Germany synagogue shooting live stream video spreads online – but not far

Staring down the lens of a camera, a man with a high-pitched, heavily-accented voice introduced himself as “Anon” and began a hate-filled rant. “I think the Holocaust never happened,” he stated, before stammering into an incoherent tirade against feminism. “The root of all these problems is the Jew,” he concluded. “Would you like to be friends?”

It was the start of a 35-minute video that was live streamed on Twitch, an Amazon-owned video sharing platform that is most commonly used to broadcast video games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. By the end of the video, the man had killed two people in the eastern Germany city of Halle and attempted to enter a synagogue using homemade weapons, before being arrested.

Only five people were watching the Twitch stream at the time but thousands more saw the archived version before it was eventually taken down. Copies of the footage soon spread to other platforms, with an estimated 15,625 people viewing clips through public channels on the messaging app Telegram.