- 2 months ago
Conspiracy theories exploded online in the hours and days after Charlie Kirk’s murder. WIRED reporter David Gilbert hosts a discussion Nina Jankowics, author of “How To Lose The Information War” and Boston University Professor Joan Donovan to investigate why conspiracy theories around Kirk’s death are so potent, what they have in common with past assassination conspiracies, and how they spread so rapidly. This is WIRED: Disinfonation.
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00:00Conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk exploded online in the hours and
00:05days after his death. A month later they still persist. In this video we'll unpack why they are
00:11so potent, uncover what they have in common with past assassination conspiracies and expose the
00:17mechanics of how they go viral. I'm David Gilbert. I write about online extremism and the crisis of
00:23truth for Wired. Welcome to Disinfo Nation, the Charlie Kirk assassination conspiracies. Today I'm
00:30speaking with two experts on the spread of false narratives, both our authors and researchers.
00:36Joan, Nina, thank you for joining us today. To get us started, can I just ask over the last couple of
00:42weeks, what has been the most out there conspiracy that you have seen around the Charlie Kirk
00:48assassination? One of the ones that I've seen that I think is kind of interesting and actually coming
00:53more from the left is that Charlie Kirk and his family are a psyop, that they aren't actually a
00:57real family and that they may be involved with the Freemasons as well. Yeah, the one that I was
01:03really intrigued by had to do with that he wasn't even there. He was being projected as a hologram and
01:09if he had been there he may have ended up being trap doored through some kind of underground tunnel.
01:16I was actually at a conspiracy conference in Ireland in real life a couple of weeks ago. They had a tarot
01:22reader from Canada there and she did a tarot reading and the first question she was asked
01:26by someone in the audience from Ireland was was Charlie Kirk really dead? And so she went and
01:32pulled her cards and it turns out that he's not dead and that in fact wasn't Charlie Kirk in the
01:38university being shot but someone else. I think conspiracies are often trying to give a balm to
01:43people during confusing events. They're a way for people to make sense of what's going on and so it
01:48makes sense that folks would turn to tarot or turn to elaborate holograms to try to process what was
01:54going on. Yeah and I think we've seen this before. Tupac, Biggie, Elvis, Charlie Kirk, this idea that the
02:00people haven't really died, you can't believe your eyes in this case, but also that you can't believe
02:06government, you can't believe anything that you see or read, which is where you start to see the
02:12repetitive types of conspiracy theories come in. Not just Freemasons, which is a well-known trope,
02:17but also that Israel had something to do with it or this was a military psyop from inside the
02:23government in some way to try to produce a martyr. And we've literally seen President Trump and others
02:29calling Charlie Kirk a martyr. He's a martyr now for American freedom. So are there examples,
02:36do you think, from the past where we can see clearly that conspiracies from decades centuries
02:42ago can also be applied to what's happening today? So famously with the JFK assassination,
02:47there was always this claim of a second shooter or the shot itself was something that never could
02:53have been made. And immediately after Kirk's assassination, you saw people sneaking back onto
02:59the campus of this university late at night and filming the area and trying to themselves see if
03:06they could see if that shot could be made from the top of the building to where Kirk was sitting.
03:12And so this notion of the impossible shot or the magic bullet is a tale that we've been through before.
03:18That's an interesting point. And with JFK, there was the controversial theory that a second shot came
03:23from the grassy knoll. And similarly, videos now claim that Charlie Kirk would have been shot from a
03:28nearby window or balcony. This would 100% line up with the actual shot from the backside of Charlie.
03:35Which is totally improbable. And of course, Tyler Robinson and Lee Harvey Oswald have both been
03:39labeled as patsies or scapegoats. Well, even when we talk about Charlie Kirk's assassination
03:45potentially being a hologram, right? That's just a version of a false flag conspiracy theory,
03:52which we've seen with many different assassination attempts from JFK to even the assassination attempt
03:58against President Trump. During the 2024 election, we had prominent voices on the left suggesting that
04:03this might be a false flag to bolster his election chances. There's a lot of claims that perhaps the
04:09deep state or others within the actual MAGA sphere had used Charlie Kirk as a sacrifice and that it was to
04:19kick off this idea that Antifa and the radical left are the real perpetrators of mass violence. And we've seen
04:27similar things like this happen in the past, particularly when Lincoln was assassinated by
04:33John Wilkes Booth. There was a lapse of security that allowed that to happen. There was also claims
04:38that Booth had actually escaped and that the person that was caught was actually a cadet that looked
04:44like Booth and he was quickly executed. Right. And one popular conspiracy theory at the time accused
04:51elements within Lincoln's own government, specifically the radical Republicans like Edwin Stanton,
04:57of somehow aiding Booth to remove a conciliatory Lincoln in order to impose harsher reconstruction
05:02punishments on the South. That to me feels like a 19th century version of a deep state conspiracy.
05:08There's also, of course, conspiracies around the end of the Romanov dynasty in Russia. People still
05:14believe today that Princess Anastasia got out somehow. And there have been investigations into
05:19different people who claim their Anastasia and their ears and their DNA on the Freemasons. There's a huge
05:25community online that is now claiming that Erica Kirk is secretly a Freemason and she didn't give
05:30birth to her children because there have never been any pictures of her pregnant or she doesn't show
05:35her children's faces. Well, as somebody who's received online harassment, I can understand why
05:39she doesn't show her children's faces. What Nina's saying is very true. One actual disinformation story
05:45that circulated very quickly after Kirk's murder was that his wife and children were there and they
05:51weren't. I actually fell for that one. Yeah, the story that his daughter was running towards him
05:57really tugs on the heartstrings. It's hard to believe someone would make up that kind of detail.
06:02Let's talk about X a little bit because that's where a lot of these conspiracies begin. I was
06:06looking back to September 10th when this happened and I was trying to find when these conspiracies
06:11started and I found a post I think less than an hour after Kirk had been officially declared dead,
06:17blaming Israel for his death. And it didn't get much engagement. Loads of these posts were posted,
06:22but not much engagement. Within hours though, they began to go viral. Can I ask you, how does something
06:29like that go viral? How does it get to the point or break containment from X to the point where the
06:34Israeli prime minister has to post a video online denying that Israel had anything to do with the
06:40shooting? How does that happen? So in this case, with pushing this conspiracy theory that Israel was
06:47involved, you had a specific actor like Candace Owens, who was close to Charlie Kirk. It's someone
06:52that is familiar to the Turning Point USA crowd, someone that is, quote unquote, trusted within those
06:59circles. And she really came out in full force to make these associations. The very day before Charlie
07:06Kirk died, he expressed that he thought he was going to be killed. What she's been able to establish
07:13has been very controversial. But at the same time, she's starting to prove it out that there was this
07:19fissure with Charlie Kirk and Israeli donors where she had received a text message. And a lot of people
07:25denied the existence of these text messages until she published them. She claims to have more. But when you
07:32think about the actors behind this is that you need some kind of protagonist to get the ball rolling.
07:37And then it moves from X over to YouTube, where she's primarily doing her nightly show. Then it's
07:44over on her Instagram. And then it's back to X. And then people start discussing her content. And then
07:50people share her content. And then algorithmically, you start to see it slowly get tied together so that
07:56when you look up Charlie Kirk, you end up with what's popular at the time, which is Candace Owens's
08:03explanation for who else might have been involved. They said that there's probably somebody else
08:09involved. That sounds about right. So one of the things that comes out with these Candace Owens
08:14tweets about Charlie Kirk's texts to her is these kind of underlying anti-Semitic tropes that Jewish people
08:22run politics, that they have a lot of money. And even Kirk himself says that Jewish donors play into
08:27all the stereotypes. So she's releasing these things selectively. And I think it's important
08:32to note that she is profiting from this. It is driving up ad revenue. And the more salacious stuff
08:39that she shares, if she keeps the drip, drip, drip of these text messages going, I mean, frankly,
08:44she's profiting from her friend's death. I'm going to throw it to some sponsors.
08:49And the platforms are profiting as well. Right now you can get 20% off your first order.
08:53One of the things that people jumped on in the wake of his death were these kind of
09:00odysseys, as people put them. For example, George Zinn, the 71-year-old man who was first arrested
09:05because he told people that he was the shooter. It turns out he wasn't. He had nothing to do with it.
09:09People have focused on the text messages that were in the affidavit that the police produced
09:15that just don't look natural. The text messages between the suspected shooter and his partner,
09:20they just don't read as natural. There was a man who looked as if he was giving hand signals,
09:25being pretty close to Charlie Kirk. Is that a key component to conspiracy theories generally,
09:30that there is a nugget of truth in there that something did happen that is real,
09:34but people just take it in completely the wrong direction?
09:37That's actually not only a nugget of conspiracy theories. That's a nugget of the best and most
09:42successful disinformation. It's not stuff that's just made up whole cloth. It is
09:47things that happen in real life, often fueled by real people's authentic grievances,
09:52that are then taken out of context, amplified, or weaponized in some way.
09:57One of the things that these conspiracy theories thrive on is this drive to rationalize things that
10:04are random. So you show this little clip of someone doing something like this, and you say,
10:09oh, this is instantly some kind of signal. And maybe it is. Maybe it's the all clear signal,
10:14because you are a bodyguard and you're communicating to another bodyguard. I think one of the really
10:19interesting ones that happened in the 30 seconds after the shot rang out is that someone jumped up
10:26and grabbed the camera from behind Kirk and pulled that down. And I think it was obviously to try to stop
10:33the live stream and to make sure that if there was, God forbid, some kind of coordinated terror attack,
10:39you don't want them to be able to be watching what's happening on the ground while maybe they're
10:44laying in wait somewhere else on campus to shoot at students or whatnot. So there was this moment where
10:49anything anybody was doing was interpreted as somehow trying to collude or hide. But this notion of just
10:57asking questions, there's some recent psychology research that it does create a truth bias for
11:04people. So if you see the same questions being asked across different platforms and by different
11:11people, you start to believe, well, maybe this is true because everybody's asking these questions.
11:17Right. And Joe Rogan in particular is a master of this rhetorical strategy of just asking questions.
11:22Here he is on his podcast, which reaches a huge mainstream audience. You're telling me
11:27that this kid who's not military trained, this guy, first of all, how did he get to the roof?
11:32How come nobody was looking? And so it's not just a rhetorical strategy to,
11:36quote unquote, just ask questions as part of being an online influencer and to drag the story out.
11:43But also it can be a way of slowly persuading people as to what you want them to conclude.
11:51So because people no longer believe what they are hearing from mainstream media,
11:57or even from law enforcement at this point, because trust in these institutions has created in recent
12:03years, that does then leave the way open for other people to take advantage and to post videos showing
12:11things that just didn't really happen. Absolutely. When you raise the specter of just
12:17asking questions, was this camera here? Was he wearing a blood pack? Was he wearing a bulletproof
12:23vest? You're not only potentially driving clout and driving views on these platforms,
12:29but many of these folks are monetizing their videos, right? So if you raise these salacious allegations,
12:35you know that it's playing right into the infrastructure of these algorithms, which rewards
12:41those salacious allegations with more views, more clicks, more engagement, and more ad revenue,
12:47frankly. So there's an MIT study from 2018 that says lies travel further and faster than the truth
12:53on Twitter, especially. Part of this is because it's so lucrative to have a scoop and to be first. And so
13:01we often see photoshops, very weirdly cropped images. We've seen quite a few different deepfakes
13:09of Charlie Kirk's voice, even from beyond the grave. Right. An AI-generated audio clip of Kirk
13:15was played in various services, such as this one. Death is not the end. It's a promotion. Don't
13:21waste one second mourning me. But going back to what you said, Nina, I've even seen a few altered images
13:27that claim that Charlie Kirk was wearing a blood pack, which also seems to have an AI voiceover.
13:32What's protruding out of Charlie's back? But if you compare this image with a real photo taken
13:37by a photographer at the same moment, you can clearly see that this theory is false,
13:42but intentionally false. You see these cheap fakes. People might augment the picture in such a way or
13:48stretch a frame so that it looks disproportionate. And knowing that things that are novel and outrageous
13:55travel at breakneck speed due in part to the infrastructure of the algorithms rewarding
14:01that novelness. It's like we've built an entire algorithmic system on many of these platforms around
14:08the idea that whoever has the most bizarre and outrageous information are going to be the ones that
14:17are circulated the most. And we know the most engaging content online is often the most enraging
14:23content. So you have people searching for answers, people who are shocked and scared and pissed off.
14:28And that is just the perfect fuel for conspiracy theories. When I saw the video, it was horrific
14:35and it really upset me. But there were dozens, hundreds, thousands of posts showing the video.
14:42Tens of millions, hundreds of millions probably viewed us. In fact, by the time Kirk was pronounced
14:47dead two hours later, the videos posted by people at the rally had more than 11 million views.
14:52My colleague at Wired, Lauren Good, pointed out that we are pretty much living in a post-content
14:58moderation world. Dina, thoughts? Certainly with the advent of the paid-for blue check on X,
15:04where your content can be surfaced to more people and you can gain virality, gain amplification,
15:10gain credibility by posting the more inflammatory content that does well on X. I think Musk has opened up
15:18a new industry for folks to engage in harmful and violent rhetoric and in some cases even traffic
15:24in violent videos, right? That's the moment that we're in. I think a really important point from the
15:29point of view of the shooter is that they waited till the live stream was on, right? And this is a really
15:36important and salient point, which is that they wanted to spread the trauma. It wasn't necessarily about
15:42just killing Kirk. It was about doing it in front of an audience. It was about doing it in a way that
15:48would be mediated and distributed. One thing that I think is important to dig deeper on is the way that
15:56these violent videos are often remixed or even people attempt to evade content moderation by flipping,
16:04inverting kind of the image, changing a filter on it. All of that generates what's called a different
16:10hash. So it makes it more difficult for the platforms to identify and remove these videos.
16:15And let's be clear, posting a video of a murder is not speech, right? This goes against most of the
16:21platforms' terms of service. That's an interesting point. The platforms have stepped back in recent
16:26years. For example, TikTok recently announced it will lay off hundreds of human content moderators
16:31in favor of increased AI-enabled content moderation. Does that play an important role in the fact that there
16:38is now zero friction effectively for anyone who wants to spread not only those horrible videos
16:44that you're referencing, but also any sort of disinformation that they may choose to post online?
16:50Yeah. And I think it's important to put out there that the same people whose job it would be to
16:55regulate these companies in this industry are the ones who are also benefiting from the spread of this
17:01disinformation. Musk and the platform executives know this is how their platforms work, right? And
17:07with Elon Musk in particular, you have something really peculiar going on where not only is this guy
17:14profiting from disinformation and from conspiracy theories, he himself is adding fuel to the fire.
17:19And I think that's totally intentional. We know that Elon wants X to be the place where news happens and
17:25news breaks. So if in the moments after the shooting, he's able to say, well, it was them, the left did it,
17:31the violent left, that really adds to people flocking to his platform, using it, commenting there,
17:38and it adds to the usage metrics for them, which I think all of these platform executives have in mind.
17:44But for Musk, it's particularly insidious given his own usage of his platform and his recognition of how
17:50it works. So on that point, we saw a lot of people questioning why the video of his actual debt was
17:55posted online so much. What's the driving force? You've mentioned money. Is there other forces there
18:02to make people want to post about this so much that their first instinct is I need to go on TikTok or I
18:09need to go on Instagram or X and give my opinion to the world? Well, even the nation's top law enforcement
18:16official felt the need to post through it with Kash Patel. A lot of the commentary in the days after
18:21the assassination, when they still hadn't found the shooter, was perhaps we shouldn't have online
18:26influencers leading law enforcement. But I really do think it's important to note what a cash cow this
18:31is for so many conspiracy theorists online. The idea that Charlie Kirk is a psyop, I found that through
18:37the Substack algorithm. That was fed to me by somebody who claims that they're just doing research.
18:43This person has over 78,000 subscribers on Substack and that's all monetized. And the more that they
18:49push this information out, the more that they're driving subscriptions, the more that they can continue
18:54to cash in on these horrible events. I think also, you know, when we get down to it, images like this,
19:01which are something that gets massively distributed, you get called in as a user and as a witness into
19:09action. You are now part of the manhunt. This is what made QAnon so powerful. Every day you could be
19:17part of the analysis and you could be making videos like this and like circling this little wisp of
19:24whatever is going by here. But what's important here is that you become a detective. I think one of
19:30the things that we really misunderstand about the media ecosystem, especially around the right,
19:35is that if you are a right winger, one of the most important things you can do as a political
19:42participant in the world is share right wing media contents. You are not the audience, you are the
19:48distribution system. Right wing media share each other's information and articles. You would just
19:54never see the New York Times sharing the Washington Post. So mainstream media has a different business
20:01model than right wing media where these kind of narratives tend to thrive. Is there specific
20:07phrases or red flags that people should be wary of and not look at that stuff and look maybe at
20:12more fact checked stuff? For me, when I hear words like 100% incontrovertible proof, that's an immediate
20:18red flag. One of the things that I think is important to recognize is that all of us are human. All of us
20:24make mistakes. So anybody who is claiming definitive knowledge in a breaking news situation is probably
20:32full of shit. Until you see something corroborated on multiple sources from multiple people of different
20:38backgrounds and political viewpoints, I wouldn't trust it. We have to be much more astute news consumers.
20:46I also am in favor of what I call everyone is a journal-ish. So I think that most people that use
20:53social media these days, they have to think, how do I know if this is true? And what are the stakes
20:58if I'm wrong? Unfortunately, that's all we've got time for today. Joan and Nina, thank you so much for
21:03your insights. Conspiracy theories have been with us for decades, from Area 51 to the JFK assassination
21:10and even the moon landing. But the Charlie Kirk assassination has shown us that conspiracy theories
21:15today are not only big business, they are instant. Supercharged by the algorithmic world that we live in
21:22and given credence by some of the most powerful people in the world. Sorting facts from fiction
21:27in breaking news situations is becoming increasingly difficult. And that's even before we have entered
21:32the era of the AI conspiracy theory. I'm David Gilbert. Thanks for watching.
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