Want unfettered free speech? Get far-right attacks like the Buffalo shooting

On Saturday 14 May, an 18-year-old man walked into a supermarket in Buffalo and shot 13 people, killing 10. A few days before carrying out the killings, the shooter published a 180-page manifesto on Google Docs detailing his motives, which were largely racist and antisemitic in nature.

Similarly to Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 people and injured 40 others at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, the Buffalo shooter attributed the views which caused him to carry out the killings to 4chan; an online message board-based forum where users are able to post completely anonymously and with very little in the way of oversight or restrictions.

4chan, along with similar websites like 8chan – another anonymous forum which has also been cited by mass shooters – have a reputation for attracting the absolute human detritus of the internet. Their refusal to provide oversight to their users predictably result in them becoming hotbeds of neo-Nazi rhetoric, antisemitic conspiracy theories, threats of violence against public figures, and on several occasions, live documentation of crimes in progress, including but not limited to animal abuse and murder.

In his manifesto, the Buffalo shooter said that he had learned about the evils of right-wing boogeyman “critical race theory” and neo-Nazi conspiracy “the great replacement” after becoming a regular user of 4chan. He wrote that: “There I learned through infographics, s***posts, and memes that the white race is dying out, that blacks are disproportionately killing whites, that the average black takes $700,000 from tax-payers in their lifetime, and that the Jews and the elite were behind this.”

And how long did it take for this kid to become a full-blown zealot? To completely subscribe to the theory that the only way he could protect the white race was by going down to the local supermarket and opening fire on the first African Americans he could find?

According to his manifesto, he became a regular user of the site about two years ago, at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Two years. That’s how quickly a website full of frog memes was able to convince a teenager to commit mass murder.

The memes are probably the most insidious part of online spaces like 4chan. White supremacist rhetoric is packaged as ironic little pictures and comics, providing users with bite-sized chunks of radicalisation in an easy to digest package. If you’ve ever seen the grey, blank-faced NPC meme, or the blond haired “yes chad” or Pepe the Frog; you’ve seen a meme that was originally popularised on boards like these, to inspire crimes like this one.

You may not have seen the racist, or violent, or homophobic version of these memes, but that’s somehow even worse, because they indicate that far-right rhetoric and semiosis have become so encoded into the mainstream that you could encounter it in your day-to-day without ever realising.

The fact that 4chan and websites like it are able to continue with impunity after multiple terrorist attacks is so mind-boggling to me that I’m not even sure where to begin. Shutting it down – or at the very least imposing strict regulations on it – is one of those things that seems like such a no-brainer to me that arguing for it makes me feel insane. To me, these sites seem to operate like a machine created to radicalise people as quickly and efficiently as possible, whose user bases are mostly made up of young men, who are able to post anything they want, completely anonymously.

Arguing that it should be curbed before it causes more harm is like arguing in favour of murder being illegal. Why is this even up for debate? Why wasn’t this fixed after the first mass killing? Or better yet, before it?

The answer is the same that people give to justify similar content being allowed on Reddit, or YouTube, or Twitter, or your impressionable aunt’s Facebook page: freedom of speech. A term that has been so bastardised by bad faith actors for the purposes of spreading hate and misinformation that it has become essentially meaningless.

Free speech absolutism of the kind practised by 4chan is something that sounds good on paper, but completely falls apart in its application. It only works in a hypothetical world where language is some ephemeral thing that is incapable of causing harm. That seems to be how many approach the issue, as if the consequences of limiting speech are always worse than allowing it to exist freely and unfettered.

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But that’s something of a fallacy. We limit speech all the time. Even the so-called vanguards of free speech will probably agree that you shouldn’t be allowed to swear on morning television, or be topless in public, or let kids see R-rated movies, or a million other things that cause less harm than teaching a 16-year-old boy that the Jews are responsible for every disappointment he’ll experience in his life.

Even Elon Musk, who recently made a big stink about bringing free speech back to Twitter as part of his recent takeover bid, isn’t above contacting the employer of a blogger who posted a negative stock analysis of Tesla in an attempt to get them fired. It makes you wonder just how absolute the “absolutism” of his views on free speech are, doesn’t it? “No, not the parts of free speech where you say mean things about me,” he seems to say. “Just the parts that harm other people.”

With Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Joe Rogan’s Spotify deal, the continued popularity of polarising pundits like Piers Morgan and Sean Hannity, and a hundred other front lines in this never-ending culture war falling to people who refuse to acknowledge the power that language and symbols carry, this is a problem that is going to get worse before it gets better.

There will be another Buffalo. There will probably be many. There will be more manifestos, and there will be more deaths. But hey, I guess that’s just the price of free speech.