As part of a broader move to simplify and streamline everything, we’re moving to a new Garbage Intelligence format. We’re ingesting so much data every month that there’s really no good way to show it all in one email anymore lol. So going forward, we’ll be condensing it down into something more readable every month. If you have any questions or want to see The Big Spreadsheet, shoot us an email!

Charlie Kirk’s Death Was The Biggest Story Online (In The US) In September

By far the biggest driver of engagement across the entire web in September was the assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10th. According to the data we pull from the internet’s top platforms every month, it was the biggest single news event online since President Donald Trump took office in January. Though, unlike that story, Kirk’s death didn’t seem to make as much of a dent on more global platforms like Telegram, which was more focused on Roblox news (a Roblox-themed aggregator was the sixth-fastest-growing Telegram channel in September, with 736,000 new subscribers according to tgstat.ru.)

It makes sense that Kirk’s shooting would be so important online. Not just because it’s become a pretext for suppressing dissent by the Trump administration, but because Kirk’s primary skill was driving engagement. Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, sold itself as a slicker, more modern collegiate organization for young Republicans, but he understood its primary purpose was being a content creation engine. Kirk was an influencer, focusing on inflammatory statements, big stunts, and troll farms, sometimes at the expense of less online initiatives. And now he’s died an influencer’s death.

In September, the three most popular Instagram accounts were Kirk’s (6.9 million new followers), his widow Erika’s (6.8 million), and Turning Point USA’s (3.9 million), according to Social Blade. Meanwhile, our data from NewsWhip shows two of the top five external links on Facebook last month were news articles about the assassination (134,000 interactions) and about suspect Tyler Robinson appearing in court (136,000 interactions). Meanwhile, the third-biggest post on Facebook last month (2.3 million total interactions) was a video from his Facebook account posted three days before his death, showing the stop on the “American Comeback” college tour he was conducting when he was shot.

Much of this engagement came in the days and weeks following Kirk’s assassination. It’s a lot harder to track numbers for how the internet reacted to the shooting in real time, since video of the event was instantly uploaded from multiple angles and algorithmically spread across the social web. Most of these videos and their viewing figures have been removed, including the video taken immediately after the shooting by TikTok user @eldertiktok11 which we covered the next day.

One real-time number that we do have, though, thanks to TwitchTracker, is how streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker reacted. Piker streams for multiple hours every single day, meaning he was already live when news of the shooting broke. Piker, a longtime critic of Kirk’s, had been scheduled to debate him at the time of his death. Over the next few hours, his stream steadily gained attention until it reached a peak of over 224,000 concurrent viewers. It was the seventh-biggest stream of the month, though half of the streams ahead of him were all coverage of the same DOTA 2 tournament. Twitch, like Telegram, is a very global platform. More on that below.

Not all of the reaction to Kirk’s death has been treating it positively as you might think, in case you keep seeing the proposed laws demanding a statue of him at every public college. There’s been some bristling at how the shooting drowned out any other news online. On Reddit, two of the top ten posts in September were expressing this negative reaction: A post on r/BlackPeopleTwitter (195,000 upvotes) criticizing how MSNBC anchor Matthew Dowd was fired for his reaction and a post on r/pics (173,000 upvotes) drawing attention to a school shooting in Colorado that occurred within hours of Kirk’s death.

Despite this, there’s one source of news about the shooting that’s gotten a lot of attention in September: Us, apparently. According to Graphtreon, Panic World was the fastest-growing Patreon in September for the “podcast” category, with over 1,300 new subscribers this month. Our own reckoning puts as as number 12 across the whole website — first place, of course, goes to a porn game with over 3,300 new Patrons — but we’ve never even come close to making our own lists before, so we think we’ve earned the brag.

Dog In Heels!!!

This was the third-biggest TikTok this month in the US this month.

Jimmy Kimmel, Welcome To The Resistance

Now here’s something we haven’t seen a very, very long time. A digital media publisher was top of Facebook this month. This is surprising for a few reasons. Long gone are the days of VICE, BuzzFeed, Mashable, and Vox dominating the big blue app. We’ve basically never seen one in our top stats since we started tracking the platform. Instead, Facebook post-COVID has pretty much only promoted news articles from legacy publications — with a handful of right-wing publishers mixed in to make sure Republicans don’t haul them in front of Congress again, of course.

So the fact that the second-biggest news article on Facebook this month was from Vox is a huge deal. The engagement the article got — 133,534 interactions — is a far cry from peak Facebook days, but still notable. It was an explainer/commentary piece on Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, written by Zack Beauchamp.

Kimmel’s show, aside from lighting up Facebook feeds this month, also officially joined the Resistance. Kimmel’s account was the second-fastest growing Bluesky, account in September (42,000 new followers), just behind the platform’s official account.

Is it frustrating that it took late night show drama to get the internet’s various libs to truly lock in? Sure, yes, of course. But, at least according to the data we have, Americans are really paying attention now.

From Streaming To The Super Bowl

There might be plenty of conservatives scratching their heads right now after hearing that Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny will be performing the Super Bowl halftime show. But according to our data, he’s the perfect pick for if the NFL is hoping to convert the biggest night in TV into the biggest night in streaming. Bad Bunny has been dominating livestreaming platforms all month.

Amazon Music simulcast the final night of Bad Bunny’s 31-night residency in San Juan on Twitch. Amazon hasn’t released exact numbers for the performance, but the company is saying it was Amazon Music’s biggest stream ever.

We do have numbers for its simulcast on Twitch, though. TwitchTracker tells us that he had the the third-biggest Twitch stream in September, with 341,000 peak concurrent viewers. Right behind Twitch long-hauler Kai Cenat (who peaked at 548,000 viewers) and the world’s biggest DOTA 2 tournament (399,000 viewers for the final matchup).

Bad Bunny’s success online isn’t super surprising. We’ve been arguing for years now that, at least according to our data, Twitch is a predominately Spanish-language platform. The consistently biggest streams and streamers, globally, are all speaking Spanish. But Bad Bunny is also in the top echelon on Spotify, where songs from his latest album have stayed in the Top 50 for months since they were released in February (according to Kworb, his biggest song in September was “DtMF,” with over 57 million streams).

Of course, being big online now also means you — and your fans — have a target on your back. A side effect of the Trump administration’s obsession with dominating the attention economy. Which is why Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now threatening to patrol the Super Bowl. A political standoff between an entertainer and secret police, while streaming numbers surge, what could be more 2020s than that?

TikTok Still Not Political

For all the panic in the US over the last few years about the political bent of TikTok, we’ve never seen much evidence of it. We’ve been tracking TikTok’s biggest posts basically since we started Garbage Intelligence and there hasn’t been a single post about news or politics to ever enter our top five each month.

Now, this is possibly due to how TikTok works. The platform has big viral hits, like the strawberry from last year. But it tends to be more interested in showing users a personalized feed of less viral content. So US lawmakers can argue that its alleged brainwashing is happening at a lower level that’s harder to track. But the videos we have been able to track have been completely and totally harmless. And September was no different.

The biggest video on TikTok this month was a wholesome video of a little boy clapping during his mom’s graduation. It got 20 million views over the month. Sure, some far-right members of the Trump administration might dislike its depiction of women going to college, but most normal people would not find anything political about it. Same with this month’s second-biggest video, which was a flashmob set to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (19 million views). Flashmobs might be a recession indicator, but hard to argue it’s part of some woke agenda.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving the sale of the app this month and it seems like its new owners in the US will be some cursed combination of allied oligarchs, but it’s still unclear how the site will function and, most importantly, what we’ll be able to track. But we can confidently say the videos on TikTok with the most views in the US have always been totally harmless slop. We’ll see how long that lasts once Trump’s friends are installed at the top.

Silksong Is Definitely Steam’s Biggest New Game

We now have nearly a full month of Steam numbers for Hollow Knight: Silksong after it released on September 4th. Steam doesn’t release sales numbers, but it displayed it as the top seller that week, and it was the most popular single-player game in months, with over 191,000 average players in September according to SteamCharts. Considering the release crashed the entire service, and it has more than four times as many reviews as this month’s next biggest release (260,000 vs 58,000 for Borderlands 2), let’s go out on a limb and say it was number one for the month.

The last single-player game to put up these numbers that wasn’t a spammy idle game was Black Myth: Wukong last year. That game averaged over twice as many players as Silksong in its first month of release. Wukong’s a much bigger title with a much bigger marketing budget than Silksong, but it was also made for a Chinese audience. Who had some serious problems with Silksong’s Simplified Chinese translation.

Anyway, a major part of its success is that Silksong isn’t just a long-awaited sequel, it’s the focal point of a years-old online subculture. The game was initially announced as DLC for the original Hollow Knight, which came out all the way back in 2018, so fans feel it’s been a little delayed. Since then, a range of absurdist, trolling, or earnestly hopeful “Silkposts” have been so popular on sites like Reddit and X that they’ve bled through pretty much all online video game culture. Meaning that playing the game is, in some ways, a meme in and of itself.

Redditors Are Strokevestigating The President

This was the second-biggest post on Reddit this month.

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a good Halloween couples costume idea.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***