A growing number of shooters are in conversation with their digital communities, which are becoming extreme
O
n the day that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson shot and killed rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, prosecutors say, he texted his roommate to confess what he’d done. While appearing to admit to the murder and describe how he was planning to retrieve his gun, he pivoted to mention why he had carved messages into the ammunition.
“Remember how I was engraving bullets? The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme,” Robinson texted, according to authorities.
Robinson’s shooting of Kirk has put the spotlight on the intersection of political violence and an increasingly nihilistic online world that promotes misinformation and extremism. It’s a confluence that raises fundamental questions about how internet culture influences both extremist attacks and how we understand them, at a time when some of the biggest online spaces are increasingly more divisive and less moderated.
