Experts on domestic extremism said Tuesday that the assassination attempt on former President Trump has led to a surge in online calls for violence, particularly modern-day civil war.
Moonshot, a research firm that monitors online extremism, said it saw 1,599 calls for civil war — a 633% increase from a typical day — in the day after the July 13 mass shooting in Pennsylvania that left one Trump rally dead and two injured, including the former president, with a graze wound.
CBS News The first to report Moonshot research.
CBS reported that the call was viewed on multiple online platforms, including Reddit, YouTube, 4chan and some far-right discussion sites.
Moonshot also tracked 2,051 specific threats and solicitations of violence online in the 24 hours following the shooting, more than double the average number of threats per day, a company spokesperson told The Hill.
“The rise in online calls is a prime example of online discourse that glorifies violence,” Moonshot’s chief strategy officer Elizabeth Neumann told CBS. “Indeed, there is an online ecosystem that works every day to encourage violence of all kinds, from political civil wars to senseless school shootings.”
The FBI has been combing through the online history of shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks over the past few weeks to pinpoint an exact motive, and in the process, authorities have found that Crooks had posted questionable content, including advocacy for political violence, in the years leading up to the assassination attempt.
Authorities found “social media accounts that appear to be linked to the shooter in approximately 2019 or 2020,” FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said. During the joint hearing During a meeting of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees last week.
“More than 700 comments were posted from this account, some of which, if ultimately attributed to the shooter, appear to be extreme, reflecting anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant themes and encouraging political violence,” Abbate said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a House committee last month that Crooks is believed to have Googled “how far was Oswald from Kennedy” a week before the shooting — a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who shot and killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Moonshot said the increase in calls for violence after last month’s shootings highlights a broader trend in which mass violence is increasingly normalized and glorified in online spaces.
Publishing the report Moonshot, in collaboration with Everytown for Gun Safety, said last month that it had found that while “an ecosystem that amplifies mass shooter violence thrives online,” a “large portion” of that ecosystem heroizes past perpetrators.
“This is disturbing, as we now know that those who commit acts of mass violence often glorify murderers of the past,” the research firm wrote.
The Secret Service has faced significant backlash over its preparations for the event and its response to the shooting, which led to Director Kimberly Cheatle’s resignation after a disastrous appearance before Congress to investigate the incident.
The Justice Department, through the FBI, is investigating the shooting, and Attorney General Merrick Garland said it was “deeply disturbing” that Crooks had such access to Trump during the rally.
