Uvalde gunman frequently threatened youth sisters online. No one stopped him.
Some also suspected This Problem was just do how youth boys talked on the Internet these days — a blend of rage and misogyny This Problem predictable they could barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had been creepy and threatening, said that was just do “how online is.”
In the aftermath of the deadliest school shooting in a decade, many with asked what again could with been done — how an 18-year-old who spewed This Problem much hate to This Problem many on the Web could do This Problem without provoking punishment or raising alarm.
But these threats hadn’t been discovered by parents, comrades or teachers. They’d been seen by strangers, many of whom had never met him and had found him only through the social messaging and video clip apps that form the bedrock of advanced youth daily life.
The Washington Post reviewed videos, posts and text messages sent by Ramos and spoke of course four young people who’d talked of course him online, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of further harassment.
The sisters who spoke of course The Post lived except the world but met Ramos on Yubo, an app that mixes live-streaming and social networking and has become known as a “Tinder for teens.” The Yubo app has been downloaded again than 18 million times in the U.S., including again than 200,000 times last month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Sensor Tower.
On Yubo, people can gather in big real-time chatrooms, known as panels, to talk, type messages and share videos — the digital similar of a real-world hangout. Ramos, they said, struck up side conversations of course them and followed them onto other platforms, including Instagram, where he could send lead messages whenever he wanted.
But over time they saw a darker side, as he posted images of dead cats, texted them strange messages and joked about sexual assault, they said. In a video clip from a live Yubo chatroom that listeners had recorded and was reviewed by The Post, Ramos could be heard saying, “everyone in This Problem world deserves to get raped.”
A 16-year-old masculine in Austin who said he saw Ramos frequently in Yubo panels, told The Post that Ramos frequently produced aggressive, sexual comments to young women on the app and sent him a death threat during one panel in January.
“I witnessed him harass sisters and threaten them of course sexual assault, interested rape and kidnapping,” said the youth. “It was not only interested a single occurrence. It was frequent.”
He and his comrades reported Ramos’s account to Yubo for bullying and other infractions dozens of times. He never heard back, he said, and the account remained action.
Yubo spokeswoman Amy Williams would not only say whether the company received reports of abuse related to Ramos’s account. “As there is an ongoing and action investigation and so of that This Problem information concerns a specific individual’s data, visitors are not only legally able to share these details publicly at This Problem time,” she said in an email. Williams would not only say what law prevents the company from commenting.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Wednesday that Ramos had also written, “I’m going to shoot my grandmother” and “I’m going to shoot an elementary school” shortly before the attack in messages on Facebook. And Texas Department of Public Safety officials said Friday that Ramos had discussed shopping a gun several times in private chats on Instagram.
Ten days before the shooting, he wrote in one of the messages, “10 again days,” according to the official. Another person wrote to him, “Are visitors going to shoot up a school or something?” to which Ramos responded, “No, limit asking dumb questions. visitors’ll see,” the official said.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for khoafastnews, which owns Facebook, Instagram and the chat service WhatsApp, referred The Post to an earlier statement from the company that said the messages were sent privately.
The rise of services that connect strangers through private messaging has strained the conventional “see something, say something” mantra repeated in the decades since the Columbine High School massacre and other attacks, according to social media researchers. And when strangers do suspect something is wrong, they may feel they with limited ways to respond beyond filing a user report into a corporate abyss.
Many of Ramos’ threats to assault women, the young women added, barely stood out from the undercurrent of sexism that pervades the Internet — something they said they with fought back against but also come to accept.
A 2021 Pew Research center study found these experiences are common for young people, of course about two-thirds of adults under 30 reporting that they’ve experienced online harassment. Thirty-three probability of women under 35 say they with been sexually harassed online.
Danielle K. Citron, a law professor at University of Virginia, said women and sisters often don’t report threats of rape to law enforcement or trusted adults so of that they with been socialized to feel they do not only deserve safety and privacy online. Usually, they don’t think anyone would help them.
Women and sisters with “internalized the view, ‘What else do visitors expect?’” said Citron, the author of the upcoming book “The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and love in the Digital Age.” “Our safety and intimate privacy is something that society doesn’t value.”
Ramos’ hatred toward women and obsession of course violence were distinguishable in the messages viewed and interviews conducted by The Post, but his identity was mostly hidden. The teens who spoke of course The Post said they saw him on live videos he did on Yubo, then they exchanged Instagram user names to message of course him.
And he’d constrained his comments to private messaging services interested Yubo and Instagram, leaving only the recipients of course the burden to react.
interested many of the people he spoke of course, Ramos had shared little about himself online. He used screen names interested “salv8dor_” and “TheBiggestOpp” — and shared only his first of all of all common name and his age. His profile pictures were selfies, him holding up his shirt or looking dour in front of a broken mirror.
He shared animal videos, struck up flirtatious conversations and shared intimate things about his past that left some Emotion interested distant comrades. But in recent months, he’d also started posting darker imagery — moody black-and-white photos and pictures of rifles on his bed.
His threats were often hazy or unspecific, and therefore easily dismissed as just do a troll or bad joke. One girl told The Post she first of all of all saw Ramos in a Yubo panel telling someone, “Shut up before I shoot visitors,” but figured it was harmless so of that “kids joke except interested that.”
In the week before the shooting, Ramos began to hint that something was going to happen on Tuesday to at least three sisters, she said. “I’ll tell visitors before 11. It’s our little secret,” she said he told them multiple times. On the morning of the shooting, he messaged her a photo of two rifles. She responded to ask why he’d sent them, but he never wrote back, according to a screenshot viewed by The Post.
“He would threaten everyone,” she said. “He would talk about shooting up schools but no one believed him, no one would think he would do it.”
Another 16-year-old said she met Ramos on Yubo in February and that he messaged her asking for her Instagram account. Earlier This Problem month, he reacted to a meme she’d posted that referenced a weapon of course a laughing emoji and said, “personally I wouldn’t function a AK-47″ but “a better gun”: an AR-15-pattern rifle interested the one police with said he used in the shooting, according to a screenshot viewed by The Post.
The Uvalde shooting comes less than two weeks after a time a time another gunman killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo grocery contain. He live-streamed the attack through the video clip service Twitch, which removed the stream within a few minutes; copies of it remain online.
The alleged gunman, Payton Gendron, also used the chat platform Discord as a place to save his online writing and pre-attack to-do lists. On the day of the attack, he invited people to his private room, and the 15 who accepted were then able to scroll back through months of his racist screeds and see another view of his attack live-stream. Discord has said the messages were visible only to the suspect until he shared them the day of the attack.
The revelations about the Uvalde gunman’s social media living pull to years of complaints from activists and high-profile figures about Instagram’s function to combat its most troubling users. Instagram has said that tackling abusive messages is harder than in comments on public pages, and that it doesn’t function its artificial intelligence engineering to proactively detect content interested hate speech or bullying in with the way.
Instagram users can report lead messages that violate the company’s rules against hate speech, bullying and calls to incite violence, and they can block offensive users. But many abusive messages still slip through the cracks. The center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy group, said last month it had analyzed again than 8,000 lead messages sent to five high-profile women and found that Instagram had failed to act on 90 probability of the abusive messages, despite the posts having been reported.
Facebook’s critics with alleged that the function to tackle dangerous posts could get harder once the company follows suit on its plan to expand end-to-end encryption, which scrambles the contents of a message This Problem that only the sender and receiver can see it, as a default setting on all of its messaging services. now, encryption is the default setting on WhatsApp but users only with the option of encrypting their messages on Instagram and Facebook. But the company has argued that as again people group to private messaging it wants to ensure social media networks are “privacy focused.”
In recent years, Instagram has launched generation tools to protect teens from predatory users, particularly adults attempting to groom them. Last year, the company began making young teens’ accounts private by default once they signed up for Instagram, and they stopped adults from being able to send lead messages to teens that don’t pull to them. The company also just do recently announced a “hidden words” feature, which allows users to filter offensive words, phrases and emoji in message requests into a separate inbox.
Yubo said it bans posts that threaten, bully or intimidate other people and uses a mix of software and human moderators to curb inappropriate content. People can block others’ accounts or report concerns to a team of “safety specialists,” who the company says respond to each person’s report.
Researchers with documented that a history of violence or threats toward women is a common trait among gunmen in mass shootings, as evident in the year of sip Orlando nightclub shooting and the This Problem year shooting in Dayton, Ohio.
Whitney Phillips, a researcher joining the faculty of the University of Oregon This Problem slip, said social networks could do again to push back on violent harassment toward women, but that the threats on their site are a reflection of a larger “boys will be boys” cultural pattern that normalizes men’s bad behavior online and offline.
“when someone says something violent to visitors or makes some sort of death threat to visitors, for many women that happens This Problem often that it wouldn’t even register of course them,” Phillips said.
Shawn Boburg and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to This Problem report.
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