New Zealand Shooter Manifesto Full Text Read

The Shooter's Manifesto Was Designed to Troll

The fierce rhetoric was written for an audition.

New Zealand police push back members of the public after the shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch.
New Zealand police force push back members of the public afterward the shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch. ( Reuters )

In the hours after the horrific mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, people desperately searched the internet for any sign of a motive or meaning behind the assail. Early Fri, a number of unverified social-media posts surfaced, forth with a bizarre manifesto posted to 8chan, rich with irony and references to memes.

Together, the posts propose that every aspect of the shootings was designed to gain maximum attention online, in part by baiting the media. The shooter live-streamed the assail itself on Facebook, and the video was quickly shared beyond YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Earlier committing the human action, he shouted, "Retrieve, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie," a reference to Felix Kjellberg, who runs YouTube'south nigh subscribed-to aqueduct. The phrase itself is a meme started by PewDiePie'southward fans, and its goal is to be reprinted.

Kjellberg, who has previously found himself embroiled in controversy over alleged anti-Semitism, disavowed the shooting on Twitter Friday morning. "Merely heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch. I experience admittedly sickened having my proper name uttered by this person. My heart and thoughts get out to the victims, families and anybody affected past this tragedy," he wrote. By forcing Kjellberg to acknowledge the attack, the shooter succeeded in further spreading the word about the crime to Kjellberg'southward tens of millions of followers.

Significant portions of the manifesto appear to be an elaborate troll, written to casualty on the mainstream media's worst tendencies. As the journalist Robert Evans noted, "This manifesto is a trap … laid for journalists searching for the meaning behind this horrific criminal offense. There is truth in at that place, and valuable clues to the shooter's radicalization, but it is cached beneath a great deal of, for lack of a better word, 'shitposting.'"

Shitposting is a slang term used to describe the act of posting trollish and usually ironic content designed to derail a conversation or elicit a strong reaction from people who aren't in on the joke. Sure aspects of the shooter's manifesto fall into this category. He includes Navy Seal Copypasta, a meme that originated on 4chan. He claims that Spyro: Year of the Dragon, a video game, taught him ethno-nationalism and that Fortnite taught him to "floss on the corpses," referring to a viral trip the light fantastic move from the game. These absurd references are meant to troll readers.

The shooter also credits the far-right personality Candace Owens with helping to "button me further and farther into the belief of violence over meekness." Though the shooter could be a 18-carat fan of Owens, who has been known to espouse correct-leaning views on clearing and gun control, this reference might be meant to incite Owens's critics to blame her.

That doesn't mean the racism expressed throughout the 74-page manifesto isn't genuine. Merely the complexities of the crime are still unfolding, and as the New York Times journalist Kevin Roose cautioned, "The NZ shooter's apparent manifesto is thick with irony and meta-text and very easy to misinterpret." Unfortunately, when journalists report on these horrific acts, the shooter's mean messages are sometimes amplified in the process. But the origins of that hate and the shooter's public postings practice demand to be examined, fifty-fifty when taking them at face up value is difficult.

Mass killers take long exploited the media environments they operate inside. The Zodiac killer gained notoriety past persuading newspapers to publish his cryptic messages. In 2015, a shooter in Virginia killed people during a alive tv set broadcast.

Every bit the internet and social media have democratized access to data, much of it spreads without necessary context. As the Verge writer Elizabeth Lopatto noted in 2015, "Our interactions with these killers were mediated past huge media gatekeepers—their manifestos were left at their homes, or sent to newspapers and Telly stations. If the manifestos appeared at all, they were quoted from, rather than released in full. This is no longer the case."

While this organization of gatekeeping itself was undoubtedly problematic, since many of the gatekeepers upheld norms and power structures built on privilege, applied science has upended our media environs and then quickly that many people are ill-equipped to handle the new data environment. We've seen the consequences of this play out in the ascension of simulated news, thriving misinformation campaigns, and baroque viral hoaxes warped by trolls to capitalize on people'due south worst fears.

Before people can fifty-fifty brainstorm to grasp the nuances of today's internet, they tin be radicalized past information technology. Platforms such as YouTube and Facebook can send users barreling into fringe communities where extremist views are normalized and avant-garde. Because these communities have so successfully adopted irony as a cloaking device for promoting extremism, outsiders are left confused as to what is a real threat and what's just trolling. The darker corners of the internet are and then fragmented that even when they spawn a mass shooting, as in New Zealand, the shooter'south words can be most incommunicable to parse, even for those who are Extremely Online.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/the-shooters-manifesto-was-designed-to-troll/585058/

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