Opinion
The Massacre in New Zealand Was Made to Go Viral
The attack marks a grim new age of social media-fueled terrorism.
By Charlie Warzel March 15, 2019
Mr. Warzel is an Opinion writer at large.

On Friday, a man in his late 20s strapped on a helmet camera, loaded his car with weapons, drove to a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and began shooting at anyone who came into his line of vision. He broadcast the act of mass terror live for the world to watch on social media.

Forty-nine people were killed in the attack, which occurred at two different mosques in the city.

A 17-minute video of a portion of the attack, which leapt across the internet faster than social media censors could remove it, is one of the most disturbing, high-definition records of a mass casualty attack of the digital age — a grotesque first-person-shooter-like record of man’s capacity for inhumanity.

Videos of attacks are designed to amplify the terror, of course. But what makes this atrocity “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence,” as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it, is both the methodical nature in which the massacre was conducted and how it was apparently engineered for maximum virality.

Though platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube scrambled to take down the recording and an accompanying manifesto from the gunman, they were no match for the speed of their users; new artificial-intelligence tools created to scrub such platforms of terrorist content could not defeat human cunning and impulse to gawk. In minutes, the video was downloaded and mirrored onto additional platforms where it ricocheted around the globe. Still frames of bodies were screenshotted and uploaded to sites like Reddit, 4chan and Twitter where it was shared and reshared.
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