A12 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, MAY 27 , 2022
Texas school shooting“Their family was an all-Ameri-
can family,” he said of his aunt,
uncle and cousins. “They’re great
people. The entire family, they’re
all great people. They don’t de-
serve this.”
Joe and Irma Garcia’s love story
stretched a quarter century,
packed with barbecues, music,
scenic country drives and the cou-
ple’s four children.
“I truly believe Joe died of a
broken heart and losing the love of
his life of more than 25 years was
too much to bear,” Irma’s cousin
Debra Austin wrote in an online
fundraiser mounted in support of
the Garcias’ four children.
Joe was a dedicated father, a
leader at his job at the H-E-B
supermarket and a doting hus-
band, who adored the woman he
met in high school and then mar-
ried, Martinez said.
But this week, the Garcia home
— typically the site of jubilant
family gatherings, filling holiday
meals and traditions like sharing
grapes for luck at midnight on
New Year’s Eve — was trans-
formed into a monument to the
pain of a family that in less than
two days saw both parents perish.
“Our family is just in shambles
right now,” Martinez said. “No-
body expected any of this. It’s
heartbreaking.”police such content. They are
fundamentally designed to keep
communications private, pre-
senting different challenges than
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,
where violent screeds and videos
have been algorithmically ampli-
fied to millions of viewers.
The way that generation uses
social media more generally
could render years of work to spot
and identify public signs of up-
coming violence obsolete, social
media experts warn.
“There is this shift toward
more-private spaces, more-
ephemeral content,” said Evelyn
Douek, a senior research fellow at
the Knight First Amendment In-
stitute at Columbia University.
“The content moderation tools
that platforms have been build-
ing and that we’ve been arguing
about are kind of dated or talking
about the last war.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said
Wednesday that the Texas gun-
man, who authorities have identi-
fied as Salvador Rolando Ramos,
wrote on social media that “I’m
going to shoot my grandmother”
and “I’m going to shoot an el-
ementary school” shortly before
the attack. Facebook confirmed
that the messages were sent pri-
vately but declined to say which
of its social networks were used.
Stephen Garcia, who consid-
ered himself Ramos’s best friend
in eighth grade, previously told
The Washington Post that Ramos
used the Yubo app, a platform
where users can swipe on one
another’s profiles, Tinder-style,
or hang out in live-streaming
rooms and virtually “meet” other
users by playing games and chat-
ting.
Yubo spokeswoman Amy Wil-
liams said in an email that the
company is not able to release
information outside of direct re-
quests from law enforcement but
that the company is investigating
an account that has been banned
from its platform.
“We are deeply saddened by
this unspeakable loss and are
fully cooperating with law en-
forcement on their investigation,”
she said.
In the Buffalo grocery store
shooting, the alleged gunman,
Payton Gendron, sent an invita-
tion to an online chatroom on the
instant messaging platform Dis-
cord that was accepted by 15
users, who were then allowed to
scroll back through months of
Gendron’s voluminous writings
and racist screeds, The Post has
reported. Users who clicked
through to the room also could
view an online video stream,
where footage of the Buffalo at-
tack was broadcast. That attack
was also broadcast on Twitch, a
live-streaming service popular
among video game users.
Discord and Twitch did not
immediately respond to requests
for comment.
Twitch was able to remove the
stream within two minutes of the
shooting’s start, Angela Hession,
the company’s head of trust and
safety, said previously. The site
has an all-hours escalation sys-
tem in place to address urgent
reports, such as live-streamed
violence.
Discord has since said the mes-
sages were visible only to the
suspect until he shared them with
others the day of the attack.
In the wake of high-profile
mass shootings in recent years,
communities, school districts
SOCIAL MEDIA FROM A
and tech companies made major
investments in safety systems
aimed at rooting out violent
screeds in the hope of preventing
attacks. The Uvalde Consolidated
Independent School District used
an artificial-intelligence-backed
program to scan social media
posts for potential threats years
before the attack, although it’s
unclear whether it was in use at
the time of the shooting.
But these tools are ill-equipped
to address the surging popularity
of live video streaming and pri-
vate or disappearing messaging
that are increasingly used by
young adults and teens. Those
messages are then closed off to
outsiders, who might be able to
spot the warning signs that a
troubled person might be about
to inflict harm on themselves and
others.
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, experts said.
“For smaller sites or newer
sites, they’re having the moments
that bigger services like Facebook
and YouTube were having in 2015
and 2016,” said Emma Llansó,
director of the Free Expression
Project at the Center for Democ-
racy and Technology, a nonprofit
backed by major tech companies.
The adoption of these upstart
apps in mass shootings reflects a
larger generational shift within
social media use. Gen Z, teens and
young adults born after 1996 have
been flocking to apps that empha-
size private messaging and live-
streaming or allow their users to
post content that disappearsfrom public profiles after a cer-
tain amount of time.
They have largely shunned leg-
acy social media apps such as
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
that rose to popularity by provid-
ing public and open spaces to
communicate with the world.
The new apps’ role in the
shootings has caught the atten-
tion of the New York and New
Jersey a ttorneys general, who in
the wake of the Buffalo shooting
launched probes into Discord
and Twitch.
“Time and time again, we have
seen the real-world devastation
that is borne of these dangerous
and hateful platforms,” New York
Attorney General Letitia James
(D) said in a statement announc-
ing the probe after the Buffalo
shooting. “We are doing every-
thing in our power to shine a
spotlight on this alarming behav-
ior and take action to ensure it
never happens again.”
Social media has played a
prominent role in many mass
shootings, and there have been
high-profile instances in which
gunmen have posted about their
plans online in plain sight and
have not been caught.
Republican lawmakers, who
have long resisted measures to
expand background checks or
limit access to guns, aimed to put
a spotlight on the role of social
media in the Texas shooting on
Thursday. “The common theme
of almost all of these mass shoot-
ings is the social alienation of sick
young men, often fueled by social
media,” tweeted Sen. Dan Sulli-
van (R-Alaska). He did not men-
tion gun access in the post.
Tech industry officials pushed
back, warning that such tweetscould distract from broader pol-
icy questions about gun control.
“Some people will try to make
it about Facebook so that it’s not
about guns,” tweeted Brian Fish-
man, former director of counter-
terrorism, dangerous organiza-
tions and content policy at Face-
book. “Don’t let them.”
Tech giants have also been
caught up in a years-long power
struggle as they seek to balance
privacy with policing content on
their sites and demands from law
enforcement agencies.
Facebook and other companies
have moved toward strong en-
cryption, technology that scram-
bles the contents of a message so
that only the sender and receiver
can see it. WhatsApp and Apple
iMessage use it, as do messaging
apps such as Signal. And Face-
book has said it wants to intro-
duce encrypted messaging as a
default setting to Instagram and
Facebook Messenger, prompting
backlash from politicians and of-
ficials in law enforcement who
have warned that the broad adop-
tion of that technology can leave
them in the dark and make it
more difficult for them to investi-
gate violence.
Some major tech companies do
scan messages for harmful con-
tent, such as child sexual abuse or
spam. But experts warn that mon-
itoring more private communica-
tion spaces is a delicate balance.
“There are so many incredibly
legitimate reasons people want to
use private communications,”
Llansó said. “That is not some-
thing that should be sacrificed for
all people because some people
want to use private communica-
tions for atrocious reasons.”
Social media users tend toskew younger, but the genera-
tional gaps among the user base
among private messaging apps
like Snapchat are larger than they
are for more traditional public-
facing sites like Facebook.
When Snapchat users send pri-
vate messages to each other, they
disappear after the recipient has
read them. The app also pio-
neered the concept of “stories” —
public posts that last for just one
day — which was later copied by
Facebook.
Snap said Wednesday that it
has suspended an account that
may have been connected to Ra-
mos and that it is also working
with law enforcement.
Meanwhile, Facebook has
struggled to keep pace with the
rapidly evolving social habits of
teen users.
Facebook’s own internal re-
search reports that young adults
are “less engaged” than older
adults, posing a significant risk to
the company’s business, accord-
ing to a trove of internal company
documents known as the Face-
book Files. The company’s re-
search found that young adults
prefer sharing updates about
their lives over text messages,
rather than broadcasting to a
wide range of Facebook friends.
The researchers suggested that
the company respond by leaning
into groups and more private
forms of sharing.
“It’s always going to be a cat-
and-mouse game,” Douek said.
“These are just sort of intractable
problems. But that doesn’t mean
that we can’t improve or we
should let platforms off the hook.”Rachel Lerman contributed to this
report.Violence highlights strain between online policing, privacy
SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
People empty out of the Uvalde County Fairplex in Uvalde, Tex., after a Wednesday vigil for the victims of this week’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.wanted her to be remembered as
someone who sacrificed her life to
protect her students.
“They weren’t just her stu-
dents. Those were her kids, andshe put her life on the line. She lost
her life to protect them,” Martinez
said. “That’s the type of person she
was.”
On Thursday, he struggled tofind the words to describe his aunt
and uncle. Together, the couple
had four children: Cristian, 23;
Jose, 19; Lyliana, 15; and Alysan-
dra, 12.JOHN MARTINEZ
Joe and Irma Garcia’s love story stretched a quarter century, packed with barbecues, music and the
couple’s four children. Joe died Thursday, two days after his wife was killed in a school shooting.BY MARISSA J. LANG
AND KIM BELLWAREJohn Martinez awoke Thursday
just before 10 a.m. to a text mes-
sage from his younger brother:
“Pray for tío Joe.”
Martinez, a 21-year-old student
at Texas State University, said at
first that he didn’t think anything
was amiss. Of course his uncle
needed prayers, he said. Joe Gar-
cia had just lost his wife, the moth-
er of his children, his life partner.
Irma Garcia, 48, was one of the
two teachers slain in the shooting
rampage at Robb Elementary
School in the Garcias’ hometown
of Uvalde, Tex., on Tuesday.
Less than two hours after the
morning text message, Martinez
got a call from his family to tell
him that his uncle had died after
being rushed to the hospital fol-
lowing an apparent heart attack.
Martinez texted his brother
about noon. “This is so over-
whelming.”
On Thursday, as Martinez be-
gan to fill in the details from his
relatives, he said that he felt ill
with grief.
Joe Garcia had just returned to
the family’s home after venturing
out to leave flowers at a memorial
set up for the victims outside
Robb Elementary School. He was
in the kitchen, Martinez said,
when he suddenly seized and fell
over.
Martinez’s mother, who was at
the house with the family, sprang
into action, administering chest
compressions until paramedics
arrived to take him to the hospital.
He died there.
“We’re all just in shock,” Marti-
nez said.
Before his uncle’s death, Marti-
nez told The Washington Post on
Wednesday that his tía Irma had
died a hero and that his familySlain teacher’s h usband
suffers fatal heart attack
A fundraiser is mounted
in support of the couple’s
four surviving children“There is this shifttoward more-privatespaces, more-ephemeralcontent. The contentmoderation tools thatplatforms have beenbuilding and that we’vebeen arguing about arekind of dated.”
Evelyn Douek, senior research fellow
at the Knight First Amendment
Institute at Columbia University