‘It was like the day after 9/11’ says analyst about extremists’ reactions on social media

Scrolling through social media in the aftermath of the shooting is also, at times, a violent experience. Among thousands of peaceful messages across X, TikTok, Telegram, Instagram and Facebook, there are celebrations of Kirk’s death: “It feels like Christmas,” reads one X post with more than 100,000 views. There are also calls for retribution. “I’m ready for civil war,” reads another post, with 329,000 views. “You want a fight and you’re going to get it”.

Researchers say the big social media companies – many of which have scaled back their content moderation rules since the Trump administration returned to office – are failing to enforce their remaining rules.

The consequences are already taking shape. One analyst who monitors extremists on social media compared the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting to “the day after 9/11”, saying the mood online is polarising and febrile.

Several days on, the video of Kirk’s death remains easy to find. A TikTok search by The Observer immediately revealed four uncensored videos of the shooting, a violation of the company's guidelines, which prohibit graphic material. TikTok is scaling back its content moderation team and says 85% of posts that break the rules are removed by AI.

A TikTok spokesperson did not comment on the videos, but said the company remains committed to enforcing its guidelines and has implemented “additional safeguards” to avoid users seeing violent videos without warning.

The video of Kirk’s death was easily searchable on X, which does not strictly prohibit violent content but says it must be “properly labelled, not prominently displayed and not excessively gory”.

It remains widely available on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, albeit behind sensitivity filters.

“We are traumatising and retraumatising ourselves individually and collectively as a society with these videos,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the US Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-governmental organisation studying online extremism.

“This is not good for us,” said Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox. “Social media is a cancer in our society, and I would encourage people to log off.”

Posts on X that “glorified, praised, or celebrated” Kirk’s death were viewed 52m times, while posts calling for retaliatory violence were seen 43m times, according to research by the CCDH, which analysed the 20,000 most-viewed posts mentioning Kirk.

The hundreds of posts are an apparent violation of X’s rules on violent content, which ban the incitement, promotion or encouragement of harm.

Only a tiny proportion of the top posts about Kirk glorify or incite violence – 1.2% and 0.4% respectively – Ahmed noted. “But nevertheless, they were able to receive tens of millions of views.”

In November 2022, Elon Musk rolled back content moderation on what was then Twitter after his $44bn purchase of the platform, saying it would prioritise “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”.

In theory, this meant hateful posts would be deprioritised by the algorithm. In practice, Ahmed said of the rebranded X, “the platform … is failing catastrophically to limit the reach of posts that celebrate murder and mayhem”.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

The virality of the video of Kirk’s death, paired with the amplification of extreme views, creates an impression of “a world that is riven by irreconcilable inter-hatreds”, said Ahmed. In turn, those hatreds may play off each other and become ratified into reality.

Other researchers have seen a huge rise in calls for retributive violence on far-right online channels. Extremism is particularly acute in semi-private online groups such as Telegram, Discord and 4chan.

In many ways, this is uncharted territory. Earlier this year, when two Minnesota politicians were shot dead in their homes, the incidents were not filmed, and were mostly treated as a local issue.

Kirk’s death is playing out as a national event, because of who he was and because of the way social media has magnified and, at times, distorted it.

Photograph by Daniel Acker/Getty Images