Charlie Kirk was cruelly murdered doing exactly what we all should be doing: in the words of Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, he was “disagreeing better.”
Kirk was out there, digitally and physically, in the public square, engaging with people of all persuasions in the hope of creating dialogue instead of walls. Our nation sorely needs individuals with the willingness to do this, no matter what you think of Kirk’s opinions on specific issues. (I certainly disagreed with a lot of his advice to young women.)
We’ve been seeing this in the zeitgeist for some time now: the idea that people who disagree with us should be shunned, estranged, cancelled, even if they are members of our own family.
Threats of the most egregious bodily harm are routinely conveyed on social media. The theme is eradication of the “other,” and it produces the most noxious fruit imaginable. In this case, it appears to have produced cold-blooded murder. As a people, we must repent in sackcloth and ashes for our hatred for those who hold different beliefs than our own.
The details of this case, sketchy as they are at this point, set off additional alarm bells for me as a mother.
What we know is that the 22-year-old now in custody, Tyler Robinson, was raised in an intact family with parents who were invested in their son and his future. He got a 34 out of 36 on the ACT and received a full-ride scholarship to Utah State University. This apparently highly beloved, highly intelligent eldest son had the world at his feet. But home was not enough to protect him.
Robinson, of course, has a long legal process ahead of him and is innocent until proven guilty.
While there’s much we still don’t know, friends have said that Robinson was "terminally online." And at least one family member has said, that in the days before Charlie Kirk came with an open heart to Orem, Utah, Robinson was filled with fury at the prospect. It should not surprise us that those two things have been shown to be related.
Social media is the gateway drug. Its predatory desire to monetize our attention pushes ever more inflammatory material our way lest we step away and stop clicking. But the gateway is only the first step, and it leads to the rabbit holes of the internet where the user, even a well-adjusted user, can find online groups on private or semi-private servers that will offer a sense of belonging — for some, at the price of one’s moral agency.
These echo chambers become the most potent instrument of radicalization, and the extreme emotions shared within these groups bleed over into the real world. We can tell Robinson found these rabbit warrens by the engravings on the bullets; you’d have to be terminally online to know what three of those four messages on the bullets meant.
As a society, we have begun the first steps to keeping children away from the gateway, and Utah has been a leader among the U.S. states in this regard. Other nations, such as Australia, go even further, banning all social media for children. There is much that should have already been done to protect children from the psychologically destabilizing effects of living online, and legislators have finally, belatedly, begun to pick up the baton.
But Tyler Robinson is no child: he is a 22-year-old adult. The question for a free society is how to maintain free speech, of which Charlie Kirk was a champion, while fighting back against technology companies which seem not to care if our people are actively harmed by their products.
I have a three-word fighting slogan: “Stop the algorithm.”
It is the tech companies’ algorithms that push the ever-more extreme content on us so that we wind up in group echo chambers where our emotions are continually inflamed. These are, by and large, brute-force algorithms with no safeguards. They will use any information they can collect from you when you set up an account, and notice every click and like, in order to predict what else you might like. Given that online content is, for all practical purposes, unvetted, you will eventually be led, step by step, into ever more deeper waters with every click you make.
In 2024, The Guardian newspaper performed a stunning experiment. They set up several brand-new “John Doe” accounts on social media, offering only the information that the user was a 24-year-old male. That’s it — no other information. They even turned off ad-tracking, and they did not click on or like any content at all. The reporter, Josh Taylor, described what happened next:
“Initially Facebook served up jokes from ‘The Office’ and other sitcom-related memes alongside posts from 7 News, Daily Mail and Ladbible. A day later it began showing Star Wars memes and gym or ‘dudebro’-style content. By day three, ‘trad Catholic’-type memes began appearing, and the feed veered into more sexist content. Three months later, ‘The Office,’ Star Wars, and now The Boys memes continue to punctuate the feed, now interspersed with highly sexist and misogynistic images that appeared in the feed without any input from the user.”
The tech companies will take you right into the violent online wastelands of the left and of the right just by knowing you are a 24-year-old male.
In a similar experiment, it was found that “misogynist manosphere content was sent to users regardless of whether those accounts actively searched for it. This was especially the case for the profiles set up as teenage boys seeking out content typically associated with masculine gender norms. All accounts were presented with masculinist, extremist and anti-feminist content and the frequency increased once their account demonstrated interest or engagement.”
We cannot continue to be the prey of these companies. We cannot continue to allow our loved ones to be their prey. While there are numerous little hacks designed to disable algorithmically-delivered content, what individuals and families need now is for our government to tell tech companies that they must “stop the algorithm.” Massachusetts is already proposing that this be done to protect teens.
Our homes are not enough; we need government action. By law, users must have the right to refuse such content, with the legally mandated default being an “opt out” for every user, no matter their age.
This is how we can respect free speech and free agency. This is where we must start, now. This is the moment, in the wake of this evil act that law enforcement says was perpetrated in Utah by a Utahn born and raised, to begin to bind this evil. Over to you, Governor Cox. Let Utah lead out once more.
