DHS Warns Online Praise For Uvalde Shooter, Calls For Copycats Intensifying
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The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning this week that online extremists are praising the Uvalde massacre that killed 19 children and two teachers and urging copycat attacks.
“Individuals in online forums that routinely promulgate domestic violent extremist and conspiracy theory-related content have praised the May 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and encouraged copycat attacks,” DHS officials said in a bulletin released on Tuesday.
The bulletin also notes that “Threat actors have recently mobilized to violence due to factors such as personal grievances, reactions to current events, and adherence to violent extremist ideologies, including racially or ethnically motivated or anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism.”
DHS warns that “in the coming months” “several high-profile events could be exploited to justify acts of violence against a range of possible targets.”
DHS officials also noted this week that have identified trends as to who is carrying out these deadly mass shootings. CBS News reported that “since 2018, six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States have been carried out by gunmen 21 years of age or younger.”
“With individuals who are younger in age, committing these attacks, we think — and this is something we’re still looking at — access to content online is really fueling those personal grievances and often inaccurate misperceptions about current events,” a senior DHS official said at a briefing this week.
“It’s really difficult for younger individuals to navigate the internet and understand what is considered to be credible information that they’re consuming,” the official added.
Mass shootings have sparked the spread of misinformation online in the past. The Dallas Observer notes that “after a gunman killed 20 kids at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, Austin-based far-right provocateur Alex Jones pushed the lie that the federal government had staged the shooting to drum up support for gun control measures.”
Jones spread similar suggestions in the wake of the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo last month and predicted more false flag attacks, according to the Observer.
