Social Media Didn't Kill Charlie Kirk

3 hours ago 7

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, a new cottage industry of rage has arisen. And while anger and horror at this act of violence are understandable, they're also taking Americans to some dark places, where retribution must be had against anyone who said negative things about Kirk after his death and politicians posture about punishing people who (crassly, but nonviolently) celebrated Kirk's death. A lot of this seems to hinge on the idea that hateful "rhetoric" is responsible for Kirk's killing; one particularly prevalent strain of this specifically indicts online speech and social media.

It's social media that led to Kirk's assassination, the refrain goes, and it's social media that's driving all sorts of political violence.

But social media platforms don't kill people. People kill people.

That seems banal to point out, I know. Reductive, perhaps. But so much discourse right now attributes an almost supernatural influence to social media and to online speech and communities. And that's reductive, too—in addition to being pretty unmoored from reality.

"I believe that social media has played a direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt that we have seen over the last five, six years," said Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on Meet the Press yesterday. Social media companies "have figured out how to hack our brains" and "get us to hate each other," Cox said.

It's not just politicians spewing a mind-control theory of political violence. "I think the main problem here isn't this killer's ideology," posted the pundit Noah Blum on Friday. "It's that the internet radicalizes people to do increasingly greater violence on a scarily regular basis and nobody really knows what to do about it."

We hear some version of this in the aftermath of many tragic or senseless events. It's not enough for people to blame disturbed or immoral individuals who do bad things. It's not even enough to blame the dubious influence of "right-wing extremism" or "left-wing extremism" or "political polarization." People blame tech companies, sometimes even suggesting they're directly responsible because they failed to stop hateful speech—or misinformation, or divisive rhetoric—on social media.

But the idea that people—especially young men—would not be radicalized if it weren't for social media belies most of human history.

I've been listening recently to a podcast called A Twist of History. One episode details Adolf Hitler's attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923. Another episode features a riot during a Shakespearean performance in New York City in 1849, fomented by Ned Buntline, a nativist newspaper pundit with ambitions of fame and notoriety. Both instances featured fringe political elements, violence, and deaths.

History is littered with examples like these: men driven to violence by people in close physical proximity, sometimes with the help of inflammatory political rhetoric printed in pamphlets and newspapers.

The type of violence that people engage in does seem somewhat era-dependent. Sometimes it was more likely to be large group violence, acting as part of political movements or criminal gangs. Sometimes it was more likely to be small group violence, committed by racist clubs, radical activist groups, and so on. (And, surely, many manically violent men throughout history have been killed in wars or bar fights before they had a chance to do other damage.)

Ours is an era of lone-wolf violence, though it is not the first one.

Because of our hyper-connected world, and because of the sensationalistic nature of public shootings, it can feel like things are worse than ever. In another time, we wouldn't have have heard of every racist lynching, every street gang fight, and so on.

But even from what we can glean, looking back, it seems clear that we're not living in some exceptionally violent time.

Is the internet capable of radicalizing people?

On some level, the answer is yes, of course. But this is simply because the internet, and social media, are such huge parts of our lives. They are where people spend time, spread ideas, and consume ideologies. They are locusts of just about everything good, and everything bad, about our offline world.

"The internet is culture now, the way television once was for our parents, our grandparents, maybe even us," Katherine Dee wrote on her Substack this week. "Every aspect of our lives flows through it. There's no such thing as 'very Online' or 'not Online.' It's all of us, all the time, always."

People will point to algorithms and profit motives, epistemic closure and endless scroll—all sorts of things that supposedly make social media or the internet generally a unique breeder of polarization and radicalism and misinformation. But we have an ever-growing body of research suggesting that, for the average person, being on social media isn't making things worse (and, in some ways, could be making it better).

We live in ideologically charged and politically polarized times. A lot of our media and our political debates and our discussions with each other reflect this. But the fact that so much of this comes seeping out on social media may simply be a symptom.

Online speech is the most visible manifestation of any rot in our system or culture. But it does not mean that Facebook, or TikTok, or X, or any of the countless niche forums out there are the cause of the rot.

Yes, the shooter was steeped in internet meme culture, as evidenced by messages printed on his bullets: "an internet-specific brand of trollish nihilism adopted by many recent shooters," as my colleague C.J. Ciaramella put it. But I think it's foolish—a combination of determined presentism, tech panic, and lack of imagination—to suggest that Kirk's shooter pulled the trigger only because of ideas or attitudes that he encountered online.

For one thing, we can't actually say what spawned the shooter's idea that assassinating someone was a good idea, or his belief that Kirk was an appropriate symbolic target for his agenda. Maybe people around him offline encouraged it. Maybe voices in his head told him to. At this point, we don't know.

But if he encountered bad ideas online, it's because the internet is now where we encounter ideas. If he cloaked his violence in the language of internet memes, it's because that's where culture is these days.

In another era, he may have encountered bad ideas at a town hall and dressed up his horrific act in different slogans. But a man with a capacity for such premeditated and dramatic violence is a man with a capacity for such things in any era. And conversely, countless billions of people encounter the same online ecosystem without committing assassinations.

Reaching for modern technology as the explanation reeks of an ideological agenda of its own.

None of this is to say that particular vectors of online radicalization shouldn't be identified. People can and should study such routes, and consider ways to combat them, just as their predecessors tried to stop people from being sucked into the Ku Klux Klan, the mob, and so on. But looking for particular pathways here (if such a thing can be done) is different from condemning social media and the internet universally. We might as well have blamed the buildings where extremists gathered, or the paper and ink that allowed them to communicate.

"Social media is simply the way we talk and communicate in this day and age, for better or worse," Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said yesterday on ABC's This Week. "What I would focus on is condemning the act of violence. It's not the free speech that led to this. It's not the fact that people can talk and communicate online. It's the actions of an unhinged, evil individual."

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