“As people get desensitized to the same types of attacks, there’s incentive to try something new: using tactics, new weapons, new targets and, in this case, we have this live-streaming.” “Facebook and Twitter frantically trying to pull this down. I think that was part of the panic that this person wanted to inspire, and that is a different dimension than one that we’ve seen previously.” “And, of course, that heightens the drama of the events. It also heightens the worldwide interest in a case such as this, which is exactly what the perpetrator wants.” “Terrorism needs an audience. Without the message alongside the violence, it’s not terrorism.” “They want the world to know why they’re doing what they’re doing.” “Having that live audience there with them and seeing the messages coming through might have been one way of sort of sustaining his motivation right the way through.” “There have been multiple murders, suicides, sexual assaults that have been live-streamed on Facebook. And the real concern, especially when you’re looking at a mass shooting, a mass atrocity, is the social contagion aspect of it.” “This is a way, in a sense, to use the social media to transmit an extremist virus throughout the global sphere.” “It is to cause more turmoil after their attacks, try to attract more people to doing similar type of things.” “But the other sense of the contagion is also just the secondary trauma that this is going to subject anybody who sees it to. A kid can witness things that a person who might have fought in a war would have never seen.” “This law that we have, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, pretty much carves out this immunity for the tech industry that the only parallel I can see to it in any other sense is the firearms industry. So, with both of those industries, we have engaged in the same rhetoric that says, You have neutral tools and we’re not going to hold you accountable, even for the most atrocious and predictable things that people will do with your tools.” “Terrorism is a sort of a public health problem, right? If there’s organizations or industries that are contributing to a public health problem, typically they end up getting regulated and they end up getting fined if they step outside of those regulations that have been set up. And I think that this particular space should be treated no differently than anything else that’s causing public health problems.” “But it’s going to take a political will to make a difference in terms of the mass murders. It’s going to take a corporate conscience that says that the control of the social media propagation is as important as the bottom line.”