OREM, Utah — The killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk set off three days of some of the ugliest and most divisive social media reactions America has seen, leading Utah’s governor on Friday to declare that enough is enough.
“Social media is a cancer on our society right now,” Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said at a news conference announcing an arrest in Kirk’s killing. “I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community.”
His words immediately struck a chord in a nation where many have been stunned by the level of online anger since the killing. Kirk was shot by a sniper at a Utah university, and graphic video of the slaying immediately spread around social media platforms, heightening emotions.
Some forces on the right have used the killing to call on the attack of liberals, some likening it to a civil war. Others celebrated Kirk’s death.
Hours after the slaying, police briefly detained two men. Social media went wild, publicizing their names, backgrounds and photos even after they were cleared of any affiliation to the fatal shooting. The situation got so bad that Utah officials on Thursday urged people not to threaten them because they did nothing wrong.
“These individuals were not suspects. They were people of interest,” Utah Department of Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason said. “They don’t deserve that harassment.”
Cox said the sheer horror of watching Kirk be killed underscores the larger issues with platforms that repeatedly surface such images.
“We are not wired as human beings — biologically, historically — we have not evolved in a way that we are capable of processing those types of violent imagery,” he said. “We desperately need some healing.”
In Orem, Utah, the college town where Kirk was killed, residents mourning the violence were shocked at the level of vitriol they experience when they opened social media apps.
Jillian Green, a student at Utah Valley University — where the shooting occurred — and longtime Kirk fan, said she made a post on TikTok commemorating Kirk’s death, and was horrified when she started getting hateful comments about him.
“I got a lot of positive feedback, but then I got tons of negative people being like, ‘He deserved what he got,’ and that was disgusting,” said Green, 20.
But upon closer inspection, she said, almost all the negative comments were posted by accounts that didn’t appear real. They had one or two followers and no posts.
Experts have long warned that these types of posts often come from machine “bots” deployed by bad actors to stir unrest. Cox said during a news conference that bots from Russia and China are working online to “instill disinformation and encourage violence.”
Green tried to not let them get her down.
“It’s just unfortunate because there’s a lot of negativity and hate around what’s going on,” she said. “But I’ve seen a ton of positivity, actually.”
Orem City Councilmember Jenn Gale urged people to find ways to move forward that were positive and didn’t sow more division, including on social media.
“Let’s lay aside the Facebook post we’ll use to justify our ‘rightness’ and skip the snarky meme demonizing the ‘other’ party,” she wrote in a post to her constituents.
Kirk was a beloved figure in the conservative movement who in death won praise for using dialogue — though sometimes heated — to make his case. He was known for his staunchly right-wing and unfiltered opinions on heated topics such as abortion and gender identity, comments that frequently drew fierce criticism, particularly on college campuses he visited.
President Trump, for whom Kirk was a major backer, hailed the 31-year-old as a “patriot who devoted his life to the cause of open debate.”
Officials have not revealed a suspected motive for the attack, though they said the alleged gunman was increasingly angry and etched “hey fascist, catch” into the ammunition found with his rifle.
Prominent figures including Elon Musk have taken to social media platforms to accuse political parties of Kirk’s fatal shooting.
“The Left is the party of murder,” Musk posted on X.
Platforms have filled with conspiracy theories, racist tropes and threats of violence all week.
Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana said he would use his congressional authority to demand that big tech platforms “mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
“If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man … those profiles must come down,” he said on X.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was pulled into the discourse when she shared video of an interview of her reaction to political pundits claiming Kirk’s death was a Democratic issue. In the interview, she disputed the claim that Kirk “just wanted to have civil debate.” Some social media users were outraged she would be so quick to criticize just a day after he was shot dead.
Some experts are deeply troubled about what they have seen this week.
“It really is a frightening commentary on the idea that our country embraces the concept of differences of opinions, and the right to have those differences and express them is really being challenged by this moment in time,” said Karen North, professor of digital and social media at USC.
“The most fringe perspectives are going to at least appear to us to be the most widely shared opinions because we know not all speech is equal online,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at UCLA and host of the podcast Utopias, which examines what it means to be human in a data-saturated world.
What this presents to users, including younger people, is a world that’s inundated with information that’s often divisive and without space to cope.
Social media users experience being overwhelmed with information, feeling the future is always collapsing on them, and speed seems to be the new normal, Srinivasan said.
But now more than ever people need to recognize, “that the world presented to us online is not the real world but it has become the real world partly because we’re so dependent on our phones and devices for many other things other than accessing content,” Srinivasan said.
Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and a professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said foreign adversaries and extremists for years have been exploiting a perceived Achilles heel in American society to advance polarization. And the online vitriol in the wake of Kirk’s death is no different.
One of the unfortunate byproducts of polarizing events is the fact that there are not only domestic malefactors, but international ones that will exploit it,” Levin said.
Sometimes the goal, Levin said, is to use fear to divide and foment hatred for a particular civic ideology. In other instances people are just looking to “throw monkey wrenches into the gears of Democracy because, for adversaries, weakening the United States is something they try to do generally.”
Cox said he was profoundly depressed by social media this week but “it was actually Charlie’s words that pulled me back.”
“Charlie posted on social media, ‘When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it’s important to stay grounded, turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends and remember internet fury is not real life, it’s going to be okay,’” Cox said.
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