The Algorithm's Role in the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Big Tech’s obsession with engagement and growth has created the most effective radicalization tool ever devised,.

Here is the hard truth most people are afraid to say out loud: the assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025 did not occur in isolation, nor was it simply the result of personal grievance or random violence. It took place within a digital environment engineered by design to divide, provoke, and manipulate human behavior for profit. Big Tech’s obsession with engagement and growth has created the most effective radicalization tool ever devised, wrapped in the language of community and personalized experience. Behind every feed is an algorithm that learns what enrages you, what confirms your biases, and what drives you deeper into isolation from anything resembling truth or common ground.

Authorities claim that Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old accused of the murder, had grown increasingly hostile toward Kirk, reportedly stating that he “had enough of (Kirk’s) hatred.” After the shooting, he confessed in a Discord chat, an admission that points to an entire psychological buildup driven not by in-person confrontation, but by years of curated content and affirmation from within a digital silo that reinforced his growing disdain for anyone outside that worldview. This wasn’t an act birthed from one bad post or one heated exchange... it was the end result of years of algorithmic engineering funneling a young man into a moral vacuum where hatred festered unchecked and unchallenged.

This is the very environment these platforms were built to sustain. The algorithms running Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X are not passive suggestion engines. They are powerful, constantly adapting systems that predict what kind of content you are most likely to engage with and then feed it to you at scale, over and over, with increasing intensity. The Facebook algorithm overhaul in 2018 prioritized “meaningful social interactions,” which in practice meant emotionally charged, divisive content. Facebook’s own researchers warned that these changes were “exploiting the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” but the leadership refused to act when those changes led to increased engagement. Why? Because anger keeps users hooked longer than reason.