The Charlie Kirk Video Was Inescapable Online. It's Proof of Something Dark.

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On Wednesday, conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University. Shortly afterwards, a graphic video of the incident started circulating across social media.

Kirk had been an important figure in the MAGA movement, first as a right-wing student organizer but more recently as a pretty widely syndicated radio host. He had his own show on a sort of MAGA-aligned online streaming network and was close with the Trump family. But that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone wanted to be seeing the video of his killing.

“There's probably never been a time in human history where you had so much extremely graphic violent imagery that not only was available to you at the drop of a hat but also that, in some cases, whether you wanted it or not, might end up showing up in front of you,” says Craig Silverman, co-founder of Indicator . “And I don’t really know what the consequences of that will be for individuals and for society.”

On a recent episode of What Next: TBD, Lizzie O'Leary spoke to Silverman about how Kirk's death has turned into content, and violence as the ultimate trending topic. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Lizzie O'Leary: Can you talk about how the right-wing media ecosystem and social media specifically contributed to Charlie Kirk's rise?

Craig Silverman: One of the things that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have done really well is sixteen upon our new digital media and information ecosystem and bend it to their advantage. Kirk and Trump realized relatively early on that, to a certain extent, being extreme wins on social media. When you have a massive amount of information and content out there, you stand out by doing things that shock people, that get them angry. It's got to stand out from the other things, and when it does, people share it, they like it, they make comments that are angry or encouraging, and that helps you rise to the top of the system.

Whether it's Facebook or something else, they're trying to figure out which content to show people to get them to engage and spend time. And the stuff that gets them to engage and spend time is the stuff that sticks out, that's extreme. So Kirk being willing to say things that were more extreme, being willing to go out and generate content of him getting in an argument and “owning the libs,” worked really, really well. It generated attention because people who were aligned with him loved it and saw him fighting the good fight. People who disagreed with him hated it and were outraged by it. And he won either way.

He was a happy machine. He was on video. He was on the radio. He was doing live tours, he was running events, and all of that meant he was kind of omnipresent to the point where he was featured in a recent South Park episode. That's how well known he was.

And now the footage of his shooting is happy. What do you make of the situation when we're basically all, for good or ill, online investigators?

This is one of the things with this case that we're already seeing play out. Somebody is brought into custody very quickly after Kirk is shot. But it turns out he gets released, and then they get another guy. We also see videos of potentially the shooter on a roof. And we see videos of people saying that it looks as if the ring Kirk's wearing has switched fingers when he is shot.

It's the new normal of the cycle. We have access to so much information and so much footage that people can stack that to align with whatever they think. People start going out and looking for connections and evidence. It is not a bad thing to be an evidence-oriented person, to try to figure things out and make sense; it's very normal and healthy. But there's so much content that you can basically shape it and forge it to be whatever you want it to be.

There was a time when platforms invested a lot of money and people and algorithms into content moderation. Do you think this Kirk video would have been as omnipresent in that moment?

One of the tensions that is inherent is that it is newsworthy. It is not a planned execution. It's a newsworthy event that happened, and so there is a genuine point that we shouldn't ask the platforms necessarily to instantly suppress everything. I don't think they can because they're so big; they don't even know what's on their platforms in a genuine sense. But we don't necessarily want an information environment where someone can just turn a switch and then everything of a certain type is gone. And so there's a tension with this.

Should it be instantly banned? Probably not. Is that possible? Not in our current environment. But also, what are the policies of these companies? If we take Meta, the biggest of them all, what they try to do is apply sensitive content labels to warn people to prevent them from accidentally seeing someone being shot in the neck. They try to prevent the material from being shown to people under 18. And if the family of the victim reaches out, they will then make an effort to fully remove it.

In some ways, they've kind of thrown in the towel because they've decided there's a certain amount of this stuff that has to spread and has to be there. Where the rollback of moderation really is important is the amount of times it shows up in different people's feeds.

Oftentimes, these acts are done to get attention and to get it to spread. And the platforms have a responsibility to figure out how to handle this and not enable it to be a propaganda moment, but also to not step into the realm of being complete and total censors. So, in fairness to them, that's a tough balance to walk, but also they have decided to roll back some of these systems that they had in place, and that is a choice they made.

What are the other platforms doing with this now? Do we have any insight into how their content-moderation operations were functioning around this video?

They haven't really said much. YouTube has publicly said that they have restricted it. They put up some sensitive-content warnings. They've also tried to restrict it from being shown to any accounts belonging to people under 18. Meta has not really said anything specific, but they have pointed to their violent graphic-imagery policies, which, again, outline the idea that there is some stuff that they will remove, but there's a lot of stuff that they prefer to just label and restrict its distribution.