Videos of Charlie Kirk’s Shooting Spread Rapidly on Social Media

Within minutes of the shooting of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at a rally at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, videos of the killing appeared on X.

By the time Mr. Kirk was pronounced dead two hours later, the videos — posted by people at the rally — had more than 11 million views on the social media platform. The graphic footage, which showed Mr. Kirk’s neck wound in high resolution, had also spread to Instagram, Threads, YouTube and Telegram, where they amassed millions of views and were repackaged with graphics and old footage of Mr. Kirk.

The proliferation of the footage continued a grisly pattern. Time and again, graphic content of shootings — including the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue and the 2019 shootings at two New Zealand mosques — has immediately been disseminated across the internet, underscoring not only the lack of guardrails against violent material but how such videos have become fixtures online.