The Republican backlash against social media platforms after Charlie Kirk’s assassination is throwing big tech companies into uncertainty, as they address conservative anger about the killing while also heeding calls for freer online speech.
Tech platforms including Meta, TikTok and X quickly came under pressure from some Republican lawmakers to pull down the graphic videos circulating after Kirk’s death on Wednesday, and by Thursday had mostly taken them offline.
Since then, the argument about social-media’s role has pivoted into anger over users posting negative views of Kirk online — speech that is legally allowed, and largely within the platforms’ rules, but strikes critics as indecent gloating.
The platforms “are all facing this problem where the right wing has been on them repeatedly about content moderation and how they [shouldn’t] control any content,” said a lobbyist for Meta, who was granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak for the company. “And now the tables are turned in some fashion, and people are all over them, saying you can’t allow this kind of content and that kind of content.”
“A lot of [the companies] are going to be whipsawed,” the Meta lobbyist said.
Another tech lobbyist said the anger over Kirk content was a topic of frequent conversation in the tech lobbying world over the weekend.
Even some Democrats say they’re worried about harmful posts. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO that “whether it’s in a political rhetoric context or not, tech platforms know that conflict and increasing conflict increases engagement, and I think that we have to ensure that they’re responsible as well.”
But it’s not clear what, if anything, Congress has an appetite to do.
Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters last week that “social media has been a toxin in politics” and it’s “added to this vitriol,” but stopped short of proposing any legislative steps.
Since the widespread deplatforming of conservatives in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the Covid outbreak, the political right has framed itself as the victim of speech restrictions, and pushed hard to take the brakes off what’s allowed in online chatter. Elon Musk bought Twitter and remade it into the more freewheeling, conservative-friendly platform X, and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan has held a series of hearings to highlight alleged collusion between Democratic politicians and social-media content restrictions.
Spokespeople for X and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
Now, the Kirk killing is widening a split in the Republican coalition, in which some leaders want to moderate the free-speech push by pulling back on published content for various reasons — whether it’s harmful to children, or deceptively advertising pharmaceuticals. Apart from hardline libertarians like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who have rejected any notions of regulating content on platforms, the lines are hard to pin down.
“There’s a lot of overlapping categories,” said Ari Cohn, lead tech policy counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that defends First Amendment rights. “I’m not sure there are clear factions, and I think this is a result of the fact that this is so ad hoc.”
President Donald Trump himself has embodied both sides of this conflict — making it harder for both elected Republicans looking for a steady direction for the party, and companies looking for a politically safe approach.
Trump appeared to draw a clear line on his first day returning to the White House, issuing an executive order that read: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
And yet, in the wake of Kirk’s killing, Trump on Saturday shared a video on Truth Social of a person imploring him to wield the law in part to hound “content creators who consistently spread lies and propaganda and half-truths across the internet.”
Asked about the apparent contradiction, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said: “President Trump is a champion for free speech — like many Republicans, he has been a victim of left-wing censorship and knows firsthand the dangers that censorship poses. And President Trump is right to call out the radical leftists that have, for years, slandered their political opponents as Nazis and Fascists, inspiring left-wing violence against conservatives.”
Other intra-GOP exchanges have brought the conflict into similarly sharp relief.
When Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) posted on X and said he’d force “tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” he got an immediate clapback from Republican personality Robby Starbuck: “Charlie died fighting for free speech. He would not agree with lifetime social media bans.”
The Kirk assassination arrived at a moment when platforms have already dismantled many of their safeguards against toxic content — in many cases to avoid Republican criticism.
“The teams that dealt with this type of content have been decimated,” said Nu Wexler, a consultant who formerly worked on Facebook and Google’s policy communications teams.
“Content moderation policies usually swing in the direction of the party in power […] so some of this is to be expected,” Wexler said. “However, it’s going to be really hard for companies to make case-by-case decisions on violent videos.”
A Meta official said the company still took moderation seriously, and works with “around 15,000” content reviewers. As for the Kirk videos: “We don’t allow any content that glorifies violent or graphic content,” the official said. “This is something where we still — for high severity violations — we focus on this type of content moderation.”
Anthony Adragna and Yasmin Khorram contributed to this report.
