Something Is Very Wrong Online

The cycle of violence will continue as long as the medium doesn’t change.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/charlie-kirk-assassination-online-reaction/684201/

https://archive.ph/16W0U



Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the aftermath of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination is how irrelevant its actual perpetrator was to the immediate discourse. I saw the finger-pointing online even before I saw the news that Kirk had been shot. At that point, there was hardly any information about the incident—let alone details about the shooter or a motive. Yet there was plenty of blame to go around: Elon Musk posted on X that “the Left is the party of murder,” even before Kirk’s shocking death had been confirmed. Others blamed the shooting on the media, NGOs, and billionaire Democrat fundraisers. This is the algorithmic internet at work. It abhors an information vacuum and, in the absence of facts or credible information, gaps are quickly filled with rage bait, conspiracy theorizing, doomerism, and vitriol.

If one thing has united the discourse in the past 48 hours, it has been a desire for certainty—a drive to know exactly why Kirk was killed. He was a political figure, of course, which makes his horrific death inherently an act of political violence. But understanding Kirk’s assassination through politics alone may not be enough. After the alleged assassin was apprehended, late last night, the online meaning-making machine went back into overdrive. This morning, I watched as people dredged up what appeared to be his mother’s Facebook page, posting photos from 2017 of a person who looks like the alleged shooter supposedly dressed up like Donald Trump for Halloween. Other photos from the same Facebook page appear to show children at a county fair, and one is wearing an NRA hat. “They were a pro-gun family,” one account that posts on both X and Bluesky wrote, alongside a screenshot of the Facebook post, implying that the killer may have been a Republican. None of this seems to have been verified before it was posted.

Another account claimed that it had found a donation from the shooter to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee. A separate post from a journalist claimed to debunk this. On 4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board, anonymous posters feuded over the killer’s ideology. “So… not trans, huh? And a white person? Male? Interesting. Who’d have thought it?” one wrote. Another poster suggested, with no evidence, that the shooter may have been a Groyper, the term for followers of the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who had publicly feuded with Kirk. Others, of course, speculated about what the assassination might have to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Many of the right-wing accounts who’d been clamoring for civil war just hours earlier seemed not to know what to make of the news—Representative Nancy Mace, who’d previously speculated that the shooter was transgender, posted on X that the shooter was a “lost individual” and she offered to pray for him. As of this writing, the public still knows very little about the shooter—there are no charges, just speculation.

Watching all this play out, you can feel a jockeying of sorts; interested parties are trying to label or disavow the shooter, or otherwise pin a label onto him. This, too, is the algorithmic internet at work: a justification machine where facts and news aren’t so much presented and reported as they are cataloged and then rearranged to fit preset narratives.

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