Photo: John Locher/AP Photo
On Wednesday afternoon, Turning Point USA founder and right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck during a speaking event at Utah Valley University. Shortly after, graphic close-up videos of the attack began proliferating on X and TikTok. Like many whose feed it came across, the moment I registered what I was seeing, I wished I hadn’t. Hours later, Utah officials confirmed Kirk had died, meaning that everyone who watched the video had essentially just viewed a snuff film.
It’s impossible to ignore the dark ironies inherent to Kirk’s killing, considering that mere moments before he was shot he was answering a question about transgender mass shooters in the US, a common fearmongering talking point among MAGA acolytes, or that in 2023 Kirk said that it was “worth it” to have gun deaths every year to preserve the Second Amendment. The mood on social media in response to Kirk’s assassination, however, has been grimmer than it might have been had so many people not seen the exact moment it occurred, in all its gruesomeness. When Trump was shot in the ear last summer, people joked about “it” finally happening; when Luigi Mangione allegedly killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December, those on both ends of the ideological spectrum heralded him as a folk hero and made him one of the defining memes of the 2020s. After the company shared news of its CEO’s death on Facebook, the post received tens of thousands of “laugh” reactions.
Some of that has occurred here too. The Hard Times, a satirical publication, published several pieces joking about the killing (“Anti-Vaxxer Finally Gets Shot,” “Incompetent Assassin Misses Largest Head On Planet,” while plenty of people on X and TikTok celebrated his death due to his stance on MAGA, Palestine, guns, DEI, and even Charli XCX. But most people on social media seem to be contending with what they have just witnessed, even if they remain ideologically opposed to its victim. Leftist influencer Hasan Piker, who was set to debate Kirk later this month, urged his followers to stop making jokes, calling the shooting “terrifying.” Others reminded their own to “keep it in the group chat” lest you’re prepared for “a knock on your door” from the FBI, while many Democratic politicians have unequivocally condemned the attack. Others cite the horrific nature of the videos on their feeds as particularly disturbing, blaming the platforms for their continued circulation.
Graphic videos have always been a problem for social media companies: Though they have armies of (usually outsourced, sometimes exploited) moderators and AI tools to weed out content that violates guidelines, at moments where news breaks, videos and images spread faster than platforms can add sensitivity warnings or remove them from circulation. I reached out to several platforms on their approach to handling the videos; Meta, which has age-gated the video to users 18 and over and is applying a “Mark As Sensitive” warning label to all footage of the shooting. YouTube said in a statement that it is “closely monitoring our platform and prominently elevating news content on the homepage, in search and in recommendations to help people stay informed,” and added that it is also adding 18-and-up age restriction and removing some content that fails to provide context. X, which fired its communications team when Elon Musk took over the site in 2022, has not seemed to respond; videos of the shooting still populate the site.
There’s also the problem of what kinds of footage can be exploited politically, and to what ends: When graphic surveillance footage of a Black man stabbing Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska to death on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina began circulating in late August, conservatives used it as a MAGA talking point to drum up racist fears of Black people and urban public transit (“Daniel Penny prevented this from happening on a NYC subway. Instead of thanking him, many hated him for it,” wrote JD Vance on X). In a culture accustomed to living amongst so many horrors, when only the most visceral of them evoke empathy, how much can we preserve for those that don’t get caught on camera? As many have pointed out, Kirk’s shooting was the 46th in the U.S. this year to take place on a school campus. The 47th took place the same afternoon, one state over in Colorado, though no footage has circulated. “unfortunately just saw that horrific video of charlie kirk being shot and now all i can think about are all of the scared innocent school children who have been killed the same way while people like him said that mass casualties are worth it to protect the 2nd amendment,” as one viral post on X put it. Three students, including the attacker, were shot. All are in critical condition.
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