Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the aftermath of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk\u2019s assassination is how irrelevant its actual perpetrator was to the immediate discourse. I saw the finger-pointing online even before I saw the news that Kirk had been shot. At that point, there was hardly any information about the incident\u2014let alone details about the shooter or a motive. Yet there was plenty of blame to go around: Elon Musk posted on X that \u201cthe Left is the party of murder,\u201d even before Kirk\u2019s shocking death had been confirmed. Others blamed the shooting<\/a> on the media, NGOs, and billionaire Democrat fundraisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the algorithmic internet at work. It abhors an information vacuum and, in the absence of facts or credible information, gaps are quickly filled with rage bait, conspiracy theorizing, doomerism, and vitriol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If one thing has united the discourse in the past 48 hours, it has been a desire for certainty\u2014a drive to know exactly why <\/em>Kirk was killed. He was a political figure, of course, which makes his horrific death inherently an act of political violence. But understanding Kirk\u2019s assassination through politics alone may not be enough. After the alleged assassin was apprehended, late last night, the online meaning-making machine went back into overdrive. This morning, I watched as people dredged up what appeared to be his mother\u2019s Facebook page<\/a>, posting photos from 2017 of a person who looks like the alleged shooter supposedly dressed up like Donald Trump for Halloween. Other photos from the same Facebook page appear to show children at a county fair, and one is wearing an NRA hat. \u201cThey were a pro-gun family,\u201d one account that posts on both X and Bluesky wrote, alongside a screenshot of the Facebook post, implying that the killer may have been a Republican. None of this seems to have been verified before it was posted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another account claimed that it had found a donation from the shooter to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee. A separate post<\/a> from a journalist claimed to debunk this. On 4chan\u2019s \u201cpolitically incorrect\u201d message board, anonymous posters feuded over the killer\u2019s ideology. \u201cSo\u2026 not trans, huh? And a white person? Male? Interesting. Who\u2019d have thought it?\u201d one wrote. Another poster suggested, with no evidence, that the shooter may have been a Groyper, the term for followers of the white nationalist Nick Fuentes<\/a>, who had publicly feuded with Kirk. Others, of course, speculated about what the assassination might have to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Many of the right-wing accounts who\u2019d been clamoring for civil war just hours earlier seemed not to know what to make of the news\u2014Representative Nancy Mace, who\u2019d previously speculated that the shooter was transgender, posted<\/a> on X that the shooter was a \u201clost individual\u201d and she offered to pray for him. As of this writing, the public still knows very little about the shooter\u2014there are no charges, just speculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watching all this play out, you can feel a jockeying of sorts; interested parties are trying to label or disavow the shooter, or otherwise pin a label onto him. This, too, is the algorithmic internet at work: a justification machine<\/a> where facts and news aren\u2019t so much presented and reported as they are cataloged and then rearranged to fit preset narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n What we know of the killer\u2019s ideology, beyond what can be interpreted from his alleged mother\u2019s Facebook posts, comes from the crime scene. The details offered by Utah\u2019s governor at a press conference this morning suggest that the situation may be complex in the way that many highly visible shootings now are. According to Utah\u2019s governor, the fired bullet casing found on the scene had been inscribed with the phrase<\/a> \u201cNotices bulges OwO whats this?\u201d\u2014a niche online reference to flirting within the furry community that is now mostly just used trollishly. Unfired cases were also inscribed with hyper-online references, including a series of arrows that, as the gaming publication Polygon<\/em> pointed out, match the input required to drop a bomb<\/a> in a popular game called Helldivers 2<\/em>. Another bullet casing was engraved with the trollish phrase \u201cIf you read this you are gay lmao.\u201d The bullet casings are less of a sign of a political affiliation and much more a signal that the shooter was very online. One old Facebook post that\u2019s made the rounds purportedly shows the alleged shooter dressed up<\/a> in 2018 as an obscure meme that gained popularity in the 2010s on 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This dynamic\u2014a young shooter who seems to have no barriers between fringe online life and the real world\u2014has become an alarming meme unto itself. Just last week, I wrote about the mass shooting<\/a> at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis; the shooter there was also extremely online and apparently affiliated with a number of groups that defy normal political ideologies. These groups are better thought of as fandoms\u2014a hybrid threat network of disaffected people that can include Columbine obsessives, neo-Nazis, child groomers, and trolls. They perform for one another through acts of violence and cheer their community on to commit murder. Though these groups might adopt far-right aesthetics, the truth is that their ideology is defined by a selfish kind of nihilism. To them, murder is the ultimate act of trolling, and they want to be remembered for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read: The mass shooters are performing for one another<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n From the little we know, Kirk\u2019s assassin seems to differ some from this profile. He appeared to have intentionally carried out a targeted assassination rather than attempting a mass shooting\u2014both are horrific, but they are different. And he did not take his life in the hopes of becoming a \u201csaint\u201d<\/a> online, as many mass shooters do. But the bullet casings suggest a desire to reach an audience\u2014and to troll the media and law enforcement tasked with trying to find a motive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This leaves the broader discourse around Kirk\u2019s assassination in an awkward position, deprived of the certainty that so many crave. The killer\u2019s motive is not clear yet, nor is the full political and cultural impact of Kirk\u2019s death. And yet, as this and so many other shootings have demonstrated, none of this matters to individuals who are using the tragedy to get attention for themselves online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I get the sense that, for many, the most unnerving outcome might be if the shooter does not fall neatly into an ideological framework. Perhaps this is part of why the unknowns will not stop interested parties from trying to categorize him. They will not stop the Trump administration from suggesting, as the White House adviser Stephen Miller did on X<\/a> yesterday, that there is a sickness among the administration\u2019s ideological enemies that must be purged from the country. The unknowns will not stop those who see the assassination as an overt act of left-versus-right violence from feeling like the country is on the brink of a civil war. The livestreams, vigilante investigators, extremists sending death threats, and conspiracist threads will continue their work. And Kirk\u2019s organization, Turning Point USA, will continue to sell $35 memorial T-shirts with an illustration of Kirk and a Bible verse on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The shooters who fall into this mold implicitly understand these internet dynamics. They seek an audience, but they are also acting out to get the world\u2014especially the online world\u2014to respond. \u201cIf you read this you are gay lmao\u201d is a trolly, nihilistic thing to inscribe on a bullet casing, but the point is for people to see it, for people like me to write it down so that people like you can read it and feel something, be it shock, outrage, confusion, or sadness. The shooters may not have a coherent ideology, or even be particularly politically motivated per se, but they seem to know the ecosystem they are dropping their horrific acts of violence into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some shooters, online communities\u2014with all their irony-poisoning, shitposting, and feuding\u2014are more real, or at least more meaningful, than physical ones. With their senseless violence, these killers are bringing a part of that networked, online chaos to tangible, life-and-death reality. They know that their violence will be flattened, picked apart, argued over, and, crucially, amplified by the justification machine. In this way, they will get what they\u2019re after. The violence will continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are many overlapping problems at work here: a gun-violence and firearm epidemic; worsening political polarization; social and cultural issues such as loneliness, alienation, and a growing distrust of elites; and disdain for one\u2019s fellow citizens. There is so much anger right now, plenty of it justified. A young father was murdered on a college campus. Few public or private spaces seem to be safe from the specter of a mass shooter. Institutions that once functioned for the benefit of the public are now sclerotic, having been partly dismantled, or seem indifferent to suffering. The economy operates like a casino, and there\u2019s a feeling that traditional pathways<\/a> to prosperity are gone. People are being rounded up off the streets without due process. The list goes on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every minute of every day, all of these thoughts and feelings are uploaded into platforms that are owned by billionaires or massive technology companies and built for viral advertising and the collection of individual data. The internet is not a monolith. For every community of mass-shooter fandoms, there is another that is silly, joyous, productive, or totally harmless. But it is hard not to notice that, in the aggregate, something poisonous is in the architecture of its platforms and the way that our technologies demand not just our attention, but our most heightened emotions. This is not an environment for good-faith politics. These platforms are governed by algorithms that tend to prioritize engagement above all else, amplifying the loudest, most shameless users because these voices will draw in other voices. This attention is worth good money, both to posters who can harness it, as well as the tech companies. Kirk knew this and was quite successful at playing this game, using social media to spread invective, troll his political opponents, polarize his audience, and grow his movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The public has no understanding of how the algorithms really work\u2014they\u2019re company secrets\u2014so participants are constantly shadowboxing the machine, turning conversation into a constant A\/B test to see what catches on. Even many of the people who broadly understand this situation feel compelled to have conversations in these spaces\u2014the very same outlets that help incubate and perpetuate unthinkable violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Kirk\u2019s death was announced, I felt sick\u2014primarily because the act itself was so cowardly and brutal and autoplaying on my timelines<\/a> with every refresh. But I also knew this could only accelerate the kind of physical violence and hateful rhetoric that got us here. And I knew what would happen next: Kirk\u2019s death would set off a chain of the highest-stakes conversations\u2014about gun violence, mental illness, political polarization, online snuff films, fascism, free speech, the right to assemble, the Second Amendment, transgender rights, Nazis, the Civil War, the very state of our democracy, and more. And the dialogue would happen on platforms that goad each of us into being the worst versions of ourselves; that prioritize in-group performance over listening; that reward outrage and outrageousness; that collapse context; that exist to privilege conflict over resolution. To continue to conduct our discourse in these spaces suggests, however tacitly, a desire for them not to resolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Charlie Warzel<\/a> is a staff writer at The Atlantic<\/em> and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain<\/a>, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The cycle of violence will continue as long as the medium doesn\u2019t change. By Charlie Warzel Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the aftermath of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk\u2019s assassination is how irrelevant its actual perpetrator was to the immediate discourse. I saw the finger-pointing online even before I saw the news that Kirk had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16727,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726\/revisions\/16727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/cdn.theatlantic.com\/thumbor\/npWRju1j6uD4fBcXExOzXI3umFU=\/0x0:2000x1125\/960x540\/media\/img\/mt\/2025\/09\/2025_09_12_social_mpg\/original.jpg\")
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