About 30 minutes before launching what the investigators said was a long-planned massacre at a Buffalo supermarket, Payton S. Gendron invited a small group of people to join an online chat room.
Until then, the messages in the room on the Discord chat application were only visible to Mr. Gendron, who had spent months uploading numerous photos of himself, often posing with his gear and the weapon that officials say he used to shoot, even share. of hand-drawn maps of the Tops supermarket that he openly said he intended to attack.
None of the people he invited to review his writings seemed to have warned law enforcement, and the carnage played out as Mr. Gendron had envisioned.
A compendium of his posts from Discord circulated online this weekend, and details of those records were published Monday. But it was not previously known that other users had joined the Discord chat room, also known as a server, 30 minutes before he carried out the attack.
In a statement, a Discord spokeswoman expressed condolences to the victims of the shooting, saying that “hate has no place on Discord.”
From opinion: The Buffalo Shooting
Times Opinion commentary on the massacre at a supermarket in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo.
“What we know at this time is that the suspect has created a private server that can be used by invitation only to serve as a personal diary chat log,” the statement said. “However, about 30 minutes before the attack, a small group of people were invited to join the server. Before then, our records indicate that no other people have seen the diary chat log on this private server.
Mr. Gendron appeared to be working to build an audience in the moments before the shooting by circulating his Discord link on web forums where like-minded users gathered. At one point, he appeared to be planning to stream the May 14 attack — for which he has been accused of murdering 10 people — directly to his chat room. It is not clear whether he did.
In the opening pages of the compendium he posted online, Mr Gendron was clear about his goal: He wanted to radicalize others and called on followers to join him in mounting similar attacks.
Discord’s chat logs complement a nearly 200-page racist cover list released by Mr. Gendron before the attack. That widely circulated document was clearly intended for an audience less versed in the jargon and references he’d picked up on 4chan, Reddit, and other websites he spent time on. In Discord, Mr. Gendron revealed much more personal details, often highlighting his thoughts with racist and anti-Semitic memes and occasionally expressing self-doubt and a desire to commit suicide.
But it’s also clear that Mr. Gendron was fully aware that the logs he uploaded would be scrutinized by law enforcement and others.
A person who actively encouraged mass shootings could face criminal charges, although the bar for any charges would be high, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.
Throughout the compendium, Mr. Gendron often refers to working on the Discord transcript, suggesting that the process of posting it online wasn’t as simple as downloading it to a server and then uploading it to web forums.
Back in March, the month he originally planned to launch the attack, he mentioned configuring settings on Discord to allow others to watch one channel without changing anything.
In another channel – the general chat – he said that other users can type, send pictures and post emoji reactions, while not deleting each other’s messages. And on a third channel, he planned to embed the live stream of him performing the recordings using the Twitch application.
In early April, he noted that he had to adjust rules in Discord to prevent others from removing anything in it.
Discord started out as the chat feature of a little-known video game. The game’s creator, Jason Citron, took an abrupt turn in 2015, leaving the game and focusing entirely on chat software. In recent years, the platform has exploded in popularity with a predominantly younger user base.
Like many other social media platforms, Discord struggles to strike a balance between privacy and free speech while fighting hate speech and content moderation. Discord has said it takes “immediate action” when it encounters violations such as underage users or inappropriate content, responds to reports from users and moderators, and leverages “advanced tooling, machine learning, specialized security teams that address specific abuse situations, and insights from experts outside of that.” the company.”
In the report, posted on the company’s website, Discord said it shut down 2,182 servers and 25,170 individual accounts in the second half of 2021 due to violent extremism.
John Herrman† Kellen Browning and Jesse McKinley reporting contributed.