Why the video of Charlie Kirk being shot was kept on social media platforms
Video of the political activist being shot and killed was available online hours after his death on Wednesday.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that some social media platforms have begun to remove the video.
After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday, footage of his death was almost immediately available on social media platforms.
Kirk was killed while speaking at an event at a college campus in Utah. Footage of him being shot while answering questions about mass shootings circulated on platforms such as X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook in the following hours.
How was such graphic footage allowed to make the rounds on these platforms? According to Laura Edelson, an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, every platform has its own policy, but many have decided to allow more videos like this to initially remain up due to their newsworthiness.
“Many platforms have specific newsworthiness exemptions that mean a video that might otherwise not comply with the platform’s policies might remain on the platform if they are deemed newsworthy,” said Edelson, who studies the spread of harmful content through large online networks. “These policies have a tremendous amount of interpretability and they usually come down to the people who run the platform. If it’s being actively recommended to you, that’s because someone at the platform made the decision that they are OK with not only hosting this content, but actively recommending it to users.”
John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology and director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab at Northeastern University, says the conversation around showing graphic content is an ongoing one in media world, including the social media.
In this case, he said the video of Kirk’s death is newsworthy given the fact that he is a public figure who was killed at a public event.
“He’s a prominent political activist who is influential with the sitting president,” Wihbey says. “(He) may have shifted some slice of young people over to the Trump camp in the 2024 election. This is a major public figure and an influential one…irrespective of his politics.”
Northeastern Global News, in your inbox.
Sign up for NGN’s daily newsletter for news, discovery and analysis from around the world.
Many platforms have policies that call for removal or warning labels around graphic content. YouTube and Discord both said they would be removing some footage of the shooting. TikTok announced on Thursday afternoon they will also remove some of the videos of the shooting and other platforms like X and Instagram followed suit in removing the video, Edelson said.
Edelson says many platforms have made changes to their policies over the years to allow this sort of footage to be hosted.
“This isn’t a subtle change,” she says. “Platforms have made changes to their policy. They have made public statements that they are going to have a wider range of content they allow.”
Wihbey says some platforms may be influenced by the decisions of others when it comes to policy and what they allow to stay posted.
Editor’s Picks
“Content standards and restrictions always exist within a broader culture,” he adds. “So if some platforms are seeing enormous amounts of views and engagements and clicks, because they are showing the unvarnished, and then others aren’t seeing that kind of traffic, there’s obviously going to be some business pressures on the ones that are taking a more careful stance. There can be a race to the bottom, dynamic, and that can influence the judgment around newsworthiness.”
Edelson says that even if the footage is allowed on a platform, its algorithm will determine who sees it and whether it’s pushed to users. And just like every platform has different policies around graphic content, they also have different methods for what ends up in your feed.
For example, Twitter/X and Instagram’s algorithms are driven by engagement, so it’s more likely to show users content other users are interacting with through comments, reactions or shares. Twitter/X was explicitly built around this sort of breaking news, Edelson adds, so it’s more likely for footage from a major event to circulate there.
In contrast, YouTube’s algorithm is focused on the duration of time someone stays on a piece of content. TikTik’s algorithm is similar, but blends a bit of both methods, Edelson says.
“One of the things we do know is that platforms that are really focused around this high engagement usage, they tend to recommend more extreme content,” she adds. “This is obviously extreme content. It’s a graphic video of someone’s death, but it captures your attention very aggressively. And so that is why a platform like Instagram, a platform like X, they have feeds that will tend to recommend this kind of content.”
As a result, it might be difficult for users to avoid this footage.
“This is a good time to take a social media break,” Edelson adds.
