SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Texas school shootingtimes in private chats on Insta-
gram.
Ten days before the shooting,
he wrote in one of the messages,
“10 more days,” according to the
official. Another person wrote to
him, “Are you going to shoot up a
school or something?” to which
Ramos responded, “No, stop ask-
ing dumb questions. You’ll see,”the official said.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for
Meta, which owns Facebook,
Instagram and the chat service
WhatsApp, referred The Post to
an earlier statement from the
company that said the messages
were sent privately.
The rise of services that con-
nect strangers through privatemessaging has strained the con-
ventional “see something, say
something” mantra repeated in
the decades since the Columbine
High School massacre and other
attacks, according to social media
researchers. And when strangers
do suspect something is wrong,
they may feel they have limited
ways to respond beyond filing aInstagramInstagramTOP: Law enforcement officers
gather Wednesday outside
Robb Elementary School,
where Salvador Ramos killed 19
children the day before.ABOVE: Screenshots of a
conversation and a photo from
a conversation that Ramos had
with a 16-year-old on
Instagram. The girls and young
women that Ramos spoke to
online said he would strike up
conversations with them on
Yubo, an app that has become
known as the “Tinder for
teens,” then followed them onto
other social media platforms
where he could send direct
messages.R IGHT: A screenshot from an
conversation that Ramos had
with a girl via Instagram the
morning of the shooting. He
messaged her a photo of two
rifles. She asked why he’d sent
them, but he never wrote back.
“He would talk about shooting
up schools but no one believed
him, no one would think he
would do it,” she told The Post.BY SILVIA FOSTER-FRAU,
CAT ZAKRZEWSKI,
NAOMI NIX
AND DREW HARWELLHe could be cryptic, demean-
ing and scary, sending angry
messages and photos of guns. If
they didn’t respond how he want-
ed, he sometimes threatened to
rape or kidnap them — then
laughed it off as some big joke.
But the girls and young women
who talked with Salvador Rolan-
do Ramos online in the months
before he killed 19 children in an
elementary school in Uvalde,
Tex., rarely reported him. His
threats seemed too vague, several
said in interviews with The
Washington Post. One teen who
reported Ramos on the social app
Yubo said nothing happened as a
result.
Some also suspected this was
just how teen boys talked on the
Internet these days — a blend of
rage and misogyny so predictable
they could barely tell each one
apart. One girl, discussing mo-
ments when he had been creepy
and threatening, said that was
just “how online is.”
In the aftermath of the deadli-
est school shooting in a decade,
many have asked what more
could have been done — how an
18-year-old who spewed so much
hate to so many on the Web could
do so without provoking punish-
ment or raising alarm.
But these threats hadn’t been
discovered by parents, friends or
teachers. They’d been seen by
strangers, many of whom had
never met him and had found
him only through the social mes-
saging and video apps that form
the bedrock of modern teen life.
The Washington Post reviewed
videos, posts and text messages
sent by Ramos and spoke with
four young people who’d talked
with him online, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity for
fear of further harassment.
The girls who spoke with The
Post lived around the world but
met Ramos on Yubo, an app that
mixes live-streaming and social
networking and has become
known as a “Tinder for teens.”
The Yubo app has been down-
loaded more than 18 million
times in the U.S., including more
than 200,000 times last month,
according to estimates from the
analytics firm Sensor Tower.
On Yubo, people can gather in
big real-time chatrooms, known
as panels, to talk, type messages
and share videos — the digital
equivalent of a real-world hang-
out. Ramos, they said, struck up
side conversations with them and
followed them onto other plat-
forms, including Instagram,
where he could send direct mes-
sages whenever he wanted.
But over time they saw a dark-
er side, as he posted images of
dead cats, texted them strange
messages and joked about sexual
assault, they said. In a video from
a live Yubo chatroom that listen-
ers had recorded and was re-
viewed by The Post, Ramos could
be heard saying, “Everyone in
this world deserves to get raped.”
A 16-year-old boy in Austin
who said he saw Ramos frequent-
ly in Yubo panels told The Post
that Ramos frequently made ag-
gressive, sexual comments to
young women on the app and
sent him a death threat during
one panel in January.
“I witnessed him harass girls
and threaten them with sexual
assault, like rape and kidnap-
ping,” said the teen. “It was not
like a single occurrence. It was
frequent.”
He and his friends reported
Ramos’s account to Yubo for bul-
lying and other infractions doz-
ens of times. He never heard
back, he said, and the account
remained active.
Yubo spokeswoman Amy Wil-
liams would not say whether the
company received reports of
abuse related to Ramos’s account.
“As there is an ongoing and active
investigation and because this
information concerns a specific
individual’s data, we are not le-
gally able to share these details
publicly at this time,” she said in
an email. Williams would not say
what law prevents the company
from commenting.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R)
said Wednesday that Ramos had
also written, “I’m going to shoot
my grandmother” and “I’m going
to shoot an elementary school”
shortly before the attack in mes-
sages on Facebook. And Texas
Department of Public Safety offi-
cials said Friday that Ramos had
discussed buying a gun several
user report into a corporate
abyss.
Many of Ramos’s threats to
assault women, the young wom-
en added, barely stood out from
the undercurrent of sexism that
pervades the Internet — some-
thing they said they have fought
back against but also come to
accept.
A 2021 Pew Research Center
study found these experiences
are common for young people,
with about two-thirds of adults
under 30 reporting that they’ve
experienced online harassment.
Thirty-three percent of women
under 35 say they have been
sexually harassed online.
Danielle K. Citron, a law pro-
fessor at the University of Vir-
ginia, said women and girls often
don’t report threats of rape to law
enforcement or trusted adults
because they have been socialized
to feel they do not deserve safety
and privacy online. Sometimes,
they don’t think anyone would
help them.
Women and girls have “inter-
nalized the view, ‘What else do we
expect?’” said Citron, the author
of the upcoming book “The Fight
for Privacy: Protecting Dignity,
Identity, and Love in the Digital
Age.” “Our safety and intimate
privacy is something that society
doesn’t value.”
Ramos’s hatred toward women
and obsession with violence were
clear in the messages viewed and
interviews conducted by The
Post, but his identity was mostly
hidden. The teens who spoke
with The Post said they saw him
on live videos he did on Yubo,
then they exchanged Instagram
user names to message with him.
And he’d constrained his com-
ments to private messaging ser-
vices like Yubo and Instagram,
leaving only the recipients with
the burden to react.
Like many of the people he
spoke with, Ramos had shared
little about himself online. He
used screen names like
“salv8dor_” and “TheBig-
gestOpp” — and shared only his
first name and his age. His profile
pictures were selfies, him holding
up his shirt or looking dour in
front of a broken mirror.
He shared animal videos,
struck up flirtatious conversa-
tions and shared intimate things
about his past that left some
feeling like distant friends. But in
recent months, he’d also started
posting darker imagery — moody
black-and-white photos and pic-
tures of rifles on his bed.
His threats were often hazy or
unspecific, and therefore easily
dismissed as just a troll or bad
joke. One girl told The Post she
first saw Ramos in a Yubo panel
telling someone, “Shut up before
I shoot you” but figured it was
harmless because “kids joke
around like that.”
In the week before the shoot-
ing, Ramos began to hint that
something was going to happen
on Tuesday to at least three girls,
she said. “I’ll tell you before 11. It’s
our little secret,” she said he told
them multiple times. On the
morning of the shooting, he mes-
saged her a photo of two rifles.
She responded to ask why he’d
sent them, but he never wrote
back, according to a screenshot
viewed by The Post.
“He would threaten everyone,”
she said. “He would talk about
shooting up schools but no one
believed him, no one would think
he would do it.”
Another 16-year-old said shemet Ramos on Yubo in February
and that he messaged her asking
for her Instagram account. Earli-
er this month, he reacted to a
meme she’d posted that refer-
enced a weapon with a laughing
emoji and said, “personally I
wouldn’t use a AK-47 but ‘a
better gun’ ”: an AR-15-style rifle
like the one police have said he
used in the shooting, according to
a screenshot viewed by The Post.
The Uvalde shooting comes
less than two weeks after another
gunman killed 10 Black people in
a Buffalo grocery store. He live-
streamed the attack through the
video service Twitch, which re-
moved the stream within a few
minutes; copies of it remain on-
line.
The alleged gunman, Payton
Gendron, also used the chat plat-
form Discord as a place to save
his online writing and pre-attack
to-do lists. On the day of the
attack, he invited people to his
private room, and the 15 who
accepted were then able to scroll
back through months of his racist
screeds and see another view of
his attack live-stream. Discord
has said the messages were visi-
ble only to the suspect until he
shared them the day of the attack.
The revelations about the
Uvalde gunman’s social media
activity follow years of com-
plaints from activists and high-
profile figures about Instagram’s
ability to combat its most trou-
bling users. Instagram has said
that tackling abusive messages is
harder than in comments on
public pages, and that it doesn’t
use its artificial intelligence tech-
nology to proactively detect con-
tent like hate speech or bullying
in the same way.
Instagram users can report di-
rect messages that violate the
company’s rules against hate
speech, bullying and calls to in-
cite violence, and they can block
offensive users. But many abusive
messages still slip through the
cracks. The Center for Counter-
ing Digital Hate, an advocacy
group, said last month that it had
analyzed more than 8,000 direct
messages sent to five high-profile
women and found that Insta-
gram had failed to act on 90
percent of the abusive messages,
despite the posts having been
reported.
Facebook’s critics have alleged
that the ability to tackle danger-
ous posts could get harder once
the company follows suit on its
plan to expand end-to-end en-
cryption, which scrambles the
contents of a message so that only
the sender and receiver can see it,
as a default setting on all of its
messaging services. Currently,
encryption is the default setting
on WhatsApp, but users only
have the option of encrypting
their messages on Instagram and
Facebook. But the company has
argued that as more people flock
to private messaging it wants to
ensure social media networks are
“privacy focused.”
In recent years, Instagram has
launched new tools to protect
teens from predatory users, par-
ticularly adults attempting to
groom them. Last year, the com-
pany began making young teens’
accounts private by default once
they signed up for Instagram, and
they stopped adults from being
able to send direct messages to
teens that don’t follow them. The
company also recently an-
nounced a “hidden words” fea-
ture, which allows users to filter
offensive words, phrases and
emoji in message requests into a
separate inbox.
Yubo said it bans posts that
threaten, bully or intimidate oth-
er people and uses a mix of
software and human moderators
to curb inappropriate content.
People can block others’ accounts
or report concerns to a team of
“safety specialists,” who the com-
pany says respond to each per-
son’s report.
Researchers have documented
that a history of violence or
threats toward women is a com-
mon trait among gunmen in
mass shootings, as evident in the
2016 Orlando nightclub shooting
and the 2019 shooting in Dayton,
Ohio.
Whitney Phillips, a researcher
joining the faculty of the Univer-
sity of Oregon this fall, said social
networks could do more to push
back on violent harassment
toward women, but that the
threats on their site are a reflec-
tion of a larger “boys will be boys”
cultural attitude that normalizes
men’s bad behavior online and
offline.
“When someone says some-
thing violent to you or makes
some sort of death threat to you,
for many women that happens so
often that it wouldn’t even regis-
ter with them,” Phillips said.Shawn Boburg and Razzan Nakhlawi
contributed to this report.Before massacre, Uvalde gunman frequently threatened teen girls online
JOSHUA LOTT/THE WASHINGTON POSTBut he was rarely
reported — and nothing
happened when he wasResearchers have documented that a history of violence or threatstoward women is a common trait among gunmen in massshootings, as evident in the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting andthe 2019 shooting in Dayton, Ohio.