The Russian state media network RT was one of the first outlets to broadcast graphic footage of the assassination last week.
Russia and other foreign adversaries have pounced on the assassination of Charlie Kirk as an opportunity to spread propaganda aimed at aggravating U.S. political divisions and painting America as an unstable country on the decline, according to researchers.
Soon after the news broke about Kirk’s murder, Russian state media and pro-Kremlin voices on social media suggested that the United States was poised for a possible civil war and that dark conspiracies — possibly involving elements of a “deep state” — had played a role in the murder.
Chinese state media portrayed the attack as yet another example of a troubled society in decline, plagued by political disorder and gun violence. State media posted video of lawmakers arguing in Congress and highlighted U.S. experts discussing a climate of violence.
If you’re old enough to remember the internet as it was 15-20 years ago it’s fairly obvious. Even in the early days of social media a narrative wouldn’t spread a fraction as quickly or with as much explosive rhetoric. In a week after a major incident we might get 4 or 5 waves of conflicting or compounding narratives.
You can imagine our social discourse as a massive pool of competing ideas going back and forth; a large disruption might cause a sizable wave. You’d expect rebound waves (opposing ideas) from the opposite fringe to naturally counteract and disperse the original and each other, keeping the water choppy but level.
With a larger network (ie: Twitter in 2025 vs Twitter in 2008) you’d expect to see more inertia and more stability, the fact that we don’t is damning. Forcing the mass uniformity of rhetoric that we see these days (massive waves sweeping across hundreds of millions on multiple platforms) is not something that could be orchestrated by anything less than state actors. It takes the planning and coordination of both the initial narratives and responses.
Yup I’m a daily internet user since the 90s and I grew up in Soviet Empire and it’s so obvious how gamed the internet is today. I love internet and would never trade it for China’s intranet or similar but the world needs to wisen the fuck up and treat this trolling like any other weapon. Just because its information and not physical gas or nuclear bombs doesnt mean it’s not damaging.
The problem here is the hubris of everyone involved “they run information campaign against us well ours will be better!” It’s fundamentally idiotic way of approaching mass information the same way governments approach geopolitical information as in “tit for tat, if you leak our shit well leak yours etc” when this doesn’t work at the scale of the web.
There will be a day where the camels back will be broken but I’m afraid it’ll be too late and we all end up either in a war or isolated, dystopia networks like China or Russia.