Buffalo Grocery Store Mass Shooting Was Streamed Live on Twitch
On Saturday, May 14, an 18-year-old white male killed 10 people and wounded three others at the Tops Friendly Market grocery store in Buffalo, New York. According to an alleged manifesto said to be written by the shooter, identified as Payton Gendron of Conklin, New York, the attack was racially-motivated, with Gendron allegedly citing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory as a motivator for the attack.
The shooter was specifically targeting black people, with 11 of the 13 victims being black, and two being white. The shooter has since been arrested and charged with first-degree murder, but has pleaded not guilty, according to various news reports. Those same reports have shed light on other details surrounding the incident, including how the shooter utilized live-streaming platform Twitch as well as communication platform Discord.
According to a report by Intelligencer, Gendron used Discord to post a to-do list for the shooting. As far as Twitch goes, the shooting could be seen on the live-streaming platform when it first started. Twitch told The Hollywood Reporter that the live-stream was shut down «less than two minutes» after the shooting started and that the user has been «indefinitely suspended.» Twitch says that it is also working to monitor any users that may attempt to rebroadcast the footage of the shooting.
This is not the first time that a mass shooting has been streamed live on Twitch. As some may recall, the 2019 mass shooting in a German synagogue was streamed on Twitch for nearly 35 minutes before it was pulled.
Twitch is not the only live-streaming platform to have featured horrific content like this. The New Zealand mosque shootings from 2019 were live-streamed on Facebook Live for around 17 minutes.
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