An online chatroom invitation sent shortly before the Buffalo supermarket shooting by alleged gunman Payton Gendron was accepted by 15 users, according to a person with knowledge of the messaging platform Discord’s investigation into the matter. When the 15 accepted the invite to that server, they were able to scroll back through months of Gendron’s voluminous writings and racist screeds.

A copy of an invitation from Gendron reviewed by The Washington Post said Discord users who clicked through to the room also could view an online video stream, where footage of the Buffalo attack on Saturday was broadcast, raising the possibility more people saw the shootings as they happened than was previously known.

Investigators at the messaging platform are sifting through data relating to Gendron’s account to decipher the accused shooter’s network, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters also being examined by law enforcement.

Discord has said it disabled Gendron’s chatroom after the shooting, which killed 10 people and injured three at a Tops supermarket, but has declined to say how it learned of the chat room’s connection to the attack.

A Discord spokesperson declined to comment on the finding that 15 people accepted the invitation. The spokesperson referred The Post to a statement issued Wednesday that said the company was assisting law enforcement. “Hate has no place on Discord and we are committed to combating violence and extremism,” the spokesperson said.

The new finding on Gendron’s alleged use of online networks to transmit footage of the killings, and to disseminate propaganda seeking to justify them, illustrates how social media companies have been unable to stop their platforms being exploited to spread terror despite promises to do so.

Gendron, an 18-year-old from Conklin, N.Y., has pleaded not guilty to murder after being arrested at the scene of the killings. About half an hour before the shootings, according to Discord, Gendron’s account shared an invitation with other users on the platform, which allows direct messaging and group discussion in private rooms known as servers that require an invite.

A copy of an invitation later posted online by one recipient features a link to Gendron’s private Discord server, where he had for six months been compiling hundreds of postings that included racist screeds and explicit details of a plan for the shooting of Black people at the store in Buffalo. The messages were written by an author who identified himself as Gendron, a review by The Post found.

Gendron, a White man, cited a racist theory that non-Whites were brought to the United States to replace White people for political purposes. Eleven of the 13 people shot at the supermarket were Black, police have said.

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The invitation, headed “Happening: This is not a drill,” also included a separate link to an account on the video streaming service Twitch, where Gendron allegedly broadcast video of his attack from a camera mounted on his military-style helmet. Twitch screenshots shared online showed that 22 people watched and the firm has said it disabled the stream within two minutes of the first gunshot. But some viewers saved copies that have since spread online. (Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post.)

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Discord has declined to say how many people had access to Gendron’s invitation. In his writings before the attack, he wrote that he intended to share it with everyone on his Discord friends list, each Discord server he belonged to and on message boards unrelated to Discord that feature extremist content. The invitation also included separate links to copies of his writings at file-sharing websites.