Social media roasted over US shootings

Shootings that left 31 people dead and 53 injured in two US cities during a 24-hour period have prompted a national outcry over the role of social media in distributing white supremacist and extremist content online.

Violent extremism online has dominated the news since the shootings on Aug 3 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killed 22 people and 9 people in Dayton, Ohio, raising questions about online platforms' responsibility to deal with extremism.

The suspect in the El Paso case is accused of publishing an anti-immigrant "manifesto" on the web forum "8chan"' minutes before the attack took place.

Patrick Crusius, 21, of Allen, Texas, has been charged with capital murder in the mass shooting that left more than two dozen injured. He is being held without bond and prosecutors are handling the attack as a case of domestic terrorism.

Trump administration officials met with leaders from the technology companies last week and discussed efforts to combat online extremism.

A four-page document, titled "The Inconvenient Truth," was published on 8chan about 20 minutes before the shooting in El Paso. Shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, and at a synagogue in Poway, California, on April 27, began with a post on 8chan.

The suspect in the El Paso shooting claimed in the document that he was inspired by the Christchurch massacre that killed 51 people.

It is filled with white supremacist language and racist hatred aimed at immigrants and Latinos. The author says he opposes "race mixing" and encourages immigrants to return to their home countries.

The website 8chan has a history of use by extremists celebrating racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist violence. The El Paso shooting prompted the site's founder, Fredrick Brennan, who no longer controls it, to urge its owners to "do the world a favor and shut it off".

The site went offline after the cybersecurity company Cloudflare, which had been keeping the site online for years, decided to cut off services to 8chan under public pressure. The company Tucows, 8chan's domain name registrar, also said it would no longer provide services to the site.

"We have a white nationalist terrorism problem in this country and it's being aided and abetted by our largest technology companies," said the activist group Sleeping Giants in a tweet. "If you're doing business with a site that helps people spread violent, racist ideologies, you are just as culpable. Full stop," the group tweeted.

The El Paso shooting came days after a shooter killed three people and injured 13 others on July 28 at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California. The FBI announced on Tuesday it had opened a domestic terrorism investigation into the shooting.

The shooter, who died in the incident, had a "target list" of religious institutions, political organizations and federal buildings, said the police.

Authorities believe that the gunman in the Dayton shooting on Aug 3 was exploring "violent ideologies" before going on a killing spree. The shooter was killed in the incident, too.

"There is a direct correlation between the rise of hate groups on social media and the frequent attacks," Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center advocacy group, told USA Today.

Hankes said Twitter "does one of the worst jobs of content moderation", calling it an "absolute cesspool" of hate.

Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, said "posting to 8chan is a tactic" for attackers to gain attention.

The manifesto of the El Paso suspect contains instructions and a weapons kit and a call for continued violence, said Donovan. "It is meant to inspire other white supremacists," she said.