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Live Video has shown a boy assaulting Jews, feminism and immigrants before shooting two people.
(JTA) — As Jews around the world were marking the holiest day of the year on Wednesday, news broke of an attack near a synagogue in the German city of Halle. With some 50 worshippers gathered for the Yom Kippur service, the gunman tried to enter the synagogue and, when that failed, shot a woman outside and a man at a nearby kebab shop, killing both.
A chilling detail emerged about the attack: The shooter had streamed it live online.
Users of Twitch, a streaming platform for video game enthusiasts, can watch the death shooter oppose Jews, feminism and immigrants before killing the two victims. It was a bizarre reminder of the killing of another 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March, which was livestreamed on Facebook.
German police knew the Halle suspect as 27-year-old Stephan Balliet, who lived with his mother in Close By Town.
Though the video did not remain on Twitch for long, it was captured and shared on other platforms.
Here’s what you need to know about Twitch, what makes it unique and how it compares to other sites used by extremists.
What is Twitch?
Launched in 2011, the site allows users to livestream videos. It started as a spinoff of Justin.tv, named after Justin Kan, a Yale graduate who attached a camera to his hat and livestreamed his life for nine months. Three years later, their parent company, Twitch Interactive, shut down Justin.tv to focus on Twitch, which was growing rapidly. In 2014, Amazon acquired Twitch Interactive for $970 million.
Twitch, which claims to have more than 15 million active users, is basically used through players to transmit through game video games. Some videos show the player’s screen as they play, while others show the player communicates with the camera. There are categories for the types of games, as well as a “Just Chat” section, in which users can have difficulty communicating over anything themselves. A 2017 New Yorker article reported that maximum popular users can win $ 2 million according to the annual transmission videos on the site.
Wednesday’s shooting was not the first captured on Twitch. Last year, a shooter opened the fireplace in a multitude game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida. Although you can’t see the shooting, shots and screams you can hear the transmission.
Twitch also faced court cases from gamers who said they were harassed through the site’s basically male user base.
How do you compare Twitch with the sites used through extremists?
Far-right attackers have used a number of websites to promote themselves. Robert Bowers, the suspect in last year’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, used Gab to rail against Jews and immigrants. Suspects in three shootings — Christchurch, a synagogue in Poway, California, and a Walmart in El Paso — allegedly posted manifestos on 8chan, an internet forum that was taken offline in August.
But Twitch differs from those sites and similar ones, like 4chan, where loose moderation policies tend to attract extremists. The gaming site “is not inherently an extremist platform at all,” said Oren Segal, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
“Most of the activity in this is for absolutely valid purposes,” Segal told the Jewish telegraphic agency on Thursday. “The challenge that all platforms have is how they deal with this user segment that wish to exploit it for hatred, fanaticism and violence. “
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were upset, and were criticized for having done enough to combat hate messages in their sites.
“Whatever this platform is, extremists will locate it and verify it to exploit it,” Segal said. “And that only emphasizes the broader ecosystem that will have to be addressed when technical means to repel this hatred. “
How did Twitch respond?
On Wednesday, the site said it was “shocked and saddened” by the shooting and that it “has a zero-tolerance policy against hateful conduct.” Twitch said the shooting suspect streamed the attack for 35 minutes but that only about five people saw it live. A recording of the stream was viewed by around 2,200 people before it was taken down, the site said.
— Twitch (@Twitch) October 9, 2019
Although the video was deleted, it had already been recorded through internet users. They posted the video on platforms popular with white supremacists: the Telegram chat app and forums like 4chan.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, reported that social media sites do not allow instant live broadcasting. Instead, he said, they institute a retention capability so that videos can be projected for violent content before they can be viewed.
“Extremists of all kinds now incorporate broadcast capabilities to spill out, to distribute terror on a global scale, to use it as a way to get on the map with other extremists,” Cooper said at JTA.
Why did the suspect contracted?
That is to say with certainty, however, Segal says that vernacular games have become increasingly unusual among violent extremists who discuss violent attacks online.
“We’ve noticed that online spaces react not only through glorifying attacks, but comment on how the shooter killed more people than the other, or didn’t, who will get the score,” he said.
The most youthful demography of Twitch users can also be attractive.
“I think naturally as gaming becomes more part of the culture more broadly, we’re seeing how that sort of gaming ideas play out within extremist spaces as well,” Segal said. “In that sense, gaming platforms may be particularly vulnerable moving forward to the exploitation from extremists”
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