Challenges of regulating online spaces in wake of mosque shooting | Hanomansing Tonight

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]these two gunmen met online and there are questions and we heard the FBI agent talking about that.

[00:00:07]They want to find out more about what the true motivation was behind acting out here and and killing the three people at the mosque. So let's bring in Amarnath Amarasingam. He's an associate professor at Queen's University and I know on the one hand we certainly don't want to be promoting or leading people to the kinds of online sites that these two people would have used but but what do we know about them?

[00:00:35]Yeah, I I I mean it's surprising that a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old would have such elaborate hatred for a variety of different groups. I've been making my way through the manifesto over the last couple of hours and it's almost an identical manifesto to previous attackers that we've seen.

[00:00:51]The Christchurch attacker, the Buffalo supermarket attacker from a couple of years ago.

[00:00:57]And they say in the manifesto over and over again that you know, these are the people that they're trying to emulate.

[00:01:02]These are the people that they want other people to copy and carry out similar attacks going forward.

[00:01:08]So it does seem to be fit kind of squarely within the what we call the neo-Nazi accelerationist milieu in the sense of they want to bring society to an inevitable collapse.

[00:01:19]They feel like politics have failed, the left has failed, the right has failed and now it's time for people to do do something about it.

[00:01:27]There's mention of the great replacement theory, the the idea that white the white race is being overrun. There's a whole bunch of hate speech against the Jewish community, the Muslim community, black black people and it kind of goes on and on for dozens and dozens of pages.

[00:01:43]What's it like for you to go through that manifesto? Must be obviously extremely disturbing.

[00:01:52]Yeah, I mean as part of I'm an extremism researcher so I spend a lot of time in kind of the swamps of the internet and so I I I've gone through a lot of manifestos in the past and that's why it the kind of structure is very similar a kind of question answer back and forth the symbols that they use the fact that they even wrote propaganda on the weapons that they used is a is a tactic that's been used before and so they're very much trying to tell you that they're copying previous attackers and that they're following in their footsteps and they want other people to follow in similar footsteps as well.

[00:02:25]So these platforms that they're going on to as far as I understand it are not the ones that are controlled and owned by the big tech companies so that makes it difficult I guess to to to try to put pressure on a company to to regulate this or to watch this do in your research do people and perhaps these two teens go to this site because they're looking for like-minded people or do they go to this site and eventually get I don't know groomed or developed into being like-minded people?

[00:02:59]Probably a bit of both I mean these sites are you know whether they had platform whether they had accounts on more mainstream platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram we don't know yet but they do seem to have been swimming in some of the more niche platforms I guess on on social media where they may may have found each other where they met and how they met and and how they became friends is still unknown but in the sense of some of these darker platforms are much more difficult to regulate they sometimes have founders themselves who are far right of the neo-Nazi bent and therefore they're not necessarily conducive to listening to governments when they ask to you know ask them to regulate their platforms and remove harmful content from their platforms and things like that because that was the entire purpose of them creating that platform in the first place is to kind of exist outside of the mainstream conversation and so um the of the details about how they met and where they met are still um I think uh unknown, but I I in the sense of some of these darker platforms are uh very hard to reach, very hard to follow, um and very hard to monitor um on an ongoing basis.

[00:04:05]So, I mean, the the the huge question here, and perhaps unanswerable, would be what do we do about this? Maybe I can narrow it a bit. Is there Is there any sort of Yeah. thing at the top of your list about either families or government should be doing?

[00:04:24]Um I think both. I mean, on on the government side, um Canada is uh um going to take be tabling an online harms legislation in the next couple of months. I was part of the um online harms bill advisory board that is that was reconvened last uh last month to talk about um frontier threats in the sense of AI chatbots and companion apps and these sorts of things. And so, some sort of legislation will be tabled um in the next in the couple in in the coming months. And that's I think is a fundamental step because at at the moment Canada has nothing.

[00:04:54]Um and so, uh and and part of the part of the Canadian approach will be a little bit different or follow uh places like Australia and and the European Union in the sense of it's not just about have you taken down this bad post, right? It's not just about asking the platforms to take down content. It's about asking the platforms to do constant risk assessments, uh file digital safety plans, mitigate kind of foreseeable upcoming harms, um protect children, uh so they to really kind of get them to think at a structural level about how their platforms work and what keeps uh children in particular on these platforms. So, it's not just about did you remove the latest manifesto or the latest bad item, uh but rethink uh how you actually function as a platform uh in order to uh reduce harms. So, that's the that's the government platform regulatory level.

[00:05:40]And then on the other hand, yes, parents need to uh know what their kids are doing online. These kids are 18 and 17 years old, so they're just at the tail end of high school. um Um, and the fact that they're writing dozens of pages of a manifesto full of hate speech and full of all kinds of content, um, live streamed uh, the shooting, um, live streamed their own suicides, um, in in and is is all, um, things that potentially could have been mitigated earlier or stopped earlier if, uh, parents, friends, uh, some someone at school maybe was paying a little bit more, uh, attention.

[00:06:15]Well, it's good that you're going through all of this and that you're willing to share the lessons from your research and I hope we can speak again.

[00:06:22]Amarnath Amarasingam is an associate professor at Queen's University in Kingston. Thank you.

[00:06:28]Thank you.

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