Firearms are increasingly present on social networks, immediately launched Detective Sergeant Maya Alieh, head of cyber-investigations at the Service de police de la ville de Montréal (SPVM).
She delivered her findings Thursday morning during the closing day of the Montreal Forum for the Fight Against Armed Violence, in front of an audience made up of police officers, but also community, education and health workers. The Forum was organized by the SPVM and the city of Montreal.
In 2018, we did not see many people who displayed themselves with firearms on social networks, related the sergeant-detective: barely eight files were open within the police force.
Now, she reports a 68% rise in firearms cases on social media, and a 20% to 30% increase in cybercrime cases each year since 2018.
And the cases make one shudder. She talked about these images of a young girl who was put up for sale on Snapchat, the barrel of a gun in her mouth.
“She was sold and was going to fly,” Detective Sergeant Alieh reported. But the police arrived just at the right time, before the girl reached her destination.
She also talked about this girl, in the first year of primary school, who tried to take her own life after being threatened with violence on WhatsApp.
“It’s the real truth of the reality on the ground.”
Social networks have abolished borders, and geographical limits no longer exist, she notes.
Part of the threat has emerged from city parks and onto the web: it showed this image of a young person who uploaded to SnapMap a photo of a handgun with a map and the words “Game Over”.
This application, which outraged parents a few years ago because it came by default with cell phones, now needs to be activated. Young people who want to make themselves known to the criminal world do so, she says.
“We see people there putting pictures of their poutines, but we also see a lot of firearms”.
If for some Instagram is seen as the prerogative of influencers and is associated with travel or fashion photos, there are also firearms for sale, just like on Snapchat, she reports.
Young people do not need the Dark Web to buy a handgun, she said: they are very well served by platforms they already have in their hands.
Normalization of violence
On social networks, there is a trivialization of violence, she explains: a young person was locked in a cage and forced to get on all fours, she said, showing images of the cage . “The young people who saw the video are so desensitized that they just shared it instead of reporting it,” she laments.
This is also the observation of one of the young participants in the Montreal forum, Émile Tremblay. His friend Thomas Trudel was shot dead last November. During the portion when the young people were consulted, many “said that the violence has become normal, that it is part of their daily life”, he reported Thursday morning.
“It’s not normal for it to be normal.”
According to him, it’s too easy to get a gun, by having it delivered or even by printing it at home. And even young people who don’t care about guns end up buying one because they are threatened and afraid, added Abdellah Azzouz, a 22-year-old from the Saint-Michel district, who says he knows five people. who were slaughtered.
The Forum was held over three days. February 24 was an opportunity for community and research organizations to discuss and share their knowledge. The week of March 14 was dedicated to young people’s ideas and this Thursday conclusions must be drawn on the best ways to combat violence in order to put a plan in place.