Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are calling for more social media restrictions in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but neither party appears to be concretely grappling with the potential ramifications of involving the Trump administration in what Americans can and cannot see online.
Kirk was shot dead September 10 at Utah Valley University. Right up until the shooting, the Turning Point USA founder was, like any other day in his career, debating with crowds of college students in order to make a case for conservative politics amongst America’s youth. The suspected shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, turned himself in to authorities days later.
As the multi-day manhunt for his killer unfolded, Kirk was martyred by the ideological right, who heralded the 31-year-old conservative firebrand as a titan of free speech. Leveraging his death, the Trump administration launched an assault on its perceived political opponents. Donald Trump announced a crackdown on organizations that he claimed fund and support “political violence,” and said he would consider designating the famously decentralized, anti-fascism ideology Antifa as a terrorist organization.
The president’s allies quickly followed suit—and took particular aim at policing what was being said online. Vice President JD Vance endorsed a mass doxing campaign pointed at harassing and intimidating individuals who chastised Kirk online, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reallocated Pentagon resources to hunt down members of the military who posted negative takes on the podcaster.
Attorney General Pam Bondi also joined the fray, threatening to use the full might of the Justice Department to prosecute those who the agency deemed to be participating in “hate speech.” (Bondi walked back the warning days later after coming under fire by members of her own party for touting the nebulous phrase.)
Notably, none of MAGA’s threats came down hard on the social media companies that platformed the violent ideals that supposedly influenced Robinson to kill Kirk. Instead, prominent Republicans opened a hypocritical war, attacking the speech of those they deemed to be disparaging Kirk’s memory, such as late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
But slightly more measured voices did raise concerns about the perhaps outsize influence social media has on young people. In the weeks since the shooting, law enforcement, journalists, and internet sleuths have scoured the web activity of Kirk’s suspected assassin, painting Robinson as a chronically online gamer more interested in sharing meta-referential imageboard memes than debating politics.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox was one of the first prominent conservatives to condemn social media companies for their unmitigated influence on Americans, both young and old.
“Those dopamine hits, these companies, trillion-dollar market caps, the most powerful companies in the history of the world, have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage, which is the same type of dopamine, the same chemical that you get from taking fentanyl, get us addicted to outrage, and get us to hate each other,” Cox told NBC’s Meet the Press days after Kirk’s murder.
“We have to turn it off, we have to get back to community, caring about our neighbors, the things that make America great, serving each other, bettering ourselves, exercising, sleeping, all of those things that this takes away from us,” Cox emphasized.
There appears to be a growing consensus among prominent liberals, too, that it’s time to address the violent and often dehumanizing rhetoric that has pervaded the online public square.
Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg referred to the trend of digital lonerism as a “sickness,” telling ABC News that “there is a pattern where we see so many of these people are men, usually young men, who seem to spend more and more of their time in dark and twisted corners of the internet.”
Democratic Delaware Senator Chris Coons similarly spoke out against the darker weeds of the web, advocating on Face the Nation last week for Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, an effort re-introduced by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn in May. That initiative would require online platforms including social media networks and video games to implement safeguards to protect users under the age of 17. Although it has 42 co-sponsors, an earlier iteration of the bill was tossed out unanimously by the Senate Commerce Committee in 2023.
“No matter how much I might deeply disagree with his political views, the idea that he would be killed in such a grotesque and public way has to bring all of us to reflect about how hard it’s getting because the internet is an accelerant,” Coons said, referring to Kirk’s murder. “It is driving extremism in our country. It’s driving us apart, left and right.”
States began taking up their own online safety initiatives in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination. Following his death, New York proposed new rules relating to its SAFE for Kids Act, aiming to further limit addictive social media features in order to curb anxiety and depression amongst children in the Empire State.
Both parties have been quick to cast Robinson’s violent actions on the other’s divisive rhetoric. While the reality of Robinson’s beliefs is complicated, conservatives have decried him as a pro-transgender, antifa progressive. Liberals, meanwhile, have referred to Robinson as a far-right, gun toting, Nick Fuentes-fashioned “groyper.”
Ironically, both Robinson and Kirk emerged from the same twisted internet ecosystem—an environment that rewards extremism over solidarity, and clickbait rage over earnest discussion. A 2024 study by George Washington University, published in the journal npj Complexity, found that online hate “thrives” in the types of tight digital spaces that Kirk and Robinson were a part of, specifically calling out sites that the two young men spent a significant portion of their time on: Discord and Rumble.
But the possibility of regulating social media under the auspices of the Trump administration does not come without the threat of opening a door to MAGA-preferential censorship. In the wake of a Project 2025-styled executive order demanding that all federal agencies eliminate internal use of “woke” language, Trump’s DOJ has, so far this year, blocked public access to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, an online repository of criminal justice research; taken down the webpage for the Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap, an actionable roadmap for cities to reduce their crime rates; and deleted data and resources specifically related to understanding and preventing bullying and youth hate crimes.
Trump and his allies have been quick to celebrate the curtailing of free speech in the name of honoring Kirk. Besides Kimmel’s temporary suspension from the airwaves, government officials have cheered on the firings of those accused of making light of Kirk’s death. One can only imagine the consequences of handing the government a much tighter leash on what can and cannot be said online.
Their efforts haven’t been without pushback. On Wednesday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order allowing University of South Dakota art professor Phillip Michael Hook to keep his job. Hook was placed on leave, with the school intending to fire him, after he posted on his personal Facebook account calling Kirk a “hate spreading Nazi.” But Judge Karen Schreier ruled that Hook’s speech “is entitled to First Amendment protections”—ironically, the same rights that allowed Kirk to spread his hateful rhetoric up until the moment of his death.
Kirk’s death is far from the only instance in which online vitriol has translated into the real world. Divisive and extreme digital rhetoric also fueled violence and killing at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015, a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, and a nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2022.
In fact, the same day as Kirk’s death, a 16-year-old opened fire on a school in Evergreen, Colorado. Law enforcement officials said he had been “radicalized,” and the shooter reportedly had an extensive online presence espousing extremist ideals. It was the third school shooting in months that, despite taking place hundreds of miles apart, had perpetrators that were inspired by the same morbid online community, WatchPeopleDie, which originated on Reddit.
Another Reddit community, which has 63,000 weekly visitors, provides users with a space to showcase their 3D-printed guns, untraceable items that have already contributed to numerous international emergencies after their underaged creators threatened to open fire on their classmates with the unregistered weaponry.
Nearly half of young Americans—between the ages of 13 and 17—report being online “almost constantly,” according to a December 2024 study by the Pew Research Center.
That same year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO) released a report examining the myriad ways in which digital companies were already attempting to address and combat hate speech on their respective platforms. It found that, while the major online entities had different definitions of content that violated their site’s policies, each and every definition “prohibited hateful content related to disability, ethnicity, race, and religion.” Most companies relied on algorithms to target and eradicate hate speech, though some also involved user feedback in flagging harmful content.
The data to understand just how rampant the problem of internet-channeled violence is, however, lacking. Research indicates that hate crimes are significantly underreported to law enforcement. Each year, the Justice Department gathers data on hate crimes via its National Crime Victimization Survey, interviewing roughly 240,000 Americans across 150,000 households to provide authorities with a clearer understanding of these predominantly undocumented attacks.
Last year, U.S. GAO recommended that the department also accrue data specifically on “hate crimes that occur on the internet”—a differentiation that has not yet been made—to help authorities better allocate resources to combat digital extremism. But whether the Trump administration will follow through on the request and funnel taxpayer dollars into hate crime research remains to be seen.
So far, the federal government has fallen drastically short on actually making the internet safer. Lagging national oversight has left states picking up the scattered pieces. In 2023 alone, 12 states enacted new laws and adopted resolutions with the intent to protect kids from the negative effects of social media. Those efforts included a TikTok ban in Montana, a new law requiring age verification and parental consent to use social media in Arkansas, and a resolution out of Illinois urging the federal government to draft new internet regulations.
On the flip side, some of Silicon Valley’s biggest players have tried to cozy up to the president in an apparent attempt to align their business goals with the administration—or perhaps persuade the government to turn a blind eye: Trump’s flush inaugural entourage included Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, X’s Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, among others.
Lacking federal demands, user safety has not exactly proven to be a chief priority for these corporations. Ultimately, social media companies would like to keep the government out of their business—and their expenditures show just how far they’re willing to go to do so. Some of the most popular digital entities in the U.S., including Meta, Alphabet, Snap, and ByteDance, have spent enormous sums of money in recent years to keep regulation away from their industry. Over the course of 2024, Meta alone spent a record $24.4 million lobbying Washington. The company is already on track to top that this year, according to projections from OpenSecrets.
It seems clear, then, that there is much lawmakers on both sides of the aisle can do to actually make the internet a less dangerous place. In particular, Republicans—who control the House, Senate, and White House—could pass nationwide regulations against online hate speech, crack down on Big Tech’s lackluster safety rules, or even just convince Trump to tone down his own violent rhetoric.
But lawmakers need to step carefully when passing these regulations, lest they unwittingly infringe on the right to free speech of which Kirk himself was so fond.
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