UK Man Sentenced To 11.5 Years In Prison For Hate Speech Videos Linked To Mass Shooters

In May of last year, a gunmen entered a supermarket in Buffalo, New York and fatally shot teen Black people. Half a year later, in November, another mass shooting in a Colorado Springs LGBT night club took the lives of five and injured twenty-five. Though these murderers, who intentionally targeted marginalized groups of people, were mostly met with disdain, a select few influenced them.

Earlier today, a 19-year-old from the United Kingdom was sentenced to 11 1/2 years in prison for five counts of encouraging terrorism, and one count of possession of material for terrorist purposes for attempting to make a gun with a 3D printer, BBC reported. Before his arrest, Daniel Harris made dozens of far-right online posts and videos that glorified and praised mass killings. The British teen’s videos were liked and shared by the attackers of the Buffalo and Colorado Springs mass shootings, where he called for the “total extermination of subhumans.” Judge Patrick Field, who announced the sentence, described Harris’ footage as “vile antisemitic, racist, misogynistic and homophobic.”

“What they did was truly appalling, but what they did was no more than what you intended to encourage others to do when publishing this material online,” Field said at Harris’ sentencing. “You intended to encourage terrorism, and it’s plain that what was being encouraged was lethal, racist and anti-Semitic violence, as well as violence against the gay community.”