Many of Ramos’ threats to assault women, the young women added, barely stood out from the undercurrent of sexism that pervades the Internet - something they said they have fought back against but also come to accept.Ī 2021 Pew Research Center study found these experiences are common for young people, with about two-thirds of adults under 30 reporting that they’ve experienced online harassment. And when strangers do suspect something is wrong, they may feel they have limited ways to respond beyond filing a user report into a corporate abyss. The rise of services that connect strangers through private messaging has strained the conventional “see something, say something” mantra repeated in the decades since the Columbine High School massacre and other attacks, according to social media researchers. You’ll see,” the official said.Īndy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and the chat service WhatsApp, referred The Post to an earlier statement from the company that said the messages were sent privately. Another person wrote to him, “Are you going to shoot up a school or something?” to which Ramos responded, “No, stop asking dumb questions. Ten days before the shooting, he wrote in one of the messages, “10 more days,” according to the official. And Texas Department of Public Safety officials said Friday that Ramos had discussed buying a gun several times in private chats on Instagram. Greg Abbott (R) said Wednesday that Ramos had also written, “I’m going to shoot my grandmother” and “I’m going to shoot an elementary school” shortly before the attack in messages on Facebook. Williams would not say what law prevents the company from commenting. “As there is an ongoing and active investigation and because this information concerns a specific individual’s data, we are not legally able to share these details publicly at this time,” she said in an email.
Yubo spokeswoman Amy Williams would not say whether the company received reports of abuse related to Ramos’s account. He never heard back, he said, and the account remained active. He and his friends reported Ramos’s account to Yubo for bullying and other infractions dozens of times. “I witnessed him harass girls and threaten them with sexual assault, like rape and kidnapping,” said the teen. In a video from a live Yubo chatroom that listeners had recorded and was reviewed by The Post, Ramos could be heard saying, “Everyone in this world deserves to get raped.”Ī 16-year-old boy in Austin who said he saw Ramos frequently in Yubo panels, told The Post that Ramos frequently made aggressive, sexual comments to young women on the app and sent him a death threat during one panel in January. Ramos, they said, struck up side conversations with them and followed them onto other platforms, including Instagram, where he could send direct messages whenever he wanted.īut over time they saw a darker side, as he posted images of dead cats, texted them strange messages and joked about sexual assault, they said.
On Yubo, people can gather in big real-time chatrooms, known as panels, to talk, type messages and share videos - the digital equivalent of a real-world hangout. The girls who spoke with The Post lived around the world but met Ramos on Yubo, an app that mixes live-streaming and social networking and has become known as a “Tinder for teens.” The Yubo app has been downloaded more than 18 million times in the U.S., including more than 200,000 times last month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Sensor Tower. The Washington Post reviewed videos, posts and text messages sent by Ramos and spoke with four young people who’d talked with him online, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of further harassment. They’d been seen by strangers, many of whom had never met him and had found him only through the social messaging and video apps that form the bedrock of modern teen life. In the aftermath of the deadliest school shooting in a decade, many have asked what more could have been done - how an 18-year-old who spewed so much hate to so many on the Web could do so without provoking punishment or raising alarm.īut these threats hadn’t been discovered by parents, friends or teachers.
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