TikTok Is Full of Content Glorifying the Christchurch Shooter and Other Mass Murderers

Published March 19, 2023 By admin with Comments 0

Almost exactly four years after one of the deadliest neo-Nazi attacks in the modern age occurred, content celebrating the heinous crime can still be easily found on TikTok.

In March 2019, a neo-Nazi opened fire on two mosques and murdered 51 Muslim people in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter livestreamed the attack in the hopes of inspiring others to follow in his footsteps and create content out of the trail of blood he left behind.

Now, fans of the mass murderer continue to do just that on TikTok, according to a new report the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) shared exclusively with VICE News. In just a few hours of monitoring, researchers for the UK-based extremism think tank found 53 pieces of content supporting the Christchurch shooter, including content created by the shooter himself. That’s almost double as many as researchers found for a similar study conducted two years ago, which lasted months.

“This data supports the finding that footage related to the 2019 terrorist attack is still easily discoverable on TikTok. Perhaps more concerning is that clear promotion and glorification of terrorists and the spread of extremist ideologies on TikTok does not appear to have improved over the course of almost two years,” reads the report, written by Ciaran O’Connor and Melanie Smith.

During the short monitoring period, the report found 33 posts and 20 accounts glorifying the massacre. Of the posts, 16 featured content created by the shooter himself, and 15 were posts celebrating him. Of the accounts, all of them used an image of the shooter as a profile picture with the most frequent one being an image of him in his car shortly before beginning the massacre. The accounts that created the posts celebrating him, unsurprisingly, had posts supporting other white supremacist mass murderers, like Anders Breivik, a neo-Nazi who killed 77 in Norway in 2011.

Content retrieved from: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3yy3/tiktok-christchurch-shooting-neo-nazi-content.