This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Yesterday afternoon, after hearing that the conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot, I turned, as I often do when news breaks, to social media. I didn’t have to go looking for it: I was immediately confronted with a five-second video in which Kirk, coarsely pixelated and sitting under a tent, crumples to the ground, microphone still in hand, as a fountain of blood spills from the left side of his neck.
I saw the clip on X, as did millions of others, perhaps in part because of a feature that automatically plays videos for anyone scrolling through their feed. There are reasonable arguments to be made about the importance of society facing the truth of preventable violence—in recent years, those who argue for stricter gun regulations have said that Americans should be forced to see photos of the aftermath of school shootings, for example—but footage of Kirk’s death quickly spread across the internet with a horrific ubiquity.
That Kirk, who became famous for participating in viral political debates, was gunned down on a university campus is a tragedy, period. And seeing such brutal violence up close can take a psychological toll on observers, the long-term effects of which are harder to gauge. It’s one thing to hear about a murder, or to read about it; it’s another to see it as it happened, over and over.
X’s owner, Elon Musk, claimed last year that the site has roughly a billion active users, the caveat being that about 40 percent of them come to the platform only “during major world events.” No one user’s feed looks exactly like any other’s, and the Kirk clip has been posted many times by many different accounts, but the particular post I saw had more than 8.8 million views as of this afternoon.
Footage of homicides has always been a feature of the internet, and major platforms have taken a variety of whack-a-mole approaches to suppressing or removing the clips over the years. (To give one famous example, Reddit banned the community r/watchpeopledie in 2019.) In an effort to balance a sensible content-moderation strategy with a commitment to allowing users to say and post what they wish to, some social-media outlets have tried to hew toward moderation, at least in the context of graphic violence. To get to the explicit content, users generally have to look for it.
Since Musk’s takeover of X, in 2022, there’s been an apparent recalibration of the site’s algorithms, which now seem palpably more lenient toward content that aligns with the right-wing honcho’s own political worldview. Now the same users who might have sought violent imagery on the dark web can access such videos by simply logging into X—as can anyone who has no intentions of viewing video of graphic death.
The problem goes beyond a single platform: All day today, searching Charlie Kirk on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram has yielded videos of the killing for users over the age of 18 who clicked past the platforms’ sensitive-content warning or logged in to verify their age. (YouTube told the AP that it was removing “some graphic content related to the event if it doesn’t provide sufficient context” in addition to adding age restrictions. Meta declined to comment, and X, which did not respond to a request for comment, posted that it “will continue to stand against violence and censorship, ensuring this platform amplifies truth and open dialogue for everyone.”)
Kirk’s murder is not even the first to be broadcast on social media this week. Graphic videos of a man fatally stabbing a young woman on public transit in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month have also made the rounds.
In the absence of concrete details on Kirk’s murder, social media has filled the information void with images of violence and threats of retaliation, which can function as substrates for misinformation. Musk’s inflammatory assertion yesterday that “the Left is the party of murder” has now been viewed more than 54 million times and counting—never mind that the killer hasn’t been named yet, and that no suspects are currently in custody. Another viral post circulating yesterday falsely identified a random man—a 77-year-old retired banker who was in Toronto at the time of the shooting—as the “registered Democrat” behind the killing.
Our modern parade of digital gore corrodes not just the individuals who are exposed to it, but also the prospect of social cohesion more broadly. “THIS IS WAR,” wrote the prominent right-leaning X account Libs of TikTok; the right-wing influencer Andrew Tate posted just, “Civil war.” There’s reason to take this kind of rising anger as a real threat; as David A. Graham wrote yesterday in this newsletter, “The impulse to solve political problems through violence would be a danger to any society, but it can prove particularly lethal in the United States, where firearms are common and easy to obtain, legally and illegally.” That Tate’s post has already been viewed more than 15 million times is a reminder of the stakes of this latest act of political violence—not in the virtual world, but here, in real life.
Related:
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- The FBI released photos of a person of interest in the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. The shooter remains at large.
- Multiple HBCUs, including Alabama State, Virginia State, Hampton, Southern University, Clark Atlanta, and Spelman College, implemented lockdown measures after receiving potential threats.
- Brazil’s supreme court found former President Jair Bolsonaro guilty of plotting a military coup to stay in power after losing the 2022 election, and a majority of judges ruled that he belonged to an armed criminal organization. Bolsonaro was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison.
Evening Read
‘I Was Responsible for Those People’
By Tim Alberta (From 2021)
On the evening of September 4, 2021, one week before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Glenn Vogt stood at the footprint of the North Tower and gazed at the names stamped in bronze. The sun was diving below the buildings across the Hudson River in New Jersey, and though we didn’t realize it, the memorial was shut off to the public. Tourists had been herded behind a rope line some 20 feet away, but we’d walked right past them. As we looked on silently, a security guard approached. “I’m sorry, but the site is closed for tonight,” the man said.
Glenn studied the guard. Then he folded his hands as if in prayer. “Please,” he said. “I was the general manager of Windows on the World, the restaurant that was at the top of this building. These were my employees.”
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Watch. The Summer I Turned Pretty (streaming on Prime Video) is serious about the barely-exceptional lives of unremarkable American kids, Greta Rainbow writes.
Look. Lisette Model’s portraits capture the joy and wariness of jazz’s luminaries, David A. Graham writes.
P.S.
There’s a sequence in the recent film Eddington, a satire about the dehumanizing and anti-social effects of social media on American life, that speaks to the phenomenon I wrote about today. After a politician is brutally knifed, the film shows us a grainy TikTok-esque video: a point-of-view clip in which the man doing the recording rushes and shoots the attacker, killing him. Cut to a year later, and the shooter is now an influencer who, in the vein of the real-life shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, transmuted his kills into fame and money, and is living his best life, in Florida. What that reveals about digital images and the human tragedy they mask is not very satirical at all.
— Will
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
