Psyops

Today a memorial service is being held in Arizona for free speech activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk was assassinated on September 10th while speaking on a college campus. Authorities say suspect Tyler Robinson may have been radicalized online, aided and abetted by an extended network of people who may have known about his plans. He’s not the only accused killer with such ties. Lisa Fletcher has more.

In the week since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, new details about the brazen crime have come into focus. The accused shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, now charged with multiple crimes, including aggravated murder. Prosecutors say they will ask for the ultimate punishment.

Jeffrey Gray: Also, following the press conference, I am filing a notice of intent to seek the death penalty.

On Capitol Hill this past week, FBI Director Kash Patel revealed investigators are looking at more than twenty people who participated in an online chat with the alleged shooter.

Sen. Josh Hawley: I see the Discord chat could have had as many as twenty users. It sounds like you’re trying to run down all of that to see if that’s accurate, who else may have been on that thread, what they may have known. Is that fair to say?

Patel: It’s a lot more than that. We’re running them all down.

Sen. Hawley: It’s a lot more than 20?

Patel: Yes, sir.

Senators pressing for answers about what role social media, outside groups, and their money could have played.

Sen. Ted Cruz: The violence we are seeing is not purely organic; there is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension, that is spreading violence.

To better understand the possible online connections, we sat down earlier this week with two experts:

Sam Havelock, a former Navy SEAL team commander and publisher of the SOFX Report, which covers global conflicts, and Jen Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland and expert on AI, radicalization, and extremism on social media.

Jen Golbeck: There's a question of what role politics played in the assassination at all. From what we see so far with very little information, it seems like this is more something from these kind of deep nihilistic social media spaces and something that was very explicit.

Sam Havelock: We know that the algorithm rhythms tend to feed the most vocal, narcissistic, and deeply flawed people on either end of the bell curve. So, your average American is seeing mountains of fighting content that they think that they're at the brink of a civil war, when the vast majority of the middle of the bell curve is like, this is crazy, I know it's crazy, and I'm not that, but this is sure interesting to watch.

The avalanche of social media posts relating to Kirk’s assassination, noted by Republican senator Eric Schmitt.

Sen. Eric Schmitt: We’ve all seen the flood of posts on social media over the past week, not just a fringe, but thousands upon thousands of people gleefully celebrating a father of two young children getting gunned down in broad daylight.

But how many of those inflammatory posts are real?

Golbeck: What we can see is that there was this response from the right to people celebrating Charlie Kirk's killing, understandably reacting against that. But then we saw all of these accounts that were very clearly bots repeating the same lines over and over. You could search for the same phrases, and it would come up from dozens of small accounts that suggest state actors running these bot farms that are trying to sow division in the American public.

Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, believes America’s rivals are actively sowing discord and hate.

Gov. Spencer Cox: We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world, that are trying to instill misinformation and encourage violence. I would encourage you to ignore those, to turn off those streams.

Lisa: We're talking about foreign actors, and we're talking about radicalization.

Havelock: Within the two contexts of let's say, let's call it one context being Chinese mal-influence, and then the other context being Russian mal-influence actors. The specific aims are a bit different, I think would tend to agree. The Chinese construct is more about unwinding key themes and messages that the United States likes to propagate about China, about trying to influence the population at scale, that it's less of a threat per se, whereas it's the Russian construct is less elegant. Put it that way.

Golbeck: But incredibly effective, right?

Havelock: Yeah, absolutely.

Golbeck: Because the Russians, they don't care if they're radicalizing us to the right or to the left or to some apolitical space. We can do that ourselves, and they're really good at pushing us. And that's been really effective over the last 10 years, where I've seen people move further out and pick up on these themes that we see the Russian bots pushing, of calling for retribution or extreme anger against the other side.

For Havelock, it’s what we as Americans are doing to ourselves that’s the most immediate concern.

Havelock: When you look at the economic model of social media companies that are masquerading around as journalists, and they are not, and they are accelerating the distribution of content - that in any other context would have been morally reprehensible - never seen in the construct of American journalism, the death of a human published at scale over and over and over to masses of the population. We've not seen that. Do you mean to tell me that big tech companies in Silicon Valley can't stop that content from propagating? They absolutely can.

Sharyl (on camera): Well, part of the problem, some would say, is a topic you've covered and they mentioned in the hearing, section 230, immunity from lawsuits the social media companies have.

Lisa (on camera): Exactly. It's part of what's called the Communications Decency Act. And it's a little provision that protects these companies from liability for what people post on their sites. Kash Patel said it is wildly out of control and he would like to do away with Section 230.