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Graphic Videos Of The Deadly Shooting Of Charlie Kirk Quickly Spread

Bonisiwe Shabane
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graphic videos of the deadly shooting of charlie kirk quickly spread

Copyright ©2025 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. Charlie Kirk was shot in the jugular during an event, and graphic video footage of the incident has emerged, showing the chaotic scene. Authorities have a suspect in custody, and Kirk was rushed to the hospital, though his current condition is not yet confirmed. Viewer Discretion Advised: This video contains graphic content, including a shooting and visible blood. Please watch with caution.

Once you see the videos, you can't unsee them. Conservative political speaker Charlie Kirk was shot dead on a college campus Wednesday, Sept. 10. Late last month, Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska was fatally stabbed on a train in North Carolina. Graphic videos of both atrocities spread quickly and widely online this week, appearing in people's social media feeds, often with little-to-no warning. Getting confronted with gruesome, horrific imagery has, unfortunately, become an assumed risk when logging onto social media.

Mental health and media experts, however, say the proliferation of violent videos online can have a deeply negative impact on our psyches − and that you don't have to view material like this in... "I don't think we have a responsibility to witness every instance of violence that happens," therapist Erik Anderson previously told USA TODAY. "People kind of need to be responsible for understanding what's going to trigger them and what they're able to tolerate." Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA, was fatally shot during an event at Utah Valley University in what the governor described as a "political assassination." Livestream video of the event showed crowds of... Earlier this week, transit officials in North Carolina released a graphic video showing the fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Zarutska on a light rail train. Just minutes after Charlie Kirk was shot at an event at Utah Valley University last week, videos capturing the moment the bullet struck him began appearing online.

They quickly racked up millions of views. "We are not wired as human beings, biologically, historically — we have not evolved in a way that we are capable of processing those types of violent imagery," Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said at a recent press conference. "This is not good for us. It is not good to consume." For many online, seeing the videos of Kirk's shooting wasn't a choice.

The event in Utah was being livestreamed, and thousands of people in the audience had smartphones. Even without searching them out, people were confronted with the graphic footage in their social media feeds — sometimes playing automatically. "Social media and violent imagery often go together these days," said Emerson Brooking, director of strategy and a senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. "This took place where everyone could see it and it was intended that everyone would see it." Images of graphic violence have long circulated online, from propaganda videos made by ISIS showing the executions of hostages to first-person footage posted by mass shooters to scenes of war. Moments after conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot, videos of his assassination reached millions.

This is just one example of the alarming spread of violent content on social media. New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel recently published a piece on this topic. Frenkel joins the show to discuss the phenomenon and the failure of social media companies to regulate the issue. HARI SREENIVASAN:a Bianna, thanks. Sheera Frenkel, thanks so much for joining us. Just last week within moments of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we saw videos of that instantly gain so many views on different social media platforms.

And I guess the first question, is why? SHEERA FRENKEL: We see this almost every time that there’s a violent incident caught on camera, people want to know what happened, and there’s a kind of a morbid fascination to see it for... If the incident happened in public, if there was a moment of violence that happened in public, you can be sure these days that someone was recording. And those videos seem to take less and less time to find their way to social media. SREENIVASAN: You know, this people opened up their phone and opened and clicked on an app, and then it was just like — there wasn’t even a choice. It was just there, in their face, it was automatically playing.

FRENKEL: I, I think what was so important about what you just said was the word choice. People had to choose to watch this sort of content, even, you know, 15, 20 years ago. You had to navigate to it. You had to select — you had to make a decision to say, I want to watch something violent and click your way through to that, even in the earliest days of the internet. Graphic videos of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination continued to spread across social media platforms Thursday, with many companies choosing to put the video behind content warnings rather than taking it down entirely. On YouTube and Meta platforms, videos that showed the moment Kirk was hit by the bullet required users to acknowledge that they were willing to see sensitive content.

On other platforms, including X and TikTok, many of the videos remained easily accessible without any warning. The spread of videos depicting violent incidents, like shootings, has been a perennial issue for social media platforms, complicated in recent years by a shift away from aggressive, human-based moderation. Most companies still have policies either banning or limiting the spread of gory videos. And while the backlash against moderation has generally been led by conservatives, some Republicans have called for action over the video of Kirk’s killing. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said Wednesday that she hoped the video was removed from social media platforms, and Rep.

Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., called on X CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok to take down videos of the shooting. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. Immediately after Charlie Kirk was shot during a college event in Utah, graphic video of what happened was available almost instantly online, from several angles, in slow-motion and real-time speed. Millions of people watched — sometimes whether they wanted to or not — as the videos autoplayed on social media platforms. Video was easy to find on X, on Facebook, on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube — even on President Trump’s Truth Social.

The platforms, generally, said they were removing at least some of the videos if they violated their policies, for instance if the person was glorifying the killing in any way. In other cases, warning screens were applied to caution people they were about to see graphic content. Days after Kirk’s death, videos were still easily found on social media, despite calls to remove them. “It was not immediately obvious whether Instagram, for example, was just failing to remove some of the graphic videos of Charlie Kirk being shot or whether they had made a conscious choice to leave... And the reason that it that was so hard to tell is that, obviously, those videos were circulating really widely,” said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University. Traditional news outlets were careful in their coverage of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination to not show graphic images of the event.

But if people wanted to see graphic evidence of what happened to him, it was easily available online. ▶ Follow live updates on Charlie Kirk’s assassination They were careful with the explicit imagery — as usual. But did it make any difference? Traditional news organizations were cautious in their midafternoon coverage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination Wednesday not to depict the moment he was shot, instead showing video of him tossing a hat to his audience moments... In practical terms, though, it mattered little.

Gory video of the shooting was available almost instantly online, from several angles, in slow-motion and real-time speed. Millions of people watched. Political commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event on a college campus in Utah on Wednesday. Kirk was at Utah Valley University on Wednesday as part of Turning Point USA's American Comeback Tour, on college campuses across the U.S. LiveNOW’s Mike Pache is speaking to Michael Maiorano who attended the Charlie Kirk event earlier today. Graphic video circulating on X shows the moments Charlie Kirk was shot during an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday.

He died later after being taken to the hospital. Kirk, 31, was speaking at the university for his "America Comeback Tour," according to the co-founder of Turning Point USA’s X account. The video posted to social media shows Kirk on stage, sitting in a chair, talking into a microphone while sitting under a white tent emblazoned with the slogans "The American Comeback" and "Prove Me... A single gunshot was heard and Kirk's head thrust back as he fell. People started screaming and running away, the video shows.

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