Each time there’s a mass shooting in the U.S., pundits and politicians race to weigh in on the cause. The positions they take often mirror their politics. Those on the left blame white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and easy access to guns. Those on the right blame mental health, video games, immigration, and the decline of religion and community, all while ignoring the fact that guns are easier to get than spray paint. One conservative politician in Ohio even blamed drag queens, gay marriage, open borders, and Barack Obama.
Trump, of course, parrots the old conservative lines about video games and the decline of civilization, despite the total lack of evidence that video games cause anything worse than carpal tunnel. At his press conference on the Monday morning after 80 people were shot in two incidents over the weekend—one in El Paso, the other in Dayton (or, as Trump put it, “Toledo”)—Trump briefly touched on white supremacy (not acknowledging his role in it) and rising hatred (ditto), but he saved his real vitriol for video games and the internet.
“We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and want dark acts,” he said, which is apparently a sentence that somebody wrote. “We must stop mass murders before they start. The internet, likewise, is used for human trafficking, illegal drug distribution, and so many other heinous crimes. The perils of the internet and social media cannot be ignored and they will not be ignored.” This is a little ironic coming from the Twitter President.
He did, however offer solutions, of a sort: “First, we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs,” he said. “I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partnership with local, state, and federal agencies as well as social media companies to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike. […] Second, we must stop the glorification of video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for trouble youth to surround themselves with a culture of violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this. And it has to begin immediately.”
But it wasn’t gaming consoles that mowed down 80 people, it’s was two mad men with guns. And studies have not connected video game playing with mass shootings. In fact, there is some evidence that video games are correlated with a decrease, not an increase, in violence. But Republicans have made it clear that they’d rather take on the tech industry than the NRA and gun manufacturers. Besides, the right to play video games isn’t written into the Constitution, which makes picking on them a much easier fight. And while Trump seems to think the federal government should be policing the internet, some tech companies are already policing themselves. The problem is, it just doesn’t work.
On Monday, Cloudfare CEO Matthew Price announced in a blog post that the company had kicked 8chan, the website where the El Paso shooter posted his anti-immigrant manifesto, off their network. It was a moral stand, and a good one, but in terms of actually ridding the internet of hate and toxicity, it did little to nothing: 8chan has already found a new home.
Price himself predicted this would happen: After Cloudfare kicked the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer off their network, the site was back up and running in no time. “Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting,” Price wrote in a blog post. “They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare’s problem, but they remain the Internet’s problem.”
Further regulation of the internet will not end the spread of hate or mass shootings. If one site is shut down, another will emerge to replace it in an endless game of digital whack-a-mole. The U.S. government cannot police the entire internet, and any attempt to do so will be about as effective as increasing the use of the death penalty, which Trump also advocated despite the fact that the death penalty has never been shown to deter any sort of crime, much less mass shootings.
He did, however, get one thing right in his statement: He referred to mass shootings as an “evil contagion,” and while the root cause of mass shootings varies (the perpetrator in El Paso was apparently motivated by white supremacy and anti-immigrant bias; the shooters in Columbine were reportedly bullied; and we still don’t know what motivated the shooter in Las Vegas), there is ample evidence that mass shootings really are a terrible social contagion.
A 2015 study by researchers at the University of Arizona, for instance, found “significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past.” In other words, they’re contagious.
We don’t know if the shooter in Dayton, Ohio, was inspired by the shooter in El Paso just hours before, or if he even knew about it, but the study found that mass shootings increase the likelihood of subsequent mass shootings for about the next two weeks. As Tony Biasotti wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018, “The more mass shootings there are, and the more attention they get, the more troubled people think that shooting a great number of random people is a normal thing that a troubled person does.”
And it’s not just mass shootings: research shows that suicide, anorexia, bulimia, and cutting are all the byproducts of social contagion, and what they all have in common is mass media attention.
This poses a great problem for the media. It’s the job of the media to report on what is happening in the world, and when there is a mass shooting or a celebrity commits suicide, you can’t just decide not to cover it because it might inspire copycats. Your job is to get information to the public. But still, if the media is at all responsible for the spread of these ideas, then we must figure out how to cover them in a way that doesn’t increase the likelihood of it happening again. The World Health Organization has looked at how the media covers suicide and advises avoiding descriptions of how or where people kill themselves. They also advise providing resources for how to get help. Of course, there are big differences between killing other people and killing oneself, and I doubt posting an 800 number at the end of stories on mass killings will prevent another.
So what do we do? Biasotti argues that the media should refrain from profiling shooters—he pointed of a 2018 Washington Post profile of a gunman in Jacksonville, Florida, for what not to do—and the nonpartisan groups No Notoriety has developed a protocol of how to cover mass shootings. They advise elevating the stories of victims rather than perpetrators, refraining from publishing photos of the killer or using his name in headlines. They also advise that reporters “refuse to broadcast/publish self-serving statements, photos, videos, and/or manifestos made by the individual.”
Would this have any effect? I’m not sure. Even if the entity of the established media—the network TV stations, cable news, print media, digital outlets, the radio ecosystem—decided to adhere to the best practices set out by No Notoriety, there’s still social media to consider. You don’t need CNN to cover a manifesto for it to spread. Twitter will do it instead.
I don’t have a solution here. Outside of waving a magic wand and making guns disappear, I’m not sure anyone does. Even if the next president increased background checks and banned high capacity firearms and raised the purchasing age to 35, there are over 300 million guns already in circulation in this country, and the technology to create new ones from the comfort of your own home is quickly evolving. Gun safety laws are a step, but they won’t end the presence of military-grade guns in our communities anymore than regulating the internet will.
Ending this problem will take bigger, more fundamental shifts in our society—including addressing mental health and white supremacy and loneliness and alienation—but until that happens, the media needs to start grappling with our role in this evil contagion, because whatever we are doing now seems to be making it worse.
