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He could be mysterious, humiliating and scary, sending angry messages and pictures of weapons. If they didn’t respond the way he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them – then he laughed like a big joke.
But girls and young women who spoke to Salvador Ramos online in the months before he killed 19 children at an elementary school in Uwalde, Texas, rarely reported it. His threats seemed too vague, several said in interviews with The Washington Post. A teenager who reported Ramos on the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result.
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Some also suspected that this was the way teenage boys talked on the Internet these days – a mixture of rage and misogyny, so predictable that they could barely make out each one. One girl, discussing moments when he was fearful and threatening, said it was just “online.”
After the deadliest shooting at a school in a decade, many wondered what more could be done – how an 18-year-old boy who spewed so much hatred for so many people online could do so without provoking punishment or raising an alarm. .
But these threats were not detected by parents, friends or teachers. They have been seen by strangers, many of whom have never met him and have found him only through social messages and video applications, which form the basis of modern teenage life.
The Washington Post reviewed videos, posts, and text messages sent by Ramos, and spoke to four young men who spoke to him online who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of further harassment.
The girls who spoke to The Post lived all over the world, but met Ramos at Yubo, an app that mixed live streaming and social media and became known as Tinder for Teens. The Yubo app has been downloaded more than 18 million times in the United States, including more than 200,000 times last month, according to analyst firm Sensor Tower.
At Yubo, people can gather in large, real-time chat rooms, known as panels, to talk, write messages, and share videos – the digital equivalent of real-world terrain. They said Ramos had started side conversations with them and followed them to other platforms, including Instagram, where he could send direct messages whenever he wanted.
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But over time, they saw a darker side as he posted images of dead cats, sent them strange messages and joked about sexual violence, they said. In a live video chat on Yubo, recorded by listeners and viewed by The Post, Ramos could be heard saying, “Everyone in this world deserves to be raped.”
A 16-year-old boy in Austin, who said he often saw Ramos in Yubo panels, told The Post that Ramos often made aggressive, sexual comments about young women in the app and sent him a death threat during one panel in January.
“I witnessed him harassing girls and threatening them with sexual violence, such as rape and kidnapping,” the teenager said. “It was not a one-time event. It was often. “
He and his friends reported Ramos’ account to Yubo for harassment and other violations dozens of times. He said he had never heard from and Ramos’ account remained active.
Yubo spokesman Amy Williams will not say whether the company has previously received reports of abuse related to Ramos’ account. “Because there is an ongoing and active investigation and because this information relates to individual data, we cannot legally share this detail publicly at this time,” she said in an email. Williams will not say which law does not allow the company to comment.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (right) said Wednesday that Ramos also wrote, “I’m going to shoot my grandmother” and “I’m going to shoot elementary school” shortly before the attack in Facebook posts. Texas Public Security officials said on Friday that Ramos had discussed buying weapons several times in private chats on Instagram.
Ten days before the shooting, he wrote in one of the messages “another 10 days”, according to the officer. Another man wrote to him, “Are you going to shoot at school or something?” To which Ramos replied, “No, stop asking stupid questions.” You will see, “said the official.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and the WhatsApp chat service, referred The Post to an earlier statement from the company, which said the messages were sent privately.
The rise of personal messaging services has strained the conventional “see something, say something” mantra, repeated in decades after the Columbine High School massacre and other attacks, according to social media researchers. And when strangers suspect something is wrong, they may feel they have limited ways to respond other than filing a user report in the corporate abyss.
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The young women added that many of Ramos’ threats to attack women barely stand out from the underwater current of sexism that is penetrating the internet – something they said they fought against but also began to accept.
A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that these experiences were common in young people, with about two-thirds of adults under the age of 30 reporting experiencing online bullying. Thirty-three percent of women under the age of 35 say they have been sexually harassed online.
Daniel K. Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said women and girls often did not report threats of rape by law enforcement or trusted adults because they were socialized to feel they did not deserve security and privacy online. Sometimes they don’t think anyone will help them.
Women and girls have “internalized the view of what else to expect?” Said Citron, author of the forthcoming book The Struggle for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity and Love in the Digital Age. “Our safety and intimacy are something society doesn’t value.”
Ramos’ hatred of women and obsession with violence were clear in reviews and interviews conducted by The Post, but his identity was largely hidden. Teenagers who spoke to The Post said they saw him in live videos he made on Yubo, then exchanged Instagram usernames to write to him.
And he limited his comments to private messaging services like Yubo and Instagram, leaving only recipients with the burden of responding.
Like many of the people he spoke to, Ramos shared little about himself online. He uses screen names like “salv8dor_” and “TheBiggestOpp” – and shared only his first name and age. His profile pictures were selfies, he lifted his shirt or looked grim in front of a broken mirror.
He shared videos with animals, started flirting conversations and shared intimate things about his past that left a feeling of distant friends. But in recent months, he has also begun posting darker images – gloomy black-and-white photos and photos of rifles on his bed.
His threats were often vague or vague, so they were easily dismissed as just a troll or a bad joke. One girl told The Post that it was the first time she had seen Ramos in a Yubo panel say to someone, “Shut up before I shoot you,” but decided it was harmless because “kids are joking like that.”
In the week before the shooting, Ramos began hinting that something would happen to at least three girls on Tuesday, she said. “I’ll tell you before 11. This is our little secret,” she said, he told them several times. On the morning of the shooting, he sent her a photo of two rifles. She answered the question why he sent them, but he did not answer, according to a screenshot reviewed by The Post.
“He will threaten everyone,” she said. “He would talk about shooting schools, but no one believed him, no one would think he would.
Another 16-year-old said she met Ramos at Yubo in February and that he sent her a message asking for her Instagram account. Earlier this month, he reacted to a meme she posted mentioning a weapon with laughing emojis and said, “Personally, I wouldn’t use an AK-47, but a ‘better gun’: an AR-style rifle.” 15 like the one police said he used in the shooting, according to a screenshot viewed by The Post.
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The shooting in Uwalde comes less than two weeks after another gunman killed 10 blacks at a Buffalo grocery store. It broadcasts the attack live via the Twitch video service, which removes the stream within minutes; copies of it remain online.
The alleged gunman, Peyton Hendron, also uses the Discord chat platform as a place to keep his lists of online writing and pre-attack tasks. On the day of the attack, he invited people to his private room, and the 15 who accepted managed to roll back through the months of his racist stunts and see another view of his attack live. Discord said the messages were only visible to the suspect until he shared them on the day of the attack.
The revelations about Uvalde’s activities on social media follow years of complaints from activists and dignitaries about Instagram’s ability to fight its most troubling users. Instagram said it was harder to deal with offensive messages than in comments on public pages, and that it did not use its artificial intelligence technology to proactively detect content such as hate speech or harassment in the same way.
Instagram users can report direct messages that violate the company’s policies against hate speech, harassment and calls for incitement to violence, and can block offensive users. But many offensive messages are still slipping through the cracks. The Center for Counteracting Digital Hate, …
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