Charlie Kirk’s assassination earlier this month spurred rare calls from the right for more content moderation measures on social media.
At least two Republican lawmakers backed calls for social media platforms to remove graphic videos of the shooting, another called for lifetime bans for users who celebrated Kirk’s death, while a senior Trump administration official suggested an end to anonymous accounts.
According to Raqib Hameed Naik, executive director of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, Kirk’s assassination exposed gaps in moderation that allow “harmful content to proliferate unchecked.”
“Once such content begins to spread, moderation systems, which are already too slow and inconsistent, are rarely able to contain it,” he added.
Social media platforms have either removed the graphic videos of Kirk’s shooting or made them harder to access. That the videos were able to go viral at all still concerns researchers such as Naik and Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at University of California, Los Angeles.