Charlie Kirk: A death on the internet

While both Instagram and TikTok’s Terms & Conditions explicitly forbid the posting of graphic or extreme violence, copies of the video racked up millions of views in the hours following the incident, with the platforms’ automated moderation systems failing to keep pace with the clip’s viral spread. 

On X, users are told that they “may share graphic media if it is properly labeled, not prominently displayed and is not excessively gory.” Users complaining that they did not, in fact, want to see graphic video of someone getting shot in the neck were met with a message from X telling them that the content didn’t break the platform’s sensitive media policy, but that they could opt out of seeing it again by setting their account to automatically block sensitive media – which, for many copies of the video, didn’t seem to work. 

Meanwhile on TikTok, many of those in attendance at the Utah rally where Kirk was murdered decided to share their immediate reactions to the shooting – horror, fear, sadness, and, in the case of one enterprising ‘influencer’, a succession of peace signs and an exhortation to “make sure you subscribe to your boy ElderTikTok.”

The eventual release of blurry images of the suspected assassin were eagerly seized upon by the online crowds, with social media sleuths leaping to seek to identify the shooter. The poor quality of the CCTV pictures was no barrier to a generation raised on true crime podcasts and investigative Facebook Groups, and it took only minutes for enterprising amateur detectives to run the photos through AI-assisted ‘image upscaling’ software to improve their quality and get a clearer picture of the killer. 

Except, sadly, these tools don’t in fact work, relying instead on the AI ‘imagining’ what the image ought to look like at higher resolution. This resulted in a wide range of different ‘photographs’ of the presumed killer being produced, and a number of different, innocent people being identified and named online as potential suspects. 

This wasn’t the only way in which AI was being pressed into service by an online audience hungry for information (and drama). A surprising number of users decided that the best and smartest approach to seeking out additional information on the shooter’s whereabouts during the manhunt was to, er, as Grok, X’s inbuilt AI assistant. “@grok where is this man right now?”, asked one representative Tweet; perhaps unsurprisingly, Grok was unable to help on this occasion. 

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Eventually, though, Tyler Robinson was taken into custody – during a media briefing, the FBI released information about messages that had been scratched into bullet casings found at the scene. The subsequent scrabbling sound heard around the world was the mainstream media desperately trying to find anyone on staff who understood online culture, as it became apparent that, rather than being indicative of ‘trans ideology’ as initially reported by the Wall Street Journal, the slogans were a mishmash of hyperonline memespeak, gaming community references and straight-up 4Chan-style trolling. 

The smartest analysis of likely motives for the assassination didn’t come from the national or international media, which struggled to keep up with both the pace of information online and the deep knowledge of internet lore required to parse it, but from internet culture reporters from the fringes of the web. 

You wouldn’t have found any analysis of Kirk’s fractured relationship with the online right, and in particular his years-long beef with a particularly-toxic section of proto-Nazis known as ‘groypers’, in any of the thinkpieces published on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal; instead it fell to outlets like Garbage Day, written by independent journalist Ryan Broderick, to provide perspective on what might really have been going on and the political undercurrents on which Kirk was borne to such prominence. 

And all the while, AI continued to reshape reality; images of Robinson quickly began circling showing him wearing a t-shirt carrying Trump’s name and the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan… images which had been altered in seconds using a free AI tool. 

Enterprising souls flooded Amazon with hastily-written biographies of Charlie Kirk, spun up with AI in the few hours since his death and retailing for just $8 a copy. Faked accounts of international stars of sport and stage – from Bob Dylan to James Hetfield to tennis player Alexandra Eala – pausing performances or matches to make heartfelt, damp-eyed tributes to Kirk’s memory to emotional crowds spread across social platforms, accompanied by AI-generated imagery, all false and all following a suspiciously-common template. 

Perhaps the oddest detail of all is one from before Kirk’s murder; a few days prior, on September 8th, online magazine Jezebel published a story whose headline read ‘We Paid Some Etsy Witches To Curse Charlie Kirk’ – the magazine has subsequently pulled the post along with a comment which states that “the piece was intended as satire and made it absolutely clear that we wished no physical harm.”

Kirk’s death is set to be used as an instructional moment for all sorts of reasons by all sorts of people; perhaps the single thing we might agree that it has taught us is that attempting to keep track of ‘what is actually happening’ around any sort of contentious, fast-moving news event is by now entirely impossible, and that our legacy institutions do not seem to have enough of a grasp of the web, its working and its culture to cope any more. 

It seems apposite to leave the last word to a former classmate of Robinson’s, who posted a short video to TikTok in which he described the suspected shooter as ‘a typical Reddit kid’ and who signed off with the immortal phrase “this internet shit is seriously no joke.” Don’t we all know it.