The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has sparked a surge in calls for violence and civil war online

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the internet has seen a surge in calls for violence, and in particular a surge in calls for a modern-day civil war — a chilling reflection of a small group of users who create and amplify messages glorifying mass shooters and perpetrators of targeted violence.

The spike was noted by Moonshot, a company that monitors domestic violent extremism (DVE) spaces online. A team of six researchers found 1,599 calls for civil war — a 633 percent increase over a typical day — across a variety of online platforms, including 4Chan and Reddit, more mainstream platforms like YouTube, and new far-right discussion sites aimed at angry and disillusioned young men.

“The rise in online calls is pretty typical of online discourse in spaces that glorify violence,” Moonshot chief strategy officer Elizabeth Neumann told CBS News. “The fact is that there is an online ecosystem that works day in and day out to encourage violence of all kinds, from political civil war to senseless school shootings,” she said.

These alarming findings are part of a long-standing trend. Over the past decade, every mass shooting or act of targeted violence has been followed by an increase in calls for violence online. In most cases, perpetrators posted messages about violence before taking action in the real world.

In the case of Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who opened fire at Trump's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month, the FBI is still working to uncover his full online footprint, but CBS News has learned that investigators believe he has posted disturbing content online in the past.

Authorities discovered “a social media account that appears to be associated with the shooter, from 2019-2020,” FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees last week. “There were over 700 comments,” he said, which “appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant themes, advocate political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”

The gunman grazed Trump's ear, killed Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter and father of two, and wounded two other rally-goers. A Secret Service sniper shot and killed Crooks seconds after opening fire.

In the day after the shooting, Moonshot also found 2,051 specific threats or incitements to violence online, more than double the usual volume of daily threats the group documents as part of its ongoing monitoring of extremist spaces.

Everytown for Gun Safety, an anti-gun violence advocacy group, partnered with Moonshot for a new report released today that tracked interest and engagement in online discussions about mass shootings and targeted violence from January to June of last year.

The researchers found that glorification of mass shootings and targeted violence, as well as glamorization of perpetrators, were common in online discussions of such content. They also found that Google searches were the gateway to other platforms that hosted these disturbing discussions. The report found that actual calls for real-world violence came from a smaller subset of individuals online.

“In the aftermath of mass shootings, we often learn that the shooter was radicalized by vile content found on sites like YouTube. Yet the leaders of these platforms consistently refuse to crack down on users who violate their own policies,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety.

More research needs to be done on the link between violent rhetoric online and violent attacks in the real world, Everytown said, but for more than a decade, both phenomena have been on the rise.

Since the advent of the Internet, a small number of message boards have hosted hateful content, including glorification of Nazism. But over the past decade, the number of mass shootings, particularly in schools, has increased, and online glorification of school shooting perpetrators has exploded.

“We call on these companies to put public safety before trafficking and proactively moderate spaces that are hotbeds of hate and violence,” Feinblatt said.

Mainstream platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have devoted significant resources to removing this type of content, with some success, but YouTube in particular has struggled to play the cat-and-mouse game of removing harmful content.

A YouTube spokesperson said the company has a policy explicitly prohibiting content that glorifies or promotes violent tragedies, such as school shootings, and said that in the first quarter of 2024, the company removed more than 2.1 million videos for violating its policies against harmful or dangerous content.

“YouTube’s Community Guidelines prohibit hate speech, graphic violence, and content that promotes or glorifies violent acts, and we strictly enforce these guidelines,” said YouTube spokesperson Javier Hernandez.

Fringe extremist platforms that do not attempt to police extremist content have emerged, including a website dedicated to discussing and glorifying mass shootings.

The perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting are the ones most celebrated in online discussions, according to the Everytown and Moonshot report.

“When I survived the shooting 25 years ago … I never could have imagined social media, let alone what it would become,” said Salli Garrigan, a Moms Demand Action volunteer and senior member of the Everytown Survivor Network. The shooting claimed the lives of 12 of her classmates and her teacher.

“As a mother today, it’s terrifying how easy it is to access violent content, especially when it’s content glorifying one of the worst days of my life,” Garrigan said.

A Reddit spokesperson, who did not see the report before it was published, said the platform's content policy “strictly prohibits content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against any individual or group of people,” and that this includes “manifestos of mass murderers and related media, as well as any support or encouragement of such attacks.”

Reddit's spokesperson said the platform has dedicated “security teams” that “monitor and quickly remove infringing content” following “significant external events.”

A spokesperson for 4Chan did not respond to CBS News' request for comment.

Shooting at Trump rally More More

ED Cauchi contributed to this report.

Anna Schecter

Anna Schecter is the senior coordinating producer for CBS News and the stations' Crime and Public Safety unit, based in New York.

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