TikTok Is Full of Content Glorifying the Christchurch Shooter and Other Mass Murderers

Almost exactly four years after one of the deadliest neo-Nazi attacks in the modern age occurred, content celebrating the heinous crime can still be easily found on TikTok. 

In March 2019, a neo-Nazi opened fire on two mosques and murdered 51 Muslim people in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter livestreamed the attack in the hopes of inspiring others to follow in his footsteps and create content out of the trail of blood he left behind. 

Now, fans of the mass murderer continue to do just that on TikTok, according to a new report the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) shared exclusively with VICE News. In just a few hours of monitoring, researchers for the UK-based extremism think tank found 53 pieces of content supporting the Christchurch shooter, including content created by the shooter himself. That’s almost double as many as researchers found for a similar study conducted two years ago, which lasted months. 

"This data supports the finding that footage related to the 2019 terrorist attack is still easily discoverable on TikTok. Perhaps more concerning is that clear promotion and glorification of terrorists and the spread of extremist ideologies on TikTok does not appear to have improved over the course of almost two years," reads the report, written by Ciaran O’Connor and Melanie Smith. 

During the short monitoring period, the report found 33 posts and 20 accounts glorifying the massacre. Of the posts, 16 featured content created by the shooter himself, and 15 were posts celebrating him. Of the accounts, all of them used an image of the shooter as a profile picture with the most frequent one being an image of him in his car shortly before beginning the massacre. The accounts that created the posts celebrating him, unsurprisingly, had posts supporting other white supremacist mass murderers, like Anders Breivik, a neo-Nazi who killed 77 in Norway in 2011. 

“Of the 33 TikTok posts, 28 were published on the platform between January-March 2023, while the rest were published last year,” reads the report. “Some of these posts date back to August 2022, again raising the question of how they have not been detected and removed by TikTok.” 

On average, the posts were seen 2,600 times. The most viewed post in the collection was seen over 13,000 times and was posted by an account that had an image of the Christchurch shooter as its profile picture and called him “a hero” in its bio.

Tiktok did not immediately respond to VICE News request for comment, but the platform has taken steps to try and stamp out the extremist content found on its site including partnering with law enforcement. In a press release from September 2022, Julie de Bailliencourt, Tiktoks global head of product policy wrote that they work with initiatives such as Tech Against Terrorism to monitor this content, remove it, and flag to law enforcement when warranted. The video streaming giant said that less than one percent of the removed  videos contained extremist content. 

The posts and accounts found in the recent report are in clear violation of TikTok’s terms of service. Moderation can be a game of whack-a-mole. Simply searching the name of the Christchurch shooter will bring users a warning that it’s associated with “hateful behavior.” But by changing the order or spelling or the search terms, the content can still be found. Posters also have tricks to avoid moderators. 

Experts have long been sounding the alarm that social media and video-sharing apps frequented by younger people are used to recruit and radicalize by extremist groups. Multiple mass murderers have cited the Christchurch shooter as inspiration in their killing sprees and have sought out content like what the report found on TikTok. 

“Content that glorifies mass violence and the individuals who commit atrocities in furtherance of ideological goals is a pillar of the propaganda playbook deployed within racially motivated violent extremist communities online and is often distributed with stated or apparent hopes of inspiring the next would-be killer in waiting," reads the report.

But some of these killers are no longer waiting. 

In 2019, a man in Poway, California, walked into a synagogue and shot four people, killing one, and tried to burn the temple to the ground. In an open letter he directly cited the Christchurch shooter as an inspiration. Last year, a young man killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a racist attack. In an online diary, he wrote that he was radicalized partially by online videos, and large portions of his online manifesto were directly lifted from the Christchurch killer. 

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