It’s Easy to Despair and Do Nothing After the Halle Synagogue Shooting. But We Shouldn’t.

We don’t have the answers to stop terror attacks being live streamed, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask questions

An image taken from the live stream of the shooter in Halle yesterday.

In March, there was the Christchurch massacre, when a gunman gleefully referenced popular memes while live streaming himself shooting dozens of Muslim community members. In April, there was the Poway, California synagogue shooting, when a Christchurch copycat attempted to live stream himself in the same manner, failed, but still managed to kill a woman and injure three others.

With the Halle synagogue shooting in Germany yesterday, live streamed broadcasts of the mass murders of Muslim and Jewish communities have officially become a trend.

I am an academic who studies the far-right online, and after these tragedies, people often ask me what we can do to stop this from happening again.

In these moments, I find myself at a loss for words. I can speak in great detail about the factors that cause this type of violence: institutional bigotry across generations; racism fueled by mass media and mainstream politicians; young male alienation, loneliness, and a sense of diminishing power, stoked by opportunists online; major technology platforms whose business models favor engagement and attention and thus often reward the exact kind of behavior at work; rising nationalist movements around the world; the gamification of social relations and performances online. But each and every one of these factors is so deeply entrenched that it can seem impossible to tackle to an extent that will lessen this form of violence.

Take all of them together, and it’s almost impossible to avoid a feeling of defeat, a sense that things are too far gone to ever make right.

Sometimes people ask if it would help to take away the livestream feature on web platforms. After all there is something uniquely horrifying about the live streaming of this violence. By filming their massacres in real time, shooters turn into performers, playing to an audience that cheers them on. They need not be part of an official terrorist organization, or have additional gunmen, to know they have a communal…