In the week since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Russia, Iran and China have spread thousands of false or incendiary claims about what happened to the conservative activist, in an effort to stoke political divisions or to portray the United States as a dysfunctional country.
Official state media in the three countries mentioned Mr. Kirk 6,200 times from Sept. 10 to Sept. 17, framing the killing as a conspiracy, though they differed on the nature of the plot involved, according to an analysis on Wednesday by NewsGuard, a company that tracks disinformation online.
The findings underscored remarks made last week by Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, where Mr. Kirk was fatally shot during an appearance on a college campus on Sept. 10.
“What we are seeing is our adversaries want violence,” Mr. Cox said two days after the shooting. “We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world, that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”
Foreign influence campaigns have become a recurrent backdrop to virtually any news event in the United States — from natural disasters to elections to political crises.
Russia, China and Iran, especially, try to exploit events in the United States to push their own geopolitical agendas. While their narratives differ, and even contradict each other, they share a goal of undermining American democracy and its reputation globally.
Mr. Kirk’s assassination immediately generated a deluge of false claims, baseless speculation and conspiratorial thinking from domestic sources that has not yet relented. The country’s adversaries have seized the moment as well, at times amplifying the same unsubstantiated narratives.
The day after the killing, Russia’s English-language news channel, RT, repeated unsubstantiated claims that people near Mr. Kirk were making hand signs to cue the shooter. Law enforcement officials have said Tyler Robinson, the man charged in the killing, acted alone.
Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent ultranationalist writer in Russia, falsely claimed in subsequent days that the “Deep State” and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations were behind the killing because of Mr. Kirk’s faith and patriotic values — a theme echoed among some conservatives in the United States, as well.
“Charlie Kirk was on our side of the front line that now divides humanity,” Mr. Dugan wrote. “The civil war in the U.S.A. is not something distant.”
Russia’s state media sought to link the assassination to the war in Ukraine, while officials and pro-Russian accounts online even suggested that Ukraine was somehow behind it. NewsGuard noted that the Russians made the same claims after the attempted assassination of President Trump during last year’s election campaign, which had no link at all to Ukraine or the war. In the past, Russia, like other adversaries, has also spread similar narratives using bot accounts posing as Americans.
Iran claimed that Israel’s secret service carried out the killing as a way to distract Americans from the killings of Palestinians in Gaza. China, not inaccurately, portrayed the United States as a deeply divided country, but one pro-China account on X falsely stated that the shooter donated $224 to President Trump’s election campaign in 2020, according to NewsGuard.
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul.
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