New Apps Offer Shooters Ways to Evade Safeguards

Fundamentally designed to keep communications private, new apps could render irrelevant years of work to spot and identify public signs of upcoming violence,  social media experts warn.

New Apps Offer Shooters Ways to Evade Safeguards

Both the Buffalo shooter and the young man who attacked a school in Uvalde, Tx., used a combination of disappearing-video app Snapchat, Instagram direct messages, chat app Discord and social app Yubo to meet people and share their violent plans with acquaintances—all apps that are all ill-equipped to police such content, reports the Washington Post. Fundamentally designed to keep communications private, the apps could render years of work to spot and identify public signs of upcoming violence obsolete, social media experts warn.

In the wake of high-profile mass shootings in recent years, communities, school districts and tech companies made major investments in safety systems aimed at rooting out violent screeds in the hopes of preventing attacks, such as artificial intelligence-backed programs to scan social media posts for potential threats. But these tools have been effectively sidelined  by popular new technology, such as streaming and private or disappearing messaging that are increasingly used by young adults and teens. These newer social networks also have far less history dealing with violent content, and they’re less likely to have policies and personnel in place to respond to the incitement of violence on their services.