Could Facebook have known about ominous direct-message threats made by a gunman who Texas authorities say massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school? Could it have warned the authorities?
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott revealed the online messages sent minutes before the Wednesday attack, although he called them posts, which are typically distributed to a wide audience. Facebook stepped in to note that the gunman sent one-to-one direct messages, not public posts, and that they weren’t discovered until “after the terrible tragedy.”
The latest mass shootings in the U.S. by active social-media users may bring more pressure on social media companies to heighten their scrutiny of online communications, even though conservative politicians — Abbott among them — are also pushing social platforms to relax their restrictions on some speech.
WHAT DID THE MESSAGES SAY?
According to a report by CNN, minutes before his deadly assault, Ramos, allegedly sent a series of chilling text messages to a girl he met online, describing how he had just shot his grandmother and was going to “shoot up a(n) elementary school.”
Ramos complained about his grandmother, according to screenshots acquired by CNN and an interview with a teenage girl who said she had been in contact with the gunman for weeks. He lamented about his grandmother being “on the phone with AT&T abojt (sic) my phone.”
“It’s annoying,” he texted.
Six minutes later, he texted: “I just shot my grandma in her head.”
Seconds later, he said, “Ima go shoot up a(n) elementary school rn (right now).”
This was his last message to the girl.
On May 9, the 15-year-old girl from Frankfurt, Germany, began conversing with Ramos on a social media app. According to the recordings and text exchanges, Ramos sent the girl selfie videos and discussed a plan to visit her in Europe.
He emailed her a screenshot of a Google airline schedule from nearby San Antonio in one message. He wrote, “I’m coming over soon”.
Ramos allegedly told her on Monday that he had received a shipment of ammo. He assured her that the bullets would expand when they hit someone, she claimed.
The girl inquired about his plans at one point. He told her it was a surprise and to “just wait for it,” she added.
Ramos called her on Tuesday at 11:01 a.m. CT and told her he loved her, she said. He texted her about 20 minutes later, at 11:21 a.m. CT, saying he had shot his grandma.
The girl whose mother granted her permission to be interviewed, said she talked to Ramos every day on FaceTime. She stated she also talked to him on Yubo, a social livestreaming service, and played games with him on Plato, a gaming app. She claims he inquired about her life in Germany during their discussions. “He seemed cheerful and at ease chatting to me,” the girl observed. He told her he spent a lot of time alone at home, she added.
Other text messages, on the other hand, worried her. He once told her that he “threw dead cats at people’s houses,” she claimed.
SHOULD FACEBOOK HAVE CAUGHT THE SHOOTER’S MESSAGES?
Facebook parent company Meta has said it monitors people’s private messages for some kinds of harmful content, such as links to malware or images of child sexual exploitation. But copied images can be detected using unique identifiers — a kind of digital signature — which makes them relatively easy for computer systems to flag. Trying to interpret a string of threatening words — which can resemble a joke, satire or song lyrics — is a far more difficult task for artificial intelligence systems, the Associated Press said in a report.
Facebook could, for instance, flag certain phrases such as “going to kill” or “going to shoot,” but without context — something AI in general has a lot of trouble with — there would be too many false positives for the company to analyze. So Facebook and other platforms rely on user reports to catch threats, harassment and other violations of the law or their own policies. As evidenced by the latest shootings, that often comes too late, if at all.
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
Even this kind of monitoring could soon be obsolete, since Meta plans to roll out end-to-end-encryption on its Facebook and Instagram messaging systems next year. Such encryption means that no one other than the sender and the recipient — not even Meta — can decipher people’s messages. WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, already has such encryption.
A recent Meta-commissioned report emphasized the benefits of such privacy but also noted some risks — including users who could abuse the encryption to sexually exploit children, facilitate human trafficking and spread hate speech.
Apple has long had end-to-end encryption on its messaging system. That has brought the iPhone maker into conflict with the Justice Department over messaging privacy. After the deadly shooting of three U.S. sailors at a Navy installation in December 2019, the Justice Department insisted that investigators needed access to data from two locked and encrypted iPhones that belonged to the alleged gunman, a Saudi aviation student.
Security experts say this could be done if Apple were to engineer a “backdoor” to allow access to messages sent by alleged criminals. Such a secret key would let them decipher encrypted information with a court order.
But the same experts warned that such backdoors into encryption systems make them inherently insecure. Just knowing that a backdoor exists is enough to focus the world’s spies and criminals on discovering the mathematical keys that could unlock it. And when they do, everyone’s information is essentially vulnerable to anyone with the secret key.
With inputs from the Associated Press
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