Online calls for violence, especially in a modern civil war, have soared following the attempted assassination of former President Trump, domestic extremism experts said Tuesday.
Moonshot, a research firm that monitors online extremism, said it tracked 1,599 civil war calls — a 633 percent increase over a typical day — the day after the July 13 shooting in Pennsylvania that killed one participant. at Trump’s rally and injured two others, in addition to grazing the former president.
CBS News was the first to report Moonshot research.
The calls were observed on several online platforms, including Reddit, YouTube, 4chan and some far-right discussion sites, CBS reported.
Moonshot also tracked 2,051 specific threats or encouragements of online violence in the 24 hours after the shooting, a number that is more than double the average volume of daily threats, a company spokesperson told The Hill.
“The increase in online calls is fairly typical of online discourse in spaces that glorify violence,” Elizabeth Neumann, director of strategy at Moonshot, told CBS. “The fact is that there is an online ecosystem that works day in and day out to encourage all types of violence, from political civil war to stupid school shootings.”
The FBI has spent the past few weeks combing through the online history of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, in an effort to determine a precise motive. In doing so, authorities discovered that Crooks appeared to post troubling content, including the embrace of political violence, in the years leading up to the assassination attempt.
Authorities discovered “a social media account believed to be associated with the shooter, around 2019, 2020,” said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. during a joint hearing from the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees last week.
“There have been over 700 comments posted to this account. Some of these comments, while ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, advocate political violence, and are extreme in nature,” Abbate said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a House committee last month that Crooks is believed to have conducted a Google search a week before the shooting, asking, “How far was Oswald from Kennedy,” in a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed the president. John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas.
The rise in calls for violence following last month’s shooting underscores a broader trend that mass violence is increasingly normalized and valorized in online spaces, Moonshot said.
Releasing a report Last month, with Everytown for Gun Safety, Moonshot said it discovered that “an ecosystem that amplifies mass shootings is thriving online,” while a “large portion” of the ecosystem thinks of past perpetrators as heroes.
“This is concerning because we know that those who commit mass violence often value previous killers,” the research firm wrote.
The Secret Service faced massive backlash in preparing for the event and responding to the shooting, with the fallout leading to Director Kimberly Cheatle resigning after a disastrous appearance before Congress to review the incident.
The Justice Department, through the FBI, is investigating the shooting, and Attorney General Merrick Garland said it was “extremely alarming” that Crooks was able to get so close to Trump during the rally.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
