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What happens when a ‘social media murder’ suspect wants to go viral

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August 26, 2015 at 1:59 p.m. EDT

In the immediate aftermath of a shooting in Southwest Virginia that unfolded on live television and left a reporter and cameraman dead, WDBJ7 anchor Chris Hurst tweeted that he and the reporter, Alison Parker, had been in love.

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“It was the best nine months of our lives,” Hurst wrote, less than three hours after the incident. He said that he and Parker wanted to be married.

Parker, a morning reporter at the station, was fatally shot alongside cameraman Adam Ward by a former employee of the CBS affiliate, according to police. Ward fell to the ground as his own fiancee, Melissa Ott, watched the shooting in real time in the control room at the Roanoke station.

A third person — Vicki Gardner, who was being interviewed live by Parker at the time of the shooting — was also shot. Gardner was taken to Roanoke Memorial Hospital for surgery.

[LIVE UPDATES: TV shooting leaves two dead]

By now, journalists and their audiences are used to seeing the aftermaths of mass shootings play out on social media. As has happened before, Reddit and Twitter lit up Wednesday morning with theories — all of which turned out to be incorrect — about the identity of the shooter, after Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said authorities believed the gunman was a disgruntled station employee.

A television reporter and a videographer for a CBS affiliate WDBJ7 in Roanoke, Va., were shot and killed Wednesday morning as they were doing a live report. (Video: The Washington Post)

But as the frantic search for the gunman continued, the role of social media in the story of this shooting deepened to an almost unprecedented point.

Footage of the shooting itself, captured and broadcast from Ward’s camera, circulated widely, even as the station announced that the two had died.

Then, hours later, social media appeared to become evidence: An account that appeared to be connected to the suspected gunman — identified as Vester Lee Flanagan by authorities, but known in the broadcast industry as Bryce Williams — began to tweet.

It was four hours after the shooting, and less than an hour after authorities named a suspect, when a Twitter account with the handle @bryce_williams7 began posting allegations against “Alison” and “Adam.” Just minutes before the account began to tweet about the shooting, a CNN reporter tweeted that “police are now searching for @bryce_williams7 aka Vester Flanagan, fmr. reporter for WDBJ.”

The @bryce_williams7 account then posted several times, accusing the shooting victims of wronging the tweeter.

“Alison made racist comments,” one tweet read.

“Adam went to hr on me after working with me one time!!!” another read.

Then came this message: “I filmed the shooting see Facebook.”

Within minutes, a video had been posted to a Facebook account for one Bryce Williams, appearing to show a horrifying video of the shooting from the gunman’s perspective.

The video was also posted to Twitter, in two separate clips.

Even now, after the boundaries between social media and the real world have become permeable, the direct release of a point-of-view video showing a fatal shooting seemed unbelievable.

Suddenly, it seemed, the suspect was asking for help going viral. Many reacted viscerally and with shock.

Both of the accounts that appeared to be connected to Williams were suspended or removed shortly after the shooting videos were posted, amid widespread calls for the social networks to remove the clips.

As copied versions of the shooting video began to migrate to YouTube, a spokeswoman told The Post: “YouTube has clear policies against videos containing gratuitous violence and we remove them as soon as they’re flagged.”

Representatives from Facebook did immediately respond to requests for comment. Twitter declined to comment on the account.

The @bryce_williams7 Twitter account does not appear to be new. People included the handle in tweets about about WDBJ reports as far back as 2012. But as of late Wednesday morning, the earliest tweets sent by the @bryce_williams7 account dated to Aug. 19 — seven days before the shooting. It’s unclear whether there were earlier tweets that had been deleted.

During the past week, the feed prominently featured photo collages showing headshots, baby photos and more recent images. It also showed a man — apparently Williams — anchoring a television broadcast with a female anchor.

Although shocking, it’s not unprecedented for alleged murderers to use social media to to display evidence of their own actions.

In February, police in Pennsylvania said a teenager had killed a classmate and uploaded a “selfie” with the victim to Snapchat. Redditors unearthed the personal details of somebody who in 2013 posted what appeared to be a murder confession in the form of a popular meme. That same year, Derek Medina posted what appeared to be a photo of his wife’s body, along with a confession, on Facebook.

But the Virginia shooting is arguably the highest-profile example of what some have termed a “social media murder,” one that unfolded in real time for a massive audience, with apparent participation by the suspect himself.

Suddenly, social media users used to chasing information were contending with the possibility that the suspect had come to them.

That, it seems, has triggered concerns that this might not be the last time an alleged gunman takes to social media in an attempt to go viral.

[This post has been updated.]

MORE READING:

Alison Parker, 24, killed on the air, was a gifted TV reporter

Cameraman Adam Ward, 27, was planning to get married before he was killed outside Roanoke

Parker and Ward were the seventh and eighth journalists killed in the U.S. since 1992

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