Hi readers, we’re back with another departure from the usual newsletter tonight. Overwhelmingly, today’s top story is the killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday and the response from across the political spectrum.
More than 24 hours after the shooting, there’s much we don’t know: As of this writing, the shooter is still at large. My Vox colleagues have done an incredible job covering this moment — you can find their work on the Vox site and in newsletters like Today, Explained. But ultimately, the goal of this newsletter is to tell you what you absolutely need to know — and right now, with so much still unclear, I think this advice from Adam Clark Estes is the best thing to leave you with. He urges us all, now more than ever, to get off the internet:
The internet devolved into a series of echo chambers years ago, but the current state of social media feels more like a series of pressure chambers, heating up with each extra post, until things are ready to boil over.
None of these platforms — not X, or Bluesky, or Threads, or any other option — are good places to find facts or reliable information. In the absence of more active content moderation, not only do graphic videos spread quickly and widely on social media platforms, but so do conspiracy theories, hate speech, and calls for violence. You can expect to see plenty of misleading updates in the days following Kirk’s death, especially as authorities struggle to figure out what happened and who was responsible.
These are all reasons not to spend the next couple of news cycles thumbing through feeds or staring at videos on your phone. It’s not just the fact that the websites will be full of angry people. But in the days and weeks that come, thanks to that pressure cooker effect, the political climate online will be especially vitriolic. The violent videos from Utah will resurface, and unfortunately, there’s always a chance that more violence will follow, especially when right wing extremists are calling for it.
We also don’t know exactly what the owners of these platforms will do about any of this. Musk has famously promoted far-right voices on X, and in his own recent tweets, he has broadly blamed the left for Kirk’s death and called it “the party of murder.” This is before we know the shooter’s identity or their motive. Rhetoric like this is scaring people online about what comes next.
Kirk’s assassination tape wasn’t even the only video of a killing that went viral this week. So again: Stay offline for the next few days. Avoid social media, where whatever pops up in your feed is typically a surprise and sometimes an unwelcome one.
