If you haven’t seen the video of a bullet killing Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah, you’re one of the lucky ones. When most people opened X, Instagram, YouTube, or any other platform on Wednesday afternoon, the gore was there waiting for them.
Social media is the worst place to be right now
Our unmoderated online reality bares its teeth.
Adam Clark Estes is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He’s spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice.
This was by design. While images of graphic violence have always spread online, users once had to search them out. But more recently social media companies have made them inescapable as they’ve backed away from content moderation, sometimes in the name of free speech. That meant horrifying videos of Kirk’s assassination went viral in the immediate aftermath of the event, in a way that traumatized people en masse. The videos were viewed more than 11 million times from the moment Kirk was shot until he died two hours later, according to the New York Times. Sometimes people watched them accidentally, like on X, which autoplays videos when you scroll past them. Still, countless people were watching the clips, which signaled to the algorithm that more people wanted to see them.
The same effect is amplifying angry rhetoric from all over the map about what comes next. Leaders on the left are condemning violence, while a handful of (largely unknown) users make jokes. Some on the far right are calling for civil war, while other conservatives are mourning a colleague or friend.
Given all that, what should you do? I’d argue something simple: Log off.
The internet devolved into a series of echo chambers years ago, but the current state of social media feels more like a series of pressure cookers, heating up with each extra post, until things are ready to boil over.
The right now has X, formerly Twitter, where, thanks to owner Elon Musk, crowdfunded fact-checking efforts have given way to unchecked misinformation. The left has Bluesky, which tends to the self serious in a way that can feel almost hostile to outsiders. Many millions more gather on Meta’s platforms, including Threads, Instagram, and Facebook. The political orientation there is less clear cut, but experts warn a recent rollback in content moderation is a threat to users and to democracy. That’s not taking into account the many fringe social media sites out there, everything from President Donald Trump’s own Truth Social to The Donald, a community formerly hosted on Reddit, where some of the plans for January 6 were drawn up.
None of these are good places to find facts or reliable information. In the absence of more active content moderation, not only do graphic videos spread quickly and widely on social media platforms, but so do conspiracy theories, hate speech, and calls for violence. Negative news tends to get shared more than positive articles, and those with more extreme views tend to see misinformation sooner than everyone else and are more likely to believe it. And you can expect to see plenty of misleading updates in the days following Kirk’s death, especially as authorities struggle to figure out what happened and who was responsible.
These are all reasons not to spend the next couple of news cycles thumbing through feeds or staring at videos on your phone. It’s not just the fact that the websites will be full of angry people. That’s called Thursday on the internet. But in the days and weeks that come, thanks to that pressure cooker effect, the political climate online will be especially vitriolic. The violent videos from Utah will resurface, and unfortunately, there’s always a chance that more violence will follow, especially when right wing extremists are calling for it.
We also don’t know exactly what the owners of these platforms will do about any of this. Musk has famously promoted far-right voices on X, possibly by tweaking its algorithm, and has also reportedly silenced his critics on the platform. In his own recent tweets, Musk has broadly blamed the left for Kirk’s death and called it “the party of murder.” This is before we know the shooter’s identity or their motive. Rhetoric like this is scaring people online about what comes next.
Kirk’s assassination tape wasn’t even the only video of a killing that went viral this week. So again: Stay offline for the next few days. Avoid social media, where whatever pops up in your feed is typically a surprise and sometimes an unwelcome one.
