If you house the video of a bullet that kills Charlie Kirk on a university campus in Utah, you are one of the lucky ones. When most people opened X, Instagram, YouTube or any other platform on Wednesday afternoon, La Gore was waiting for them.
This was by design. While the images of graphic violence have always extended online, users once had to look for them. But more recently, social media companies have made them inescapable, since they have moved away from the moderation of content, sometimes in the name of freedom of expression. Those horrible videos of Kirk’s murder became viral immediately after the event, in a way that traumatized people and mass. The videos were seen 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 accidentally watched them, as in X, that automatic videos when traveling is adjusted. Even so, innumerable people were looking at the clips, which pointed to the algorithm that more people wanted to see them.
The same effect is to amplify the angry rhetoric of the entire map on what comes next. Leaders on the left condemn violence, while a handful of users (largely unknown) make jokes. Some of the extreme right are asking for a civil war, while other conservatives are crying to a belief or friend.
Given all that, what should you do? Would argue something simple: close the session.
The Internet became a series of echo cameras years ago, but the current state of social networks feels more like a series of pressure cameras, heating up with each additional publication, until things are ready to boil.
The now has X, previously Twitter, where, thanks to the owner Elon Musk, the verification efforts of crowdfunding funds have given way to wrong information without control. The left has Bluesky, which tends to be serious in a way that can feel almost hostile to strangers. Many more millions meet on the finish lines, including threads, Instagram and Facebook. Political orientation there is less clear, but experts warn that a recent reversal in content moderation is a threat to users and democracy. That does not take into account the many marginal social networks, everything from the truth of the truth of President Donald Trump to Donald, a formally organized community in Reddit, where some of the plans for January 6 were written.
None of these are good places to find facts or reliable information. In the absence of a more active content moderation, graphic videos not only extend rapidly and widely on social media platforms, but also conspiracy theories, hate discourse and the call to violence. Negative news tends to share more than positive items, and those with more extreme views tend to see the erroneous information than everyone else and it is more likely to create it. And you can expect to see many misleading updates in the days after Kirk’s death, especially as the authorities fight to discover what happened and who was responsible.
These are all reasons not to spend the next two news cycles making manifestations or watching videos on your phone. It is not just the fact that websites will be full of angry people. That is called Thursday on the Internet. But in the days and week that arrive, thanks to the effect of the pressure cooker, the political climate online will be a sotal vitory. Utah’s violent videos will resurface, and unfortunately, there is always the possibility of following more violence, especially when the extremists on the right are asking.
Nor do we know exactly what the owners of these platforms will do about any of this. Musk has promoted the extreme right voices in X, possibly adjusting its algorithm, and has also silenced its critics on the platform. In his own tweets, Musk has blamed broadly to the left for Kirk’s death and called him “the murder party.” This is before we know the identity of the shooter or its reason. The rhetoric like this is scaring people online about what comes next.
Kirk’s murder tape was only the only video of a murder that is viral this week. So again: Stay offline for the next few days. Avoid social networks, where the Didever appears in its feed is typically a surprise and, sometimes, a lack of little.