Within minutes of the shooting of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at a rally at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, videos of the killing appeared on X.
By the time Mr. Kirk was pronounced dead two hours later, the videos — posted by people at the rally — had more than 11 million views on the social media platform. The graphic footage, which showed Mr. Kirk’s neck wound in high resolution, had also spread to Instagram, Threads, YouTube and Telegram, where they amassed millions of views and were repackaged with graphics and old footage of Mr. Kirk.
The proliferation of the footage continued a grisly pattern. Time and again, graphic content of shootings — including the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue and the 2019 shootings at two New Zealand mosques — has immediately been disseminated across the internet, underscoring not only the lack of guardrails against violent material but how such videos have become fixtures online.
Meta, which owns Threads, Facebook and Instagram, and Google, which owns YouTube, have long said they remove or limit violent content uploaded to their platforms. X, which is owned by Elon Musk, has a policy that prohibits users from sharing “excessively gory” media and asks people to place violent content behind a warning label.
But people have easily found ways around the bans, by altering videos with text or speeding them up so platforms cannot easily find and remove them. And in recent years, many of the platforms — led by X, which Mr. Musk has pronounced as a free speech platform that resists censorship — have cut back on content moderation and relaxed rules against hate speech.
It was inevitable that videos showing the moment Mr. Kirk was shot would spread widely, social media experts said.
“This is the first time such a widely recognized figure has been murdered in such a public way and spread this way on social media,” said Emerson Brooking, the director of strategy at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council. “Because of that, I think unfortunately this is a viral moment with tremendous staying power. It will have lasting consequence for American political and civic life.”
Meta declined to comment on the spread of the videos on its platforms. X and Telegram did not immediately respond to requests for comment. X posted online that it “will continue to stand against violence and censorship, ensuring this platform amplifies truth and open dialogue for everyone.”
YouTube was removing some graphic content of the shooting and applying age-restricting tools to some videos so they would not be shown to accounts of people under 18, a Google spokesman said.
“Our hearts are with Charlie Kirk’s family following his tragic death,” the spokesman said. “We are closely monitoring our platform and prominently elevating news content on the homepage, in search and in recommendations to help people stay informed.”
Social media companies have struggled to stem the spread of violent content for at least a decade. In 2015, the Islamic State posted footage of beheadings and shootings from Iraq and Syria on social media, which went viral and helped the radical group share its propaganda and recruit members, experts on extremism said. The platforms removed some of the content, but often days or weeks after the videos were posted.
The spread of violent content was not limited to videos. In 2018, the gunman who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh posted his antisemitic views to Gab, a right-wing social media platform. From there, his screed was shared on other social media sites, along with a torrent of antisemitic photos, videos and hashtags.
In 2019, a recording of a livestream in which a gunman murdered 51 people in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also spread across the internet. Despite promises by social media companies to remove the video, dozens of copies were still being shared online three years later.
Hours after Mr. Kirk’s shooting, some social media companies appeared to be trying to remove some of the videos — with inconsistent results.
Some videos on Instagram and Threads had a warning label marking them as sensitive footage, while others did not. Meta labeled some, but not all, of the videos as sensitive and restricted some of them to people over 18. Several videos of the shooting uploaded to YouTube were removed, but new videos were being uploaded every minute, according to a New York Times search.
On X, the footage was quickly picked up by news aggregation accounts that share major headlines of the day and commentary. On one account, Uncensored News, a video of the attack received more than eight million views, according to X’s public data. The video was later deleted from the account, though it was unclear if it had been removed by the user or by X.
Another aggregation account on X, Breaking911, shared the same video and received three million views within an hour after the shooting.
Mr. Musk appeared to have seen some of the videos. In a post shortly after Mr. Kirk was shot, Mr. Musk wrote, “The shot looked real bad, but I sure hope Charlie makes it somehow.”
Soon afterward, hundreds of people posted to Mr. Musk’s feed, asking him to remove footage of the shooting. Many said he should think of Mr. Kirk’s family, including his young children and the prospect of their one day watching footage of the moment of their father’s death.
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp.
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
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