Online calls for civil war soared after Trump shooting, researchers say
Online calls for violence, particularly a modern-day civil war, skyrocketed following the attempted assassination of former President Trump, domestic extremism experts said Tuesday.
Moonshot, a research company that monitors online extremism, said it tracked 1,599 calls for a civil war — a 633 percent increase from a normal day — the day after the July 13 shooting in Pennsylvania, which killed one Trump rallygoer and injured two others, in addition to grazing the former president.
CBS News was the first to report Moonshot's research.
The calls were observed across multiple online platforms, including Reddit, YouTube, 4chan and some far-right discussion sites, CBS reported.
Moonshot also tracked 2,051 specific threats or encouragements to violence online in the 24 hours after the shooting, a figure that is more than double the average volume of daily threats, a company spokesperson told The Hill.
"The uptick in online calls is fairly typical of online discourse in spaces that glorify violence," Elizabeth Neumann, chief strategy officer for Moonshot, told CBS. "The fact is, there is an online ecosystem out there working day in, day out to encourage violence of all kinds, from political civil war to mindless school shootings."
The FBI has spent the past few weeks combing through the online history of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, in an effort to determine a precise motive. In doing so, authorities found Crooks appeared to post concerning content, including the embrace of political violence, in the years leading up to the assassination attempt.
Authorities discovered "a social media account which is believed to be associated with the shooter, in about the 2019, 2020 timeframe," FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said during a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees last week.
"There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature," Abbate said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a House committee last month Crooks is believed to have conducted a Google search one week before the shooting, asking, “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy," in a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.
The increase in calls for violence after last month's shooting underscores a wider trend that mass violence is increasingly normalized and valorized on online spaces, Moonshot said.
Releasing a report last month with Everytown for Gun Safety, Moonshot said it found "an ecosystem amplifying mass shootings is thriving online," while a "large portion" of the ecosystem thinks of past perpetrators as heroes.
"This is worrying because we know those that go on to perpetrate mass violence have often valorized previous killers," the research company wrote.
The Secret Service has faced massive backlash over its event preparation and response to the shooting, with the fallout prompting Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign after a disastrous appearance before Congress to review the incident.
The Justice Department, through the FBI, is investigating the shooting, and Attorney General Merrick Garland said it was “extremely alarming" that Crooks was able to get so close to Trump during the rally.