3 years after Tree of Life shooting, social media still a breeding ground for extremism, experts say

Federal prosecutors say the mass shooting that Robert Bowers carried out at a Pittsburgh synagogue three years ago was preceded by disturbing, hate-filled activity on social media.

Since then, social media sites have continued to be linked to — and some say breeding grounds of — acts of violence and hate, from the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“It feels like every day you can open your phone or turn on the TV or pick up the paper and see instances of shocking anti­semitism and hate that could chill you to your bones,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League.

Greenblatt was among those who participated in last week’s three-day Eradicate Hate Global Summit at Pittsburgh’s David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Organizers said the event was born out of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting on Oct. 27, 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Bowers is awaiting trial on charges that he killed 11 people there that day.

Organizers of the summit said they are determined to root out hate speech and violent extremism. Many of the conversations during the summit centered on social media and what experts see as their rise as a breeding ground for hateful rhetoric.

Federal prosecutors pointed to Bowers’ activity on the social media website Gab in the days and weeks leading up to the attack at the Squirrel Hill synagogue, which housed the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha, Dor Hadash and New Light congregations. The Anti-Defamation League said this month that the social media site “has a long history as a haven for extremists, conspiracy theorists and misinformation.”

Prosecutors said Bowers shared numerous posts on social media that disparaged Jewish people and immigrants, taking specific aim at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and its efforts to help refugees. HIAS President and CEO Mark Hetfield told the Tribune-Review days after the synagogue attack that Dor Hadash had participated in a refugee Shabbat the week before.

Prosecutors said Bowers took to social media minutes before opening fire at the synagogue, posting, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

That type of toxic thinking — the idea that Jews, immigrants and other “undesirables” are out to take away “our” jobs and “replace us” — is one of the more menacing out there, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She also participated in the Eradicate Hate summit.

“Probably the most dangerous white supremacist ideology out there is the same thing that motivated the attack (at the Tree of Life synagogue), and that is this notion of a great replacement conspiracy theory,” she said.

“It is becoming a unifying way of thinking by white supremacists,” she added, pointing to shootings driven by such violent rhetoric in El Paso, Texas, and Christchurch, New Zealand.

She said the conspiracy theory is growing, including among some prominent figures in government and the media.

“It bodes very, very poorly for the future if we start to see more and more Americans … frame political change around a conspiracy theory that thinks that the changing demographic is actually an orchestrated plot to hurt white people,” Beirich said.

Experts agree that there is no singular solution.

Elizabeth Neumann, chief strategy officer for Moonshot, said her team has had success in reaching people who are in the early stages of the radicalization process. Moonshot, founded in 2015, uses technology to analyze consumers of conspiracy theories, disinformation and extremist content and then redirects them to other sources.

“We’re about to identify those individuals that are in the process of radicalization — they’re seeking out harmful content — and we’re learning how to target the right messaging to them,” she said.

For example, so-called high-risk users in Indonesia were 128% more likely to engage with advertisements for loneliness as opposed to ads offering information.

One U.S. study found that users searching for content on armed militia-type groups were more likely to click on an advertisement that was intentionally designed to elicit emotion but instead redirected them to a crisis text line.

There remains a question of how much responsibility social platforms themselves bear and how they should respond.

Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, said kicking people who espouse hateful and violent far-right ideology off sites such as Twitter and Facebook simply created a migration to alternative platforms such as Gab, Parler and Telegram, where influencers were able to reestablish both themselves and their audiences.

“One of the consequences (of kicking users off of mainstream platforms) is that people who might be on the fringes and have a small number of infringements on a large platform lose access to their accounts and migrate to a platform that is far less diverse ideologically and far more toxic,” said Nick Pickles, a senior policy director at Twitter.

“I think there’s a question to think about in terms of, ‘How do we improve behavior of people before they reach the point where they’re suspended from a large platform?’ ” Pickles said.

Another answer might come from upending the business model of some platforms, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, founder and chief executive of Valens Global, a company that helps governments, private companies and other organizations understand and deal with threats posed by terrorist and other violent organizations.

“Polarization is inherent to these platforms,” he said. “You know that attacking somebody — going negative — will get you much more interaction, much more retweets, much more engagement than saying something positive.”

He said a deeper discussion needs to take place about how that engagement affects society and what obligations companies have.

“It’s much easier to dehumanize other people either for reasons of race and religion and ethnicity or reasons of political differences on these platforms than it is face to face,” Gartenstein-Ross said. “To rehumanize, you often have to get off of the internet and look at someone from across the table.”