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It could be cryptic, degrading and terrifying, sending angry messages and photos of weapons. If they didn’t respond the way he wanted, he would sometimes threaten to rape or kidnap them, and then he would laugh at it like a big joke.
But girls and young women who spoke to Salvador Ramos online months before he allegedly killed 19 children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, rarely reported him. His threats seemed too vague, several said in interviews with The Washington Post. A teenager who reported Ramos to the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result.
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Some also suspected that this was how teenagers were talking on the Internet these days: a mixture of rage and misogyny so predictable that they could barely make out. One girl, speaking of moments when she had been creepy and threatening, said this was “how she’s online.”
After the deadliest shooting of a school in a decade, many have wondered what more could have been done: how an 18-year-old who vomited so much hatred on so many on the net could do so without causing punishment or alarm.
But these threats had not been discovered by parents, friends or teachers. They had seen strangers, many of whom had never met him and only found him through the social messaging and video apps that form the basis of modern teenage life.
The Washington Post reviewed videos, posts, and text messages sent by Ramos and spoke to four youths who had spoken to him online, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of further harassment.
Community members express shock and grief in Uvalde, Texas, at a memorial for 19 students and two adults killed in a mass shooting. (Video: Alice Li, Jon Gerberg, Zoeann Murphy / The Washington Post)
The girls who spoke to The Post lived all over the world, but they met Ramos on Yubo, an app that mixes live streaming and social media and has become 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 estimates by analytics firm Sensor Tower.
In Yubo, people can meet in large real-time chat rooms, known as dashboards, to talk, write messages, and share videos, the digital equivalent of a real-world hangout. Ramos, they said, engaged in side-by-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 pictures of dead cats, sent them weird messages and joked about sexual assault, they said. In a video from a live Yubo chat room that listeners had recorded and was reviewed by The Post, Ramos could be heard saying, “Everyone in this world deserves to be raped.”
A 16-year-old boy from Austin who said he saw Ramos frequently on Yubo panels told The Post that Ramos often sexually assaulted young women on the app and sent him a death threat during a panel in January.
“I witnessed harassing girls and threatening them with sexual assault, rape and kidnapping,” the teenager said. “It wasn’t like a single fact. It was common.”
He and his friends reported Ramos’ account to Yubo for harassment and other infractions dozens of times. He said he never received a response and the account remained active.
Yubo spokeswoman Amy Williams did not say whether the company received reports of abuse related to Ramos’ account. “Because there is an ongoing and active investigation and because this information relates to the data of a specific person, we cannot legally share these details publicly at this time,” he said in an email. Williams would not say what law prevents the company from commenting.
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Texas Gov. 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 on Facebook messages. And Texas Department of Homeland Security officials said Friday that Ramos had discussed buying a gun several times in private chats on Instagram.
Ten days before the shooting, he wrote in one of the messages, “10 more days,” according to the official. Another person wrote, “Are you going to shoot a school or something?” to which Ramos replied: “No, stop asking silly questions. You’ll see, “the official said.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and the WhatsApp chat service, told The Post in a previous statement from the company that the messages had been sent privately.
According to social media researchers, the rise of services connecting strangers through private messaging has strained the conventional “see something, say something” mantra repeated over the decades since the Columbine High School massacre and other attacks. . And when strangers suspect something is wrong, they may feel that they have limited ways to respond beyond submitting a user report to a corporate abyss.
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Many of Ramos’s threats to attack women, the young women added, barely stood out from the current of sexism that permeates the Internet, something they said they had fought against but also accepted.
A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that these experiences are common for young people, with about two-thirds of adults under the age of 30 reporting being bullied online. 33% of women under the age of 35 say they have been sexually harassed online.
Danielle K. Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said women and girls often do not report threats of rape to law enforcement or trusted adults because they have socialized to feel they don’t deserve it. online security and privacy. Sometimes they think that no one will help them.
Women and girls have “internalized the vision: ‘What else do we expect?'” Said Citron, author of the forthcoming book “The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age.” “Our security and intimate privacy is something that society does not value.”
Ramos’ hatred of women and his obsession with violence were clear in the messages displayed and in interviews with The Post, but his identity was mostly hidden. The teens who spoke to The Post said they saw him in live videos he made on Yubo, then exchanged Instagram usernames to send him messages.
And he had restricted his comments to private messaging services like Yubo and Instagram, leaving only the recipients with the burden of reacting.
Like many of the people he spoke to, Ramos had shared little about him online. He used screen names like “salv8dor_” and “TheBiggestOpp” and only shared his name and age. His profile pictures were selfies, he was holding his shirt or he was looking sad in front of a broken mirror.
He shared videos of animals, had flirtatious conversations, and shared intimate things about his past that made him feel like distant friends. But in recent months, he had also begun posting darker images: moody black-and-white photos and rifle images in his bed.
Their threats were often blurry or unspecific, and were therefore easily dismissed as a troll or a bad joke. A girl told The Post that she first saw Ramos on a Yubo sign telling someone, “Shut up before I shoot you,” but she thought it was harmless because “kids joke like that.”
The week before the shooting, Ramos began hinting that something would happen to at least three girls on Tuesday, he said. “I’ll tell you before 11. It’s our little secret,” he said, telling them several times. On the morning of the shooting, he sent her a message with a photo of two rifles. She responded by asking why she had sent them, but never answered, according to a screenshot seen by The Post.
“It would threaten everyone,” he said. “He was talking about shooting schools, but no one believed him, no one would think he would.”
Another 16-year-old said she met Ramos on Yubo in February and sent him a message asking for her Instagram account. Earlier this month, she reacted to a meme she had posted that referred to a gun with a laughing emoji and said, “I personally wouldn’t use an AK-47,” but “a better gun.” AR-15 style. like what police said he used in the shooting, according to a screenshot seen by The Post.
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Uvalde’s shooting comes less than two weeks after another gunman killed 10 blacks at a Buffalo grocery store. It broadcast the attack live via the Twitch video service, which removed the stream in a matter of minutes; copies remain online.
The alleged gunman, Payton Gendron, also used the Discord chat platform as a place to save his to-do lists before attacking and typing online. On the day of the attack, he invited people to his private room, and the 15 who accepted were able to step back months from their racist statements 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.
Revelations about Uvalde gunman activity on social media follow years of complaints from activists and high-profile figures about Instagram’s ability to combat its most troubling users. Instagram has said that addressing abusive messages is more difficult than commenting on public pages, and that it does not use its artificial intelligence technology to proactively detect content such as hate speech or school bullying. in the same way.
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