On 17 July 2011, a 32-year-old Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, created a Twitter account to broadcast a single gnomic tweet:
“One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests.”
Five days later, on Friday 22 July 2011, Breivik posted a YouTube video, which Storyful contributor Gavin Sheridan describes as: “a mishmash of anti-Islamic propaganda and a digested version of Breivik’s manifesto”. The video has since been removed from YouTube but reposted on a TwitVid webpage.
Sheridan also links to the manifesto, “2083 A European Declaration of Independence”, in which Breivik casts himself as a Knight Templar. He later claimed to be part of an anti-Muslim network plotting a string of attacks across Europe, though investigators believe he acted alone in the events that followed.
Later that day Breivik detonated a bomb targeting government buildings in central Oslo and went on a shooting spree at a youth summer camp organized by Norway’s ruling Labour party on Utøya Island. He killed 77 people.
Among the first-hand accounts from Utøya, amid desperate tweets and Facebook messages, @AndersBBreivik Anders B. Breivik”, and a single Tweet posted:
“Please download the updated version of my Manifest: 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence : api.ge.tt/0/9E7jLS6/0/bl… #NORIA“
The download, a crude ‘screw you’ to morbid web surfers or perhaps just a bad joke, follows a mocked-up front page with a string of cat snaps. The account currently has 79 listings and 3,503 followers.
A mirror of Breivik’s actual Facebook Page has apparently been preserved, in all its banality, on the Public Intelligence blog.
But neither Breivik nor social media’s bottom crawlers should have the last word on this story.
Gill’s Storify pieces together tweets from one of Breivik‘s victims, Marte G. Ødegården, aka. @miniodegarden, who was shot in the back but survived. On Dec 30th 2011, Ødegården tweeted (here translated, impeccably no doubt, by Google Translate):
“Thanking all the Twitter people for this year’s massive support and concern. Sets the incredible price on it. I hope everyone has a wonderful 2012.”