The Interpreter: How online radicalization is changing the world

Lessons from mass shootings

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Friday, August 9, 2019

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Welcome to The Interpreter newsletter, by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who write a column by the same name.

On our minds: Online radicalization.

We Have Something Very Exciting for You on Sunday

Your Interpreter correspondents in São Paulo, Brazil, speaking to Renan Santos, the national coordinator for a right-wing political group called Movimento Brasil Livre. Francisco Proner

What are the consequences of the Internet's growing role as a force for radicalization?

That question is preoccupying the world more and more, and with greater urgency, including this week, after the authorities say a man who gave every indication of being radicalized into white nationalist terrorism killed 22 people in El Paso.

And it's a question that we have spent most of the year investigating for a project that we will finally be able to share with you on Sunday, when it will run as both a long-form article and a half-hour film.

You'll be able to find the article on NYTimes.com and, of course, via this newsletter around the same time. The film, which is an episode of The Times's new TV show, "The Weekly," will air on F/X at 10 p.m. Eastern time and appear on Hulu the next day.

Without giving too much away, we wanted to investigate whether the consequences of online radicalization, particularly through social media, might go beyond a few lone extremists to affect society as a whole.

After all, just about everyone uses social media. And the things that make it a force for extremism and misinformation apply universally. Could the most infamous extremists merely represent the tip of a much bigger iceberg?

To find out, we went to Brazil, where we tried to understand, as holistically as we could, social media's impact on every facet of life.

We picked the country for two reasons.

Brazil's politics have experienced a sudden, world-shaking shift, with the once-fringe, far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro becoming president this year. Something was clearly happening here.

And Brazil is the second-largest market for YouTube, after the United States. YouTube has not received as much scrutiny as, say, Facebook. But there is a growing sense that the platform's real-world impact might go far beyond that of other social networks — and that it has the power to radicalize people and communities in ways we are only beginning to understand.

"From my perspective, YouTube is perhaps the most troubling platform we have out there right now," Danah Boyd, founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, told us.

What we found in Brazil went far beyond anything we had anticipated, with important — and sometimes disturbing — lessons for us all.

Stay tuned. Coming Sunday.

The Price We Pay

Mourners at a memorial for the victims of the recent shooting in El Paso. Calla Kessler/The New York Times

How do we measure the costs of online radicalization? For the past few years, as we've reported on the ways social media is fueling extremism and violence all over the world, we've thought about how to answer that question. This week, after yet another mass shooting in which the gunman seems to have been inspired and encouraged by online extremism, that question is on our minds again.

One view argues that, statistically, Americans are still very unlikely to die in a mass shooting. Although gun deaths in the United States number in the tens of thousands per year, mass shootings contribute only a small fraction of that number. And an even smaller fraction of those attacks have clear ideological motivations, such as the white supremacy and violent misogyny that have become hallmarks of online radicalization.

But the harm of those attacks goes beyond the physical impact of bullets on flesh. They are terrifying. And the trauma they generate can affect a far broader population.

In the days that followed the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, a child psychologist we know was on his phone at all hours, reassuring scared kids that there was no reason to believe that their schools were unsafe. Over and over, he told his patients that the massacre had been an awful tragedy and that everyone in the country felt very sad. But don't worry, he said — grown-ups believed that other children were still safe in their schools.

Those were more innocent times.

Now, for millions of people, mass shootings, and the racist, misogynist manifestoes that often accompany them, signal that the groups they belong to are particularly at risk. And for many more, these shootings, which target the quotidian places where people go about their lives — schools, universities, places of worship, shopping centers and exercise studios — have systematically stripped away the sense that anywhere is safe.

Actuarially speaking, of course, most places are still fine. But our brains operate via a more basic arithmetic of terror. It's simply human to feel danger after seeing violent attacks in the kinds of places we go, against people like us.

And terror leads to trauma. One study found widespread trauma symptoms in the Norwegian public after the 2011 Norway attacks, particularly among those who were physically near the attacks or felt a psychological identification with the 77 victims. Other research found a similar effect among New Yorkers after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Now, even the things Americans do to stay safe reinforce the message that danger is everywhere.

By 2017, Amanda's toddler's daycare was holding mass shooting response drills. Staff members practiced locking all doors and windows and keeping the children quiet, so that if one day a gunman came, even the babies would know how to avoid attention. It's now fairly commonplace for schools across the country to do the same.

And every time they do, that's another addition to the arithmetic of fear. If one day a kindly therapist tries to convince children who grew up with those drills that they don't have to worry about a gunman coming to their schools, those arguments will be weighed against a lifetime of practicing responses to a mass murderer on a room-to-room hunt.

That's a small trauma compared with an actual mass shooting. But it's not rare. It's not dependent on being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's just something that happens in schools now.

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