While I posted a lengthy statement about Charlie Kirk the day after he was killed (not reproducing it here, but in short: he shouldn't have been killed, but he shouldn't be lionized either), I wanted to dive deeper and try to uncover why there was such a divide in statements that I was personally seeing on my social media feeds. Responses I saw were holding him up as a great Christian family man or someone who wanted nothing more than to talk with people he disagreed with. This shocked me, to say the least, since that is never how I saw Charlie Kirk.
I read a post on Bluesky where someone stated that he had been "coded and sold as a young Mr. Rogers to a very receptive audience" (K.B. Spangler post ). Looking at the post she was referencing, it told the story of two people discussing Kirk and neither having the full picture of the man due to how algorithms work on social media. That made a ton of sense to me. As a software engineer, my career is built on algorithms and, while I'm excited that people have become familiar with the term in a colloquial sense, I really wish it wasn't through the evils of social media algorithms.
(If you do not know what an algorithm is think of something like GPS navigation directions: a series of step by step instructions with decision points. In half a mile, turn left. Continue for 3 miles. If there is traffic, then the algorithm recalculates and determines the new route. Ultimately, if you follow the algorithm, you end up at your destination. In the case of social media algorithms, they follow directions to select the next bit of content they'll display to you.)
The problem with social media feed algorithms is that all are designed with a single end goal in mind: to maximize a company's revenue.
Let's look at YouTube first. How can YouTube maximize revenue from me as a user? They need to keep me on YouTube and keep me watching videos so they can serve me more ads. What videos am I likely to watch? Like most people, I'm not on YouTube looking to challenge my world view or to get angry, so I'm more likely to stay on YouTube if they serve up what I like. Normally, I'm looking at basketball highlights, stand-up comedy, or the late night show highlights from the night before. Occasionally, I'll go in search of a video on how something works or a lecture on a topic I want to learn about. But that's what YouTube's algorithm is designed to maximize. When it wants to "broaden" my horizons to get me to stay longer, it will serve up content adjacent to things I like. "Hey Will, you looked up a video that told you where a secret location was in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 the other day, what about this video titled 'Skateboarding with Tony Hawk is Unbelievable' by Spencer Barton? Wanna watch? Good, here's another ad first."
In contrast, there is Facebook. Facebook needs to maximize reactions to content, but whether those reactions are positive or negative isn't the most important thing. The longer Facebook keeps you reacting to content and scrolling through their feed, the more ads they can show you, and the more money they can make. This incentivizes Facebook to show you more extreme content on either side: things you really love to see and things you really hate to see. The stronger your feelings, the more likely you are to add a like, add an angry face, or click a link and, ultimately, keep scrolling and see more ads. You may get pissed off, but as long as Zuck can continue to build out his compound in Palo Alto, he doesn't give a shit.
Getting back to Charlie Kirk, I decided to look up some videos of him using the search queries "Charlie Kirk Christian" and "Charlie Kirk motivational" and the limiter "before:2025-09-10" to ensure I wasn't getting any montage videos made after his death.
In a video called "The NFL Is Back, Just in Time to Ruin My Week," the first 30 seconds is an ad for The Voice of the Martyrs, an international Christian nonprofit organization that focuses on supporting persecuted Christians around the world. The video begins in earnest with Kirk talking about the Chicago Bears like a normal NFL fan: highlighting why they lost and criticizing their coaching. He mentions they are moving to Arlington Heights, then smoothly transitions into criticizing Mayor Johnson of Chicago for being "so bad, that he has successfully driven the Bears out of Chicago." He later says Chicago is a "once great city that is so in need of a leader." He finishes off the video by saying "Caleb Williams, I tell you what...that guy, with his black nails? He's gonna wear a tutu to the next game."
Overall, I watched just over 6 minutes of Charlie Kirk talking and sounding like a normal human. Did he work in unfair criticism of Mayor Johnson? Maybe, considering that Johnson supported a $4.7 billion dollar plan to keep the Bears in Chicago and the real resistance came from the state level. Also, the joke about Caleb Williams seemed a bit homophobic. However, most of that video was just a guy talking about football and made him seem pretty normal.
Another video, titled "Charlie Kirk Debates Atheist on God's Existence," starts off with a 40 second long Patriot Mobile ad. Unexpectedly, I found myself watching a guy wearing a MAGA hat who "turned conservative in 2016 with Trump's first run" talking about being an atheist, asking how they can get more people from other faiths to the conservative movement, and continuing on until Kirk interrupts him after about a minute and starts going through the arguments for God's existence. There's a bit of back and forth, but it remains calm and respectful throughout. Ultimately, the atheist doesn't find any of the arguments compelling, saying that he's skeptical that we're the only life anywhere in the universe and that it seems more likely that we're not, we just haven't contacted other life yet. Kirk starts going through trying to convince him with the human ability to heal over time, the capacity for reason, asks him if we only have five senses, asks him what happens when we die, and then ends on "do you hope you're wrong" when the atheist says nothing happens. When the atheist replies "not really," Kirk pivots to a commentary on "how dark that is, how sad that is" and how Christians do hope for something "higher and better." Calm, respectful, and polite are three words I never would have associated with Charlie Kirk from the clips I had seen of him prior to that, but those adjectives do describe the interactions in that "debate."
The final video I watched was "Young Men: Charlie Kirk Just Gave You a Wake-Up Call 📢" from the Turning Point USA channel. It was a one minute and 20 second clip where Kirk urges men to be confident and assertive in their goals and desire to lead a family when speaking with women and to "end up purposeful." I had also never seen Kirk give any sort of motivational speech like this before.
So, in a little under 20 minutes, I had seen a completely different Charlie Kirk than I had ever seen before. And that's the problem that most people didn't pick up on.
Because a person that public, famous, known to the President, and with his own media empire is bound to be seen in different ways by different people, but this wasn't just differing perspectives. You had people on the conservative end of the spectrum swearing he was a good Christian, a family man, and one of the best of us humans. People on the left weren't mourning his death because of the racist, anti-LGBTQ+, antisemitic lies that Kirk had spread. Flags were lowered to half mast, he's posthumously getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and there is going to be a day of remembrance on October 14th for him and we are so divided that we can't even seem to agree on anything but the man's name. Most alarming: a man was murdered and, rather than focusing on that fact, both sides just rushed to blame the other and to ensure they weren't at fault.
Information silos, echo chambers, and social media algorithms have led us to this point. I cannot have a reasonable conversation with some people on the right anymore for the simple reason that we don't agree on facts or reality at this point and, without a shared reality, what is there to discuss? In the attempts I've made, we end up squabbling over whether or not something is true before we even get to more advanced interpretations or downstream effects. We have a long list of problems to solve in this country and the odds of even discussing them reasonably look a lot more grim now than they ever have before.
And you may be thinking "yeah, Will, obviously social media algorithms are bad, but we can't actually do anything about them." That's not entirely true. There are some social media sites like Mastodon and BlueSky where algorithms are not the primary focus. Mastodon shows you only posts made by people you follow. You can even opt out of their reposts if you want. BlueSky has a "Discovery" feed that follows some sort of algorithm, but the main feed when you open up the app is "Following" and you can switch between different topic feeds or even create your own. These can be problematic in their own right: based on what we just discussed, it is entirely possible to only follow people or topics you agree with and create your own echo chamber. However, that seems less problematic than a company creating an echo chamber for you based on their revenue. Alternative frontends also exist for sites like YouTube and Twitter. FreeTube is an ad-free, algorithm free experience for YouTube that allows you to subscribe to channels and watch videos without pre or mid-video ads. They are constantly in an API battle with YouTube, so it breaks occasionally, which can be annoying, but when it works, it's great. Nitter is an alternative frontend for Twitter if you want to look up a user on there.
If you still need to use social media, it's cliche, but please do so responsibly. Don't get your news from it, don't trust anything posted on it to be factual no matter who posts it, and get two reliable sources for any story before you propagate it to your followers. Be aware of your own biases and how you could potentially be manipulated and it makes it less likely to happen. And finally, perhaps the biggest social media related takeaway from the murder of Charlie Kirk: not everything needs a post, not every post needs to be immediate, and it's okay (probably best) if you take some space before you respond to something traumatic.