Russia and other foreign adversaries have pounced on the assassination of Charlie Kirk as an opportunity to spread propaganda aimed at aggravating U.S. political divisions and painting America as an unstable country on the decline, according to researchers.
Soon after the news broke about Kirk’s murder, Russian state media and pro-Kremlin voices on social media suggested that the United States was poised for a possible civil war and that dark conspiracies — possibly involving elements of a “deep state” — had played a role in the murder.
Chinese state media portrayed the attack as yet another example of a troubled society in decline, plagued by political disorder and gun violence. State media posted video of lawmakers arguing in Congress and highlighted U.S. experts discussing a climate of violence.
Iran’s media posted baseless allegations that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency had possibly orchestrated Kirk’s killing.
In the week after the conservative activist was shot at Utah Valley University, state media in Russia, China and Iran mentioned Kirk 6,200 times from Sept. 10 (the day of the shooting) to Sept. 17, according to a report from the fact-checking site NewsGuard.
Each of those countries maintain covert online influence operations, which when aimed at American audiences often stress divisive narratives, according to Western governments and researchers. It was not clear, however, whether their campaigns gained much traction in recent days with a U.S. populace already significantly divided over Kirk’s assassination and legacy.
Darren Linvill, the director of Clemson University’s Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub, which tracks state-sponsored online disinformation campaigns, said there was little evidence that foreign propagandists had made much of an effort to inflame the issue with fabricated social media accounts, which have been used by Russia and others to push divisive narratives since at least 2016.
“I’ve seen a few Russian Matryoshka accounts, but they had zero organic engagement,” he said, referring to a Russian operation that posts fake news stories that appear to come from legitimate news outlets.
“Nothing from China,” he said.
Neither the Russian Embassy nor Iran’s U.N. Mission in New York immediately responded to requests for comment.
Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said his government “condemns all illegal acts of violence.”
“At the same time, we firmly oppose attempts by certain U.S. media outlets and individuals to unfairly drag China into such issues,” he added at a news briefing in Beijing. “We strongly oppose the spread of false information and smears against China.”
Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said Russia’s international news outlet, RT, devoted extensive coverage to the assassination and was one of the first media outlets to broadcast graphic footage of Kirk’s shooting.
“It is extraordinary the degree to which Russian state media and RT specifically centered their coverage on the Kirk assassination,” Brooking said.
“As the hours passed, RT was amplifying and directing its focus toward individual Americans who had posted insensitive things about Kirk,” Brooking said.
By highlighting social media posts from left-leaning critics of Kirk, Russian media echoed conservative voices and appeared to be trying to align themselves with America’s political right, he said.
According to NewsGuard and other research, the Russian media’s portrayal of the killing of Kirk resembled its coverage of the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump last year, which it blamed on Kyiv.
“Ukraine has found the culprit in Kirk’s death: it turned out to be Zelensky,” read a recent headline in the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
There is no evidence of a conspiracy related to Kirk’s murder and prosecutors say the shooting suspect who has been charged, Tyler Robinson, is a U.S. citizen who acted alone.
The propaganda push from abroad came as the Trump administration has shut down teams across the federal government that tracked and analyzed information warfare waged by Russia and other foreign adversaries. The State Department said Wednesday it had halted what was left of its effort. Earlier this year, it closed the Global Engagement Center, which had flagged foreign disinformation campaigns in the past.
The Russia state news agency TASS published a column by a pro-Russian former member of Ukraine’s Parliament, Artem Dmitruk, who wrote — without evidence — that “I declare with full responsibility: Zelensky’s hand is both ideological and practical in the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the murder of Charlie Kirk.”
Dmitruk claimed that Zelenksyy’s government had worked to prevent Trump from being re-elected and that the murder of Kirk was part of the same plot.
After the suspect was arrested, the Russian media’s “focus has been blaming Zelenskyy and Kyiv for stoking hatred of Kirk among the left,” said Bret Schafer, of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, a think tank.
Iran’s pro-regime media pushed the idea that Israel may have had a role in Kirk’s killing, without offering any evidence.
The Iranian outlet Mashregh News wrote: “The Israeli regime’s dark history of false flag operations and Trump’s use of the assassination of Charlie Kirk to suppress Palestinian supporters have led independent analysts to suspect the possibility of Mossad’s role in the assassination.”
Russian state media also promoted other conspiracy theories, including that elements of an American “deep state” had engineered the assassination.
RT promoted a post from the hard-line Russian commentator Alexandr Dugin, who alleged without evidence that investor and philanthropist George Soros was somehow behind the murder.
“SOROS HITS FIRST,” Dugin wrote on X.
Dugin also wrote that if Trump “does not pass the test of preserving law and order, then I think sooner or later civil war, in its fullest and most horrific form, in the United States will be inevitable.”
U.S. authorities last year accused RT of operating as a de facto arm of the Russian intelligence services and of running a scheme to pay millions of dollars to pro-Trump influencers. Two RT employees were indicted in the case.
Afterward, RT was banned from YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and Russian media pulled back from wading into domestic U.S. politics after the 2024 election, keeping its focus on the war in Ukraine, according to Brooking.
“I wouldn’t characterize this public facing propaganda from Russia as tremendously impactful,” Brooking said. “But the bigger observation is that they’re essentially back in the American culture war and trying to leverage this tragedy to do so.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned earlier this year that Russia would continue to use both clandestine and public methods, including its RT network, to “amplify and stoke domestic divisions” in the United States.
After the shooting, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said at a news conference that America’s enemies wanted to stir up divisions and violence.
“What we are seeing is our adversaries want violence,” Cox said. “We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”
RT responded to Cox’s comments with a sarcastic post. “We’re not bots,” it said. “We have feelings.”
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