Charlie Kirk Assassination Sparks Social Media Crackdown

How buying a T-shirt led to government monitoring

T-Shirt worn by alleged gunman

Five hours after Charlie Kirk was shot this week, an Atlanta man got a phone call from an Illinois police officer asking about a photo he shared with a couple of close friends on a private Discord chat. The Atlanta man, who asked not to be identified, says the post was merely a confirmation that he had purchased the same T-shirt that the accused killer wore (from an Illinois-based online shop).

The police officer told him that he was following up on an active FBI investigation of Kirk’s assassination, and warned that due to the political climate, posting such a photo was ill advised. The Atlanta man was confused and disturbed, he told me, that the police learned so quickly of his purchase and also knew of his private Discord post.

Discord has made clear that there’s no evidence that the alleged shooter used its platform to plan or communicate anything about the attack. Despite this, pundits and politicians across the political spectrum this weekend created an orgy of fearmongering about Discord and other social media platforms, as well as the Internet in general.

Yesterday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox called the Internet a “cancer”; today he added that “cancer probably isn’t a strong enough word,” likening social media to the equivalent of “fentanyl” in destroying young minds and taking lives:

We have seen an escalation in violence that has been happening across the country. … I don't think a governor, I don't think a president, and I don't think anyone can change the trajectory of this. It truly is about every single one of us.

And I can't emphasize enough the damage that social media and the Internet is doing to all of us. Those dopamine hits. These companies, trillion dollar market caps and the most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to the outrage which is the same type of dopamine, the same chemical that you get from taking fentanyl and get us addicted to outrage and getting us to hate each other.

I've seen it in real time since the death of Charlie Kirk. I've seen it in every corner of our society. The conflict entrepreneurs are taking advantage of us and we are losing our agency, and we have to take that back. We have to turn it off, and do you have to give it back to the community and caring about our neighbors and bettering ourselves, exercising, sleeping and all of these things that this thing takes away from us.

Social media has become a punching bag in the wake of violent incidents like these. But Governor Cox’s condemnation of social media does not, somehow, apply to his ongoing use of accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X / Twitter. He means “bad” social media like Discord.

In other words, he wants people to see social media in national security terms, a battle between that which is innocent and that which is dangerous — plainly between sanctioned and unsanctioned speech.

On Friday, FBI Director Kash Patel gave a sense of the massive scale of the national security machine’s response. “Last night, we had a total of approximately … 7,000 leads,” Patel said. “As of this morning, thanks to your great work, we have over 11,000 leads that were called in to the FBI, and we are running out every single lead that we can.” (This represents the most tips received by the FBI since the Boston Marathon bombing, as Governor Cox has pointed out.)

Patel is in effect saying that anything, even just the purchase of a T-shirt, is a lead.

It makes sense that investigators might be interested in discovering an accomplice or a conspiracy. But when an investigation jumps from Utah to Illinois to Atlanta, it also makes sense to ask the authorities what exactly they are investigating.

Social media companies are generally forbidden by law from divulging users’ private communications to the government without a traditional legal process (e.g., court order). But there’s an exception: in perceived emergencies, social media platforms can proactively and “voluntarily” hand over private messages in response to what’s called an “emergency disclosure request” (EDR).

Discord, I am told, did not respond to any EDR here; but when I asked them directly if they’d provided law enforcement with information to traditional legal process, they declined to respond on-record.

As the Atlanta man recounted to me (and corroborated with screenshots), on the afternoon of September 11, he purchased the shirt off eBay from a seller based in Naperville, Illinois, before posting his ironic find in a private Discord chat with several close friends of his. On the following evening, a day after alleged suspect Tyler Robinson was apprehended, he received three calls from the police.

“He explains he is with the Naperville Police Department on behalf of an ongoing FBI investigation,” the Atlanta man told me, “that I committed no crimes and am in no trouble, but he needs to know why I sent a picture of the ‘terrorist,’ which I had to correct him on.”

The police officer did not seem to realize that the Atlanta man hadn’t posted a photo of the shooter, just another T-shirt with the same design. But the cop did know he’d sent the image to the private chat. Given that the call came from the same city as the eBay seller, it wasn’t clear how that police had access to his private Discord chat.

The FBI, or the intelligence community, evidently is monitoring Discord private messaging, even from people who have broken no law.

Though unfamiliar and thus scary to types like Governor Cox, Discord is an extremely popular American chat app with over 200 million users. Far from the niche cesspool of radicalism it’s been portrayed as, the app is basically just WhatsApp for gamers — a group that may once have been a subculture but is completely mainstream today.

What its users may not know is that Discord responds to about two emergency disclosure requests daily from law enforcement “when it has a good faith belief that an emergency involving an imminent risk of death or serious bodily injury requires disclosure of information without delay.”

As Discord told Congress, it responds to emergency requests in under an hour on average. (One Discord employee says the process is getting even faster.) In such cases, Discord does not notify users that its communications have been handed over. The man in Atlanta only knew about the authorities having access to his Discord communications because the cop who called him let it slip.

In the days and weeks ahead, we will see plenty of statements like Cox’s, and we will see plenty of pundits and politicians demanding that something be done about social media: that we need to watch it more closely, that we need to collect more, and that we need to pressure bad companies and users. But it appears that more is already being done; behind the veil of secrecy.

— Edited by William M. Arkin