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Attempted assassination of Donald Trump spurred a huge spike in calls for violence and civil war online
The day after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the internet saw a huge spike in calls for violence, and in particular an increase 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 documented by Moonshot, a company that monitors domestic violent extremism, or DVE, spaces online. A team of six researchers documented 1,599 calls for civil war — a 633% increase from a normal day — across a range of online platforms including 4Chan and Reddit, more mainstream platforms like YouTube, and new sites for far-right discussions geared towards angry and disillusioned young men.
“The uptick in online calls is fairly typical of online discourse in spaces that glorify violence,” Elizabeth Neumann, chief strategy officer for Moonshot, told CBS News. “The fact is, there is an online ecosystem out there working day in, day out to encourage violence of all kinds, from political civil war to mindless school shootings,” she said.
The alarming findings follow a longstanding pattern. Every mass shooting or instance of targeted violence in the last decade has been followed by increased calls for violence online. In most cases, the perpetrators posted about violence prior to carrying out the act in the real world.
In the case of Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who opened fire at the Trump 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 posted troubling content online in the past.
Officials have found “a social media account which is believed to be associated with the shooter, in about the 2019, 2020 timeframe,” FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees last week. “There were over 700 comments,” he said, that “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and are described as extreme in nature.”
The gunman grazed Trump’s ear, killed volunteer firefighter and father of two Corey Comperatore, and injured two more rally-goers. A Secret Service sniper shot and killed Crooks within seconds of him opening fire.
In the day following the shooting, Moonshot also found 2,051 specific threats or encouragements to violence online — more than double the regular volume of daily threats the group documents as part of its ongoing monitoring of extremist spaces.
Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group combating gun violence, partnered with Moonshot on a new report out today that tracked interest and engagement in online discussions of mass shootings and targeted violence from January through June of last year.
Researchers found that the glorification of mass shootings and targeted violence, and the valorization of the perpetrators, was common in online discussions devoted to such content. They also found that Google searches were the gateway to other platforms that hosted the troubling chats. The report found that actual calls for carrying out violence in the real world came from a smaller subset of individuals online.
“In the aftermath of mass shootings, we often learn that the shooter was radicalized with help from vile content he found on sites like YouTube — and 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 connection between violent online rhetoric and violent attacks in the real world, according to Everytown, but for more than a decade, both have been on an upward trend.
Since the dawn of the internet, a small subset of chat rooms have harbored hateful content like Nazi glorification. But in the last 10 years, as the number of mass shootings — particularly school shootings — has increased, the online glorification of school shooters has ballooned.
“We call on these companies to put public safety ahead of traffic numbers, and proactively moderate spaces that are breeding grounds for hate and violence,” Feinblatt said.
Mainstream platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have devoted significant resources to clearing out such content, with some success, but YouTube in particular has struggled with the game of whack-a-mole to stamp out harmful content.
A spokesperson for YouTube said the company has a policy that explicitly prohibits content that glorifies or promotes violent tragedies, such as school shootings, and said 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 promoting or glorifying violent acts, and we strictly enforce these policies,” said Javier Hernandez, the YouTube spokesperson.
Fringe extremist platforms that make no attempt to monitor extremist content have been cropping up, including a website devoted to the discussion and glorification of mass shootings.
The perpetrators of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 are celebrated the most in the online discussions, according to the report by Everytown and Moonshot.
“When I survived the shooting 25 years ago… I could never have imagined social media, let alone what these sites would become,” said Salli Garrigan, a Moms Demand Action volunteer and senior fellow with the Everytown Survivor Network. The shooting claimed the lives of 12 of her classmates and her teacher.
“As a mother now, it’s terrifying to know 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 spokesperson for Reddit, who did not see the report prior to publication, said the platform’s content policy “strictly prohibits content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people,” and that this includes “mass killer manifestos and related media, as well as any support or cheering for these attacks.”
The Reddit spokesperson said the platform has dedicated “safety teams” that “rapidly monitor and remove violating content” following “significant external events.”
A spokesperson for 4Chan did not respond to CBS News’ request for comment.
contributed to this report.
Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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