Today, Explained - A mass shooting, live-streamed

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

A terrorist attacked two mosques in New Zealand during Friday prayer, killing at least 49 people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A quick note for all those people trying to hire the perfect candidate for the job that they need filled like yesterday. LinkedIn Jobs makes it easy to get matched with quality candidates who fit your role best. Post a job today at LinkedIn.com slash explained and get $50 off your first job post. That is LinkedIn.com slash explained. Roweda Abdelaziz, you cover Islamophobia at the Huffington Post. What exactly happened earlier today in New Zealand? So earlier today, we found out that 49 people were killed at two mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand. This took place around noontime when a shooter had stormed the two mosques and kind of aimlessly just shot and murdered those worshippers when they were praying. And in addition to the 49 we know are dead now, there were dozens more injured, correct?

Correct. And that death toll is expected to rise as we continue to find out what's happening. What's the significance of the day and the time the shooter chose to execute this act of terrorism? So the timing of this terrorist attack is definitely not a coincidence. Fridays are the busiest day of the week for Muslims. So Muslims

pray five times a day. And so the noon prayer on Friday is known for where Muslims congregate in mosques around the country, around the world, for approximately an hour, where they listen to a sermon given by an imam, and then prayers are followed in congregation. And so it's a very busy time for any mosque anywhere, but in this particular mosque, hundreds of people in attendance, and these are men, women, children. People tend to take off that hour from work. If they're working, people come from their homes. So I think this is one of the many reasons why Muslims were shocked to see this happen and to learn that this occurred during this time. I think another thing that people find especially shocking about this event is that it occurred in New Zealand. Has anything like this ever happened in that country?

So nothing like this has happened in New Zealand before. In fact, the prime minister came out earlier and said that this was unprecedented. Unlike anything that we have experienced before. But as I say, New Zealand has been chosen because we are not a place where violent extremism exists. We reject those notions and we must continue to reject them. Gun violence in general is quite low in New Zealand. So no, this is a huge shock for not just Muslims in New Zealand, but to the country as a whole. Police reports say that four people were arrested. There's video of one shooter.

Do we have any idea why four people were arrested? How many people were involved in this act of terrorism? So the information coming out from police is quite scarce. So we don't exactly know why four people were arrested. But what we do know is that at least one of them is of Australian citizenship. And there seems to be that it was only one shooter. So even though there were two mosques affected, that there was one shooter and that this one man is in his late 20s. He has been charged. He was charged with murder. And that two explosive devices were found attached to a vehicle that they have stopped.

How does this act of terrorism against Muslims in New Zealand fit into growing Islamophobia across the world? Most recently, we've seen it with the Quebec mosque shootings, where a shooter also stormed a mosque and killed a number of Muslims who were also worshipping. They were doing the evening prayers there. And that was just last year. And in the UK, we saw a viral hashtag of punish a Muslim day, where there was a sick game system that gave points to people who verbally or, you know, physically abused and assaulted Muslims. And so this situation isn't happening in New Zealand. It's not just happening in the US. But unfortunately, we're seeing it happen in different countries across the world. And obviously, you know, the prime minister of

New Zealand condemned the attack today. This is a real opportunity for the international community, for countries across the world to condemn forcefully Islamophobia. Do you think leaders across the world will take that opportunity? The president started with a bit of that this morning and then quickly switched back to the Mueller investigation and the witch hunt. I hope so, but I can't say that many folks from the Muslim communities are expecting for their leaders to do this. You know, Muslims find themselves in a bind where quite often if the flip side happened and there was a terrorist attack of someone who proclaimed to be Muslim, you know, was part of a terrorist attack of someone who proclaimed to be Muslim, you know, was part of a terrorist group of some sort, ISIS or whatnot,

there seems to be this collective blame or this expectancy for Muslims to kind of come out and distance themselves and condemn that hatred. And yet now that Muslims are finding themselves yet again on the opposite side of that spectrum, they are hoping that leaders come out forcefully and unequivocally and stand for them. I just came back from a Friday prayer, a Jomar prayer here in New York City.

And one of the stunning and beautiful things that I saw that on my way over there, there were folks, non-Muslim community members, folks from the Jewish community, the Christian community, the disabled community, the LGBTQ community, holding up signs that had kind words saying, you are a blessing. We want you here. You deserve to be here. As Muslim members were walking to their Friday prayers. And a lot of these Muslims tell me that they were anxious. Some of them hesitated to go. Some of them really wanted to go. And so seeing that, I saw some Muslim worshipers cry and felt emotional and hug a lot of these allies. And so seeing that, I saw some Muslim worshippers cry and fell emotional and hug a lot of these allies. And so I think the situation on the ground and the support that

Muslims are receiving on the ground from their neighbors and families and friends is not being reflective in leadership, saying that this is unacceptable and intolerable and that hate of all kind, including hatred against Muslims, is just, you know, dead wrong. You know, you mentioned that you just went to a mosque in New York to report. But I wonder, how do you feel about going back to one to pray after today's events? It's difficult. Last night was particularly difficult for me. I was up all night covering the incident and the shooting when I thought I was done and, you know, tried to go to bed for a couple of hours to wake up in the morning and do it all over again.

I had a really difficult night where I just had traumatic nightmares where I was imagining myself in my own mosque at my own Friday prayers seeing, you know, a shooter come and target me and my family. I hope that once this is over, by this I just mean this current news cycle, because there's always, unfortunately, something to report on when it comes to hatred against the Muslim community, that I find that time and I can go back to the mosque and do what I need to do personally so that I can continue to have the energy and the courage and the strength to do my work and to do my work and to do my work well. The smash shooting was very, very online. From the live stream to the manifesto to the communities that fostered the shooter's white supremacy. We try to make sense of all of that after the break. I've been around some small businesses enough to know that running a small business isn't easy.

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Addie Robertson, you're a senior reporter for The Verge. The shooting in New Zealand was very online in a way I think we've never seen before. Is that fair? It's a very successful version of a formula that has been used before. Obviously, mass shootings are about getting attention. And to some extent, we've seen shootings and mass murders that were designed to grab people's attention online and take advantage of the way things spread. But this one was very, very good at being designed for going viral to an extent that I'm not sure we've seen before. And I guess that begins with the live streaming on Facebook of the shooting itself.

How exactly did the shooter go about doing that? The shooter streamed, as far as we know, a portion of the shooting on Facebook and then before that had sort of promoted it on other platforms, that he had gone to 8chan, which is this message board that hosts a lot of hate content and sort of advertised what he was doing. And then after the streaming, this popped up as a recorded video on lots of other platforms. It was on YouTube and Twitter. And at that point, it kind of just became a general piece of content circulating on the internet. And tell us more about 8chan because we're obviously pretty familiar with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, but this shooter belonged to this community called 8chan where much more horrendous ideas go to spread.

What exactly is this site? So 8chan is sort of a clone of the site 4chan, which is this anarchic message board where everyone is more or less anonymous and you post on this general message board and it tends very strongly toward memes and catchphrases. 8chan is that, but with a very, very strong sense of white nationalism and general hate. It's about getting a reaction out of people, and the easiest way to do that is to join sort of the worst cause that you can find. And is 8chan policed at all the way algorithms and humans moderate Facebook and YouTube and Twitter? Self-consciously as little as possible. 8chan has had problems with hosting child porn. It's not clear how much they think that's a problem, but it's gotten them delisted from Google. It has gotten them in trouble with hosting companies.

And so they've tried to remove things that are explicitly illegal. But other than that, there is explicitly no policy for something like hate speech. The shooter was also trying to draw attention to his manifesto. How exactly did he do that? In a sort of similar way on a superficial level, which is posting it on 8chan, making sure there are links to it. But it's also the sort of content of the manifesto, which was very, in sort of multiple senses, meme-y, that it included a bunch of sort of well-known catchphrases and was full of slogans and things that are easy to repeat and had sort of references to pop culture. And he mentioned that people should subscribe to PewDiePie. PewDiePie is like this Swedish YouTube phenomenon with like 90 million

followers. Yes. PewDiePie is the most popular YouTuber. He's a game streamer and sort of celebrity in his own right. And he's currently in a war over who will have the largest channel on YouTube with another channel called T-Series. And so this has become a really big, semi-ironic public fight where people are constantly urging each other to subscribe to PewDiePie. And so it's a reference to that. And he's super controversial, right? is both a way to reference a well-known thing people will recognize and also a call out in a way that PewDiePie kind of has to address. And he did. And he absolutely disavowed this, but that still brings that to more people's attention. Is it even worth trying to sift through this manifesto to understand it? One of the things that seems like it's actually changed a little

bit over the last several years, you're seeing people, I think, spend less time trying to divine the kind of core motivations of just how serious these people were and whether they really hated Muslims or whether they were just homicidal maniacs. And to say, look, this doesn't matter. You're trying to play these rhetorical games, but we know the thing that you've done, and the thing that you've done is terrible. I think beyond that, we're just going to have to deal with this in the way that we've dealt with mass shootings for a long time, which is to try to move toward not spending all of our time analyzing the sort of killer's personality or spending a lot of time naming the killer and to focus on the people who have been affected by this. I can't help but worry that we're going to see more people live streaming shootings now. Is that our future? Being able to spread something around the world with no gatekeepers, making it impossible to censor. That's one of the things

that we spent a long time saying we loved about the internet. This is us seeing the dark side of that. And eventually we're going to have to decide whether we think we can find a way to get rid of this vulnerability purely for bad actors, or if we need to fundamentally rethink the way that we want things to work on the internet. I think beyond that, right now, social media is absolutely opening up new ways to sort of take advantage of publicity. But there is already a very large industry devoted to covering shootings in ways that are sometimes salacious. Sort of traditional media has certainly been criticized for sensationalizing manifestos or for making celebrities out of killers. And I think that it's

important to see this as part of a longer tradition, not just a thing that has sprung up overnight. Addie Robertson is a senior reporter at The Verge. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. I'm going to go. To match you with quality candidates who make the most sense for your role, post a job today at LinkedIn.com slash explained and you will get $50 off your first job post at LinkedIn.com slash explained.