Parents reel as Charlie Kirk video goes viral

Alissa Wright’s 13-year-old daughter arrived home from her Los Angeles school Wednesday with an announcement: Charlie Kirk was dead, and she had watched a video of it happening.

Wright’s stomach dropped, she said. The 47-year-old stay-at-home mom had seen the gory video of the conservative commentator’s killing at a Utah speaking event earlier that day as it spread on TikTok and Reddit. Her daughter said that a boy in her class had sneaked around the school’s phone ban and discovered the video on TikTok.

Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.

Then Wright asked how it made her daughter feel. The middle-schooler said the image of blood spurting from Kirk’s neck was “crazy.”

“These are kids who have been doing school shooter drills their whole lives, and I hate that she’s so desensitized to it,” Wright said. “It just makes me think, what else has she seen?”

While violent videos live in many corners of the internet, children and teens encountered the videos of Kirk’s killing on mainstream social platforms, often in their primary feeds.

It was a “perfect storm,” said Titania Jordan, chief marketing officer at the parental controls app Bark, leaving kids across the country encountering the clip before parents could talk to them about it. Just days after video of a stabbing of a Ukrainian woman on a North Carolina train made waves online, some parents said they feel overwhelmed by the frequency and intensity of violent images.

“You cannot go online now and not see something related to this,” Jordan, a parent herself, said.

Cable news channels and mainstream media outlets aired edited videos that omitted the shooting itself, but on social platforms, uncensored videos filmed at the scene from long distance and up close quickly surfaced. Apps like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are designed to play one video after another as people scroll, prioritizing the posts that draw the most attention. Experts said it was impossible to quantify just how many people, and how many kids, the videos ultimately reached, especially since many were taken down.

“This one moved at a pace you can’t keep up with,” said Jill Murphy, chief content officer at family advocacy group Common Sense Media. Murphy said traffic to the organization’s webpage titled “Explaining the News to Our Kids” was 20 times higher on Wednesday than the day before. Common Sense used to wait for schools to request educational materials to help kids process violence in the news, but now, the group starts prepping once major events occur.

Murphy spoke to the omnipresence of news coverage and cellphone footage, and the speed at which information can travel.

“This footage was available online to a generation who is used to watching, commenting, sharing, and posting their own reactions to events – whatever that event might be – and long before they may realize the impact of what they’ve just consumed,” she said.

By Thursday, the most graphic videos were less prevalent on most major platforms as companies worked to remove them, though they still turned up through search or algorithmic feeds, especially on X. Still, parents said their children reported the videos being discussed and shared at schools, sometimes via group chats or private messaging apps.

Most major platforms told The Washington Post they are proactively identifying and either removing or placing age restrictions on posts that showed Kirk’s killing.

– – –

‘I am heartbroken’

People who encountered the video expressed outrage, sadness and resignation on Thursday.

In their car ride for school drop off, Heather Reynolds of Salt Lake City said she found out that her 15-year-old daughter had watched the video at school. She said she felt bad not finding out earlier. “I am heartbroken that she watched something I have protected myself from.”

But Reynolds said that while her daughter found the video “horrible,” the teen also thought it was “important” to have seen it and felt it shouldn’t be censored.

Alicia Perry, a 37-year-old tech worker in Texas, opened Facebook on Wednesday and immediately saw the clip when it auto-played in a post from one of her friends. She couldn’t sleep that night, she said, and ended up booking an emergency session with her therapist.

One user reported that multiple videos of the shooting still surfaced on Thursday in a search for “Charlie Kirk” on Snapchat’s “Spotlight” video feed, which often caters to a younger audience. A search for “Charlie Kirk” on TikTok on Thursday morning brought up suggestions for other searches that misspelled his name, such as “Charlee” and “Charles Kirik.” Clicking on those misspelled search terms brought up videos that included gory close-ups of his shooting.

Snapchat spokeswoman Monique Bellamy told The Post via email that the company worked to remove graphic videos of the shooting and ensured that they didn’t pop up in users’ feeds.

“In the wake of these tragedies, our safety teams immediately took action,” she said.

Even Instagram’s Teen accounts, designed with additional safety features for users 13 to 17, could readily find videos of the shooting, according to tests conducted Thursday by Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog organization.

Using a test Instagram Teen account created for research purposes, with the birth date set to 2009 and settings activated to limit graphic content, Paul said she searched for terms such as “Charlie Kirk,” “Charlie Kirk video” and “Charlie Kirk shot” and was stunned by what she found. Each turned up dozens of Instagram Reels, or short videos, from the event at which he was killed. And some returned videos of the killing itself, including a bloody close-up that had more than 10,000 views and remained live on the site as of midday Thursday.

A spokesperson for Instagram parent company Meta said Paul’s findings stemmed from the challenges of tracking and rapidly moderating all the different versions of a given video and was not related to Instagram Teen accounts.

“We are removing content that glorifies or supports this tragic incident or the perpetrator, while applying warning screens over videos of the incident and restricting their view to people 18 and over,” spokesperson Francis Brennan said in an email statement. “There can be a lag at times in applying those warning screens when individuals upload slightly different versions of known videos, and it appears that’s what happened here.”

Many parents said they struggled to limit all the ways their children could encounter the video. Cara Carlone, 41, said she assumed the parental controls on her 14-year-old daughter’s social media accounts would prevent the teen from seeing it. Carlone was still reeling from watching the close-up on TikTok – the image replaying again and again in her mind, she said – when her daughter came to her saying a friend had sent the clip in a text message.

TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza said in an email that the company has “implemented additional safeguards to prevent people from unexpectedly viewing footage that violates our rules.”

Andisheh Nouraee, a communications professional in the Atlanta area, said he saw the video on Bluesky on Wednesday and warned his kids, 15 and 12, to avoid watching it because they’d probably regret doing so. He said his kids and their friends were already familiar with Kirk from social media clips and had heard about his death at school.

The 15-year-old told Nouraee later that she had been texting with a friend who searched for the video online, found it readily, and then exclaimed at how graphic it was.

Bluesky spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said in an email statement that the platform is taking down “close-up videos” of the event and suspending accounts that encourage violence.

Google’s YouTube is “closely monitoring our platform” and balancing public interest with protecting its users by removing some graphic videos while restricting others to users over the age of 18, spokesperson Jack Malon said in an email statement.

– – –

The struggle to curb the spread

Bark, the parental controls app that helps families monitor kids’ phone use, said outreach from parents spiked Wednesday evening as they turned to the app’s email support or Facebook group to ask how to stop kids from seeing the video. For many, it was already too late. Jordan said hundreds of parents wrote in about the clips of Kirk, saying, “My kid has seen this. Now what?”

Jordan recommended families temporarily pause social media use when graphic clips go viral, but the more realistic course may be to help kids practice saying no to friends who try to share the clips. Ultimately parents alone can’t protect kids from gruesome content if social platforms don’t invest in curbing its spread, Jordan said, citing changes to content moderation teams and systems at major social media companies that have shifted the responsibility for flagging dangerous content onto users.

Moderating videos at scale, however, is harder than it might seem – particularly during a major breaking news event such as the Kirk shooting, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook executive and CEO of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm.

Most major social media platforms use machine-learning software to identify and remove posts that violate their policies against gore and graphic violence, she said. But that’s harder with videos than with text or still images, she said. It takes time for companies to train their systems to identify videos they’ve never encountered before, particularly when users make small tweaks or edits that result in countless different versions of the same footage.

“It’s not an instantaneous thing where you can hit a button and have it disappear from the internet completely,” Harbath said.

When the video is newsworthy, she added, the companies must also make judgment calls on how to balance public interest with the interests of users and respect for the victim.

Harbath said she believes most of the major social media companies have gotten better overall at responding quickly to viral shooting videos since the 2019 massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which the shooter live-streamed on Facebook. She said Elon Musk’s X, which has cut back on content moderation and loosened speech restrictions, is an exception.

X’s rules allow users to post graphic imagery “if it is properly labeled, not prominently displayed and is not excessively gory or depicting sexual violence,” though threatening or glorifying violence is not allowed. The company declined to explain how it was applying that rule to posts about the Kirk shooting, but said in a post on X that “we will continue to stand against violence and censorship, ensuring this platform amplifies truth and open dialogue for everyone.”

Some lawmakers on Thursday urged X and other tech companies to take stronger action.

“The impact of pushing videos detailing the graphic murder of Charlie Kirk from every different angle cannot be anything but detrimental to kids,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee). Blackburn led a Senate hearing earlier this week with ex-Meta whistleblowers criticizing the company’s approach to child safety.

U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) posted that she is calling on Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok to “remove the horrifying videos of Charlie Kirk’s murder,” adding that “no one should be forced to relive this tragedy online.”

While the clip of Kirk’s shooting was distinct for its close-up detail, social media users have also been confronted with viral images from numerous other violent events in recent years. Those include the war in Gaza, the stabbing of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska, the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, the mass shooting in Buffalo, the murder of George Floyd and the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Wright, the California mom, said she’s angry that her daughter has to witness the stream of violence. Her one hope is that upsetting images spur some sort of change, she said.

“God, if people could see this happening to children. Like, if people actually saw the footage of children dying like this, maybe something would actually happen,” she said.

Related Content

Why your health insurance may soon cost a lot more

Inside India’s hidden war against one of the world’s oldest insurgencies

Trump was dared to dine in D.C. He played it safe at a chain steakhouse.