Politics
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September 29, 2025
Foreign bots were spewing much of the racist rhetoric that followed Charlie Kirk’s killing. And yet it gained traction only because there is plenty of homegrown racism to exploit.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox and FBI Director Kash Patel at a press conference following the shooting of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
(Michael Ciaglo / Getty Images)
The evening after Charlie Kirk’s murder, the public safety commissioner of Utah, where Kirk was fatally shot on a college campus, admitted that law enforcement still had “no idea” about the identity of the shooter. That same night, Utah Governor Spencer Cox pleaded that authorities “need[ed] as much help as we can possibly get” to identify a suspect. Though the shooter’s identity was unknown, odds were fairly high that they would be white—they had evaded attention in an overwhelmingly white crowd, on a majority white campus, in a very white state. Police opined that the shooter “blended well” in those white environs, a fact made evident by the need for the manhunt. And yet, immediately after Kirk’s killing, social media churned with racist incitements and anti-Black calls for violence. Analysts at the Center for Internet Security and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue told ABC a large number of those posts were from Russian bot networks “intent on inflaming passions.” The AP, likewise, warned that Chinese, Iranian, and pro-Kremlin “online bots” were using Kirk’s death to increase “divisions or even spur further violence.” And The New York Times wrote that foreign entities were “using bot accounts posing as Americans” to spread toxic narratives. Governor Cox also urged caution, suggesting that very online Americans were being baited by foreign adversaries trying to gin up anger and division.
“There is a tremendous amount of disinformation we are tracking,” Cox told assembled media the evening after the shooting. “What we’re seeing is, our adversaries want violence. We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world, that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”
It was true. There are more bots on the Internet than ever before, multiple studies show, accounting for roughly 50 percent of overall traffic. A steadily rising number of those are “bad bots” with malicious intent. On social media, the problem is most obvious on Twitter (X), where cybersecurity experts in 2024 variously estimated 64 percent to 75 percent of users are bots, compared with less than 3 percent each on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Just one week out from Kirk’s death, tweets calling for retaliatory violence had “amassed 43 million views,” per the Center for Countering Digital Hate. It was not clear how many of those tweets were from bots, but on a platform rife with them, there’s little daylight between perception and reality.
“This is a really prime example of how the distorted lens of social media algorithms can turn perception into reality,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate US/UK, told me. “We all start to feel like the world is worse than it really is. And bit by bit, that’s slowly ripping apart our confidence in, and our ability to sustain a cohesive democracy.”
Does that come as a relief? That problem is that using anti-Black racism to promote chaos works only because there’s so much anti-Black racism ready and waiting to be exploited. The day after Kirk’s killing, at least six—six!—historically black college and university campuses in Southern states were forced into emergency lockdowns because of “terroristic threats” made via both phone calls and e-mails. Neighboring HBCUs that were not directly threatened also had to implement shelter-in-place protocols out of caution. At NYU and Southern University and A&M College, administrators received an e-mailed manifesto from an anonymous author who claimed that they were “going to shoot every nigger I see.… I am coming for only niggers, no whites and no chinks.” HBCUs were founded at a time when Black folks had no choice but to create their own colleges because they weren’t allowed on white colleges, and yet, all these years later, those institutions are still no safe haven from the ubiquity of white terror.
Despite being thousands of miles from the lily-white environs where Kirk was shot, they were again subject to America’s age-old predictable scapegoating of Black communities, which seems to offer a sort of grotesque catharsis to a country that has always regarded Blackness itself as the enemy.
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And just days ago, a “debate” group claiming Kirk as inspiration showed up at Tennessee State University, an HBCU, clad in MAGA gear and bearing signs reading “DEI should be illegal” and “Deport all illegals now.” After being swiftly removed by security and booed by a crowd of students, the MAGA agitators accomplished the true aim of their mission—to further antagonize those students using social media posts that cast them as violent and themselves as innocent white victims. The threats and harassment of HBCU students demonstrate the feedback loop between online hatred and incitements to violence and their IRL manifestations.
Unsurprisingly, other vulnerable communities—Jewish and transgender people—were also blamed and targeted, even as the shooter remained anonymous. The Center for Internet Security and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that after Kirk’s shooting, some 46,000 tweets included the word “trans,” mostly to speculate that the shooter was transgender. “The jews assassinated Charlie Kirk. We’re in a fucking war, Whites,” one pseudonymous account declared, garnering 22,000 likes and 280,000 views. “In a world where you can be murdered for being a Charlie Kirk, be an Adolf Hitler” another anonymous account tweeted, to 18,000 likes and 234,000 views. “Fight back white man.”
The online right—some of which surely included foreign bots—had been calling for a race war over the killing of a young Ukrainian immigrant woman by a mentally ill Black man in Charlotte, North Carolina, earlier this month. Kirk himself, no stranger to race-baiting, tweeted just hours before his death that it was “necessary to politicize” her death, unwittingly noting the precise pretext that would be used in the threats that followed his killing. American racism is so reliably reflexive, it gives our purported enemies an easy and surefire way to crush national unity and break down our barely-there democracy from within. It’s why racism is, and has long been, among the greatest threats to America’s national security, making us all the more vulnerable.
And the irony is, it’s a trick that America has fallen for before. Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Russia’s then-most-prolific troll factory undertook a massive operation, including setting up “websites that published pro-Trump stories and attempted to sow racial discord.” That same Kremlin-backed group bought more than 3,500 Facebook ads, the majority of which a USA Today analysis later found either “dealt with race directly,” or indirectly, via “issues fraught with racial and religious baggage.” (For example, and quite incredibly, including a sex tape featuring Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lookalikes to trigger America’s miscegenation anxieties.) A 2019 Senate report ultimately concluded that Russian cyber interference had an “overwhelming operational emphasis on race.… no single group of Americans was targeted…more than African Americans.” Those campaigns would continue to focus on America’s racial fissures in the 2018 midterms, in 2020 and in 2024. For example, in the latter year, Russian propagandists posted a video to Twitter of supposed Haitian immigrants, riding in a van they claimed was en route to help them vote multiple times in Georgia for Kamala Harris. Another video, described in a NBC report, depicted “two Black men or boys kicking the shoes of a bloodied, crying white woman or girl who wears a Trump shirt.”
Ahmed notes that while foreign interference is part of the issue, there’s also the problem of the platform. “It’s very clear to anyone using it that there appears to be strategic and determined distortion in part caused by bots,” he told me. “But there is also just the algorithm itself, which allows the proliferation and maximum amplification of lies that are slowly driving our country apart.”
It may be a problem intrinsic to social media, where all engagement, positive or negative, leads to reach, but it is also specifically an Elon Musk problem. After Kirk’s shooting, Musk unquestionably helped escalate tensions, tweeting to his 225 million followers that they must “fight or die.” (Unlike Musk, Trump, or Vance, Democratic officials not only condemned the shooting but also urged the cooling of rhetoric across the board. You can see this for yourself in side-by-side quote comparisons.) Musk has made plenty of room for hate on Twitter since he has bought it. Not only did hate speech jump 50 percent after Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, but the number of “likes” on hateful posts increased 70 percent, per a 2025 study from the University of California and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute. In April, NBC reported that it had found “a flourishing Nazi network on [Twitter] under Musk’s ownership.” Researchers from Queensland University found in 2023 that bots are “worse than ever” on Twitter under Musk.
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A 2024 study by Global Witness found that just 45 bot-like Twitter accounts made 610,000 tweets in a month, which made 4 billion impressions. Those bots then pivoted from one current event to the next, tweeting about each of them. This included the UK general election, followed by the assassination attempt on Trump, and then Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. They responded to each “with racism, gendered disinformation and conspiracies,” researchers wrote. Musk doesn’t clean up the site because bots give the appearance of more users, which is in turn used to sell ads. (Cynicism is Twitter’s head of product boastfully tweeting that the day of Kirk’s murder and the day that followed, the site “had more first-time downloads in the United States than on any single day in its history.” He did not mention that this was, in part, because of rubberneckers viewing the horrific video of the shooting.) Musk has also put Twitter’s application programming interface behind a paywall, and has sued researchers who look too closely, including Ahmed.
So, yeah, the digital architecture is a problem. But it’s surely made worse by all the forces exploiting America’s oldest and most reliable hatred. America’s adversaries know how fragile, and easily manipulated, racism makes this country. And things will almost certainly get worse, since the Trump administration seems intent on leaving America defenseless. State Department officials recently announced that they have shut down the Global Engagement Center, which tracked Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation. And since Trump reentered office in January, other groups within the FBI, DHS, and ODNI tasked with tracking foreign meddling have also been shuttered, leaving America more exposed.
But the problem also lies within us. In response to the Times article on foreign adversaries’ exploiting Kirk’s shooting, China’s Global Times took offense, writing that “media hype aimed at distracting attention toward external powers serves as little more than an ostrich burying its head in the sand—it cannot conceal the severity of domestic problems.” They’re not entirely wrong. The solution isn’t just countering foreign interference but cleaning up our own house too—the ugliest corners that we so often prefer to ignore first. Otherwise, a house so readily divided is sure to burn in someone else’s war.
Don’t let JD Vance silence our independent journalism
On September 15, Vice President JD Vance attacked The Nation while hosting The Charlie Kirk Show.
In a clip seen millions of times, Vance singled out The Nation in a dog whistle to his far-right followers. Predictably, a torrent of abuse followed.
Throughout our 160 years of publishing fierce, independent journalism, we’ve operated with the belief that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. We’ve been criticized by both Democratic and Republican officeholders—and we’re pleased that the White House is reading The Nation. As long as Vance is free to criticize us and we are free to criticize him, the American experiment will continue as it should.
To correct the record on Vance’s false claims about the source of our funding: The Nation is proudly reader-supported by progressives like you who support independent journalism and won’t be intimidated by those in power.
Vance and Trump administration officials also laid out their plans for widespread repression against progressive groups. Instead of calling for national healing, the administration is using Kirk’s death as pretext for a concerted attack on Trump’s enemies on the left.
Now we know The Nation is front and center on their minds.
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With gratitude,
Bhaskar Sunkara
President, The Nation
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