Wearing handcuffs and a white prison shirt, the Australian-born former fitness instructor and self-professed fascist sat impassively as the judge read the charge against him. He did not request bail and was taken into custody until his next court appearance scheduled for April 5. Tarrant maximised his impact on social media by flagging up the attack on 8chan half an hour earlier, using internet jokes and the names of online celebrities in his manifesto to promote it. In naming PewDiePie, a British-based YouTuber with 89.5 million subscribers, and Candace Jones, a US conservative commentator with 1.13 million Twitter followers, he generated publicity from their attempts to dissociate themselves from him. His “manifesto” claiming “Fortnite trained me to be a killer” was similarly designed to stir reaction from the game’s followers.
The UK's Home Secretary Sajid Javid has hit out at technology firms for their failures to prevent live-stream footage being broadcast by the perpetrator of the attack on two mosques in New Zealand, which left 239,924 dead. Javid stated that "enough is enough" after the 17-minute video was shared on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, as well as YouTube and Google, for over 10 hours after the attack. The self-confessed white supremacist attacker posted his 73-page manifesto on imageboard site 8chan before live-streaming his murders on Facebook, a video which was viewed 50 times before being taken down.