active shooter. |
| 1:44.4 | Flicking through Facebook, Twitter, and early internet searches often the picture |
... |
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