Introduction
When a terrorist opened fire on African Americans at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022, the livestream was an essential part of his operation. The gunman declared in his manifesto: “I think that live streaming this attack gives me some motivation in the way that I know that some people will be cheering for me.”
The attacker, Payton Gendron, was inspired by a fellow white supremacist terrorist who livestreamed an attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. However, Gendron was also tapping into a far longer historical precedent. Throughout American history, white supremacist murderers have eagerly adopted new communications technologies in order to publicise their killings. Dating back to the Reconstruction period after the American Civil War, the torture, mutilation, and murder of Black bodies has been a sport—lynchings, executed by self-anointed chivalric white men, were designed for public consumption. Today, new technologies have only empowered these dark rituals. Parallel to how “great replacement theory” – the belief that there is a global conspiracy to eradicate the white race – inspired much postbellum violence, modern livestreamed killings are but the latest iteration of the grim American tradition of lynching. As this Insight suggests, emerging communications technologies have always been readily adapted by extremists looking to broadcast racialised violence.
Gamification and Communication Technologies
At its core, “gamification” is defined as the introduction of game elements into a non-game context. In the last decade, the concept has been framed as an emerging trend in right-wing terrorism, precipitated by the digital environment that white supremacist terrorists occupy in the lead up to perpetrating a violent attack. Essentially, gamification is understood as a unique byproduct of the digital era, stemming from communications technologies typically associated with videogames. As Lakhani, White, and Wallner argue, “gamification is just a tool – it can be wielded both negatively and positively.” In its most extreme form, the term can be used to highlight how reframing real-life violence as part of a game may lower psychological barriers to violent action.
Livestreamed attacks, such as the Christchurch mosque shooting and subsequent copycat attacks in El Paso and Halle, embody the most horrific use of gamification in right-wing terror. First, such attacks produce a digital record of racialised violence. These records have proven exceptionally far-reaching. In the first twenty-four hours following Christchurch, Facebook removed the livestream 300,000 times. Another 1.2 million copies of the video were blocked at upload. Additionally, by reframing actual violence as “Let’s Play” gaming videos, perpetrators not only produce digital records of their attacks but also dehumanise their victims as objectives in a videogame. Attackers set extremist “high scores” through their murder of racial minorities, and encourage further violence by baiting users into trying to make it onto the proverbial “leaderboard.” Perhaps most dangerously, framing attacks as nothing more than FPS (first-person shooter) videogames allows other users to envision themselves as the perpetrator and, in a sense, experience the role themselves before committing real-world violence of their own.
While the digital age has introduced new platforms for broadcasting racialised violence – and the concept of gamification itself – violence being shaped by emerging communications technologies is not new. In fact, the weaponisation of digital technology for white supremacist ends has always been a present threat. In announcing the creation of the movement’s first digital forum in 1984, Louis Beam, a leader of the KKK, gushed that “At last, those who love God and their Race and strive to serve their Nation will be utilizing some of the advanced technology available heretofore only to those […] who have sought the destruction of the Aryan people.” Even further back, in the post-Reconstruction lynching era (roughly 1880 -1925), two dominant communications tools – the newspaper and the telephone – played central roles in organising, publicising, and carrying out acts of white supremacist terror. Newspapers both inflamed racial resentment with sensationalist reporting on the supposed “crimes” of the victim and also functioned as logistical tools, announcing the time and place of lynchings to ensure maximum viewership. Meanwhile, the telephone allowed white communities to coordinate quickly across towns and counties, accelerating the formation of mobs. As Eula Biss poignantly writes in “Time and Distance Overcome,” the telephone pole itself became symbolic, often repurposed as the site of torture and killing–a literal and figurative pillar of white supremacist messaging. Together, these technologies enabled the execution of theatrical violence, creating mass-mediated spectacles of racial domination.
Carnivalesque Murders
Given the frequent association of gamification with the digital era of right-wing extremism, the concept is rarely applied beyond the 21st century. Upon closer examination, however, the nature of 19th and 20th-century lynchings implies that gamification – or at least the incorporation of gamified elements – is a constant in right-wing terrorism. Often, lynchings became “ritualised and carnivalesque” displays of violence replete with food vendors, postcard printers, and souvenirs to commemorate the murder. Akin to livestreamed attacks becoming digital artefacts of violence, lynchings were carried out publicly and intended to reach as broad an audience as possible, often being advertised in local newspapers to draw a crowd. Black victims were tortured, many being castrated, burned alive, skinned, or otherwise mutilated. Following the murder, photos of lynched Black men – often accompanied by racist poems celebrating the violence – were sold as souvenir postcards. Lynch mobs also dismembered victims, distributing fingers and ears as souvenirs to onlookers before burning the already-desecrated body. All the while, white men, women, and children enjoyed refreshments and picnicked at the scene.
In fact, lynchings often attracted travellers, akin to concerts or large sports events today. Ida Wells’ A Red Record recalls how “Hundreds of people poured into the city from the adjoining country and the word passed from lip to lip that the punishment of the fiend should fit the crime — that death by fire was the penalty,” the New York Sun wrote in February 1893 of one lynching in Paris, Texas. In the latter’s account, the victim “was placed upon a carnival float in the mockery of a king upon his throne, and followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster in current history.”
While right-wing terrorists’ preferred means for perpetrating white supremacist violence against racial minorities has shifted from the lynch mob to mass shootings, the subcultural script, the formula attackers follow, is nearly identical between both forms of racialised violence. For lynchings, the murder was first advertised in mass media (newspapers) to draw onlookers, the Black victim was subsequently tortured and murdered before a crowd, and from there, records of racialised violence were produced to celebrate the attack. For contemporary mass shootings, the perpetrator announces his intention to stage a violent attack, attempts to livestream violence against racial minorities, and other users commemorate the perpetrator and his act of violence by hailing him as a “Saint,” ranking him on the leaderboard, and distributing digital records of the attack. As Emma Coleman Jordan reflected after the Buffalo shooting, “As with the lynchings of the past, today’s racially-based attacks put Black suffering on display for the entertainment of a 21st-century version of the White mob.” One Buffalo resident similarly reflected, “This is their Emmett Till moment.”
The only notable difference between the two scripts is their respective emphasis on dominant communications technologies: newspapers and the telephone versus social media and livestream. In both cases, the communications technology and violence worked in tandem to bring their consumers together in celebration and community.
Conclusion
The Buffalo shooting was not just an act of mass murder. The attack, like its historical predecessors, was a carefully staged spectacle of white supremacist violence designed to be consumed, replicated, and celebrated online. While the parallels between the racialised mass violence of today and the lynchings of the previous century are not often highlighted in contemporary research on violent extremism, the continuity is striking. The Buffalo shooting echoed a long lineage of racial terror in America from the carnivalesque lynchings of the post-Reconstruction era to the digital livestreamed massacres of today. The technologies may have changed, but the goals remain the same: to terrorise, desensitise, and recruit.
To disrupt this pattern, academics and technology practitioners must take seriously the historical continuity between past and present forms of white supremacist violence. By doing so, it becomes easier to map the cultural scripts and online subcultures that transform mass murder into participatory propaganda. As terrorists increasingly turn to exploiting AI and chatbots, understanding the quick integration of emerging communications technologies into terrorist tactics will be crucial for proactive prevention. Furthermore, as the enduring relevance of emerging communications technologies demonstrates, they must be stripped of their power as spectacle to curb the influence of these attacks. Every time a violent stream is shared or reposted, a manifesto quoted, or a killer’s name celebrated, a part of their strategy succeeds. Counterterrorism efforts in this space ought not only to remove objectionable content but also to prioritise developing counternarratives that expose the banality and cruelty behind the spectacle. Understanding the Buffalo shooting as part of the long arc of white supremacist terrorism is a first step. Unwriting the script that made it conceivable in the first place is the challenge that lies ahead.
Samantha Olson holds an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University and is currently a Research Fellow at the Accelerationism Research Consortium. Her research focuses on extremists’ use of narrative and historical memory to legitimize violence.
Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he studies domestic terrorism and counterterrorism, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is the co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.