After Kirk shooting, Utah governor calls social media a “cancer.” Will we treat it like one?

We did not evolve to handle this, Utah governor says.

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[NowIsTheTimeOfMonsters]

Whether online or in person, on postcards or Burma Shave signs, the medium matters less than the message. Kirk was a fucking asshole, a racist, sexist, bigoted POS.

Assailing affirmative action “picks” Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Kirk said, sickeningly, “you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously” without affirmative action. “You had to steal a white person’s slot.”

Kirk was an equal opportunity hater who called Martin Luther King, Jr. “awful,” and “not a good person,” while insisting, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”

When Zohran Mamdani shocked the nation by winning the New York City Democratic primary, Kirk ... called Islam “the sword the Left is using to slit the throat of America.”

( https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/charlie-kirk-legacy )

Fuck Charlie Kirk. What about all the damaged and dead people his rhetoric and hatred helped to cause? https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/charlie-kirk-violence-2673986895

 

[redjimmy]

I had to learn as a kid that the half sheet newspapers at the supermarket checkout with headlines like “Elvis is alive” were garbage. “How can they print that then?” I’d ask. “Freedom of the Press”. You just need to chuckle and then ignore it. Fast forward forty plus years and now a huge percentage of folks primarily consume the equivalent in the form of social media and entertainment news. I recently tried to remind my Mom of that distinction she drew back then between a real newspaper and those rags. Her response was unfortunately the secondary bad effect of the landscape today of “Well I don’t know who to believe.” Maybe one of these news aggregators sites with the right-left rankings can pivot to misinformation and disinformation ranking? It’s not an answer though if folks don’t switch to starting their days with these sites instead of a garbage half sheet… err social media and entertainment news.

 

[gavron]

We did not evolve to handle this, Utah governor says.

Red-state governors and voters don't believe in evolution.

 

[Focher]

To preface, I didn’t even know who Charlie Kirk was a couple of days ago.

I’m pretty sure Taylor Robinson didn’t read Ars, as he’s much too young for that, but I have seen the following sentiments posted many times on Ars in the last year:

- Donald Trump and anyone who supports him is a fascist and/or Nazi.

- The right thing to do when confronted with fascists and Nazis is to kill them, like Gramps did.

Now, I don’t recall the same person posting both of these points in a single post, but by different people within a single thread, certainly.

Wow. That is a post so devoid of any type of intellectual rigor that it was hard to even understand how AI didn't step in and at least provide a modicum of repair to it. To summarize, "I read one person say one thing and another person say another thing and so it's clear to me that both also said the other things that they didn't actually say".

Brilliant. Dizzying, even.

 

[DaVuVuZeLa]

He was especially interested in debating people whose debate skills were leagues below his own. There's a reason he preferred the college circuit and encouraged questions from the audience: it generates the types of media clips that go viral.

If you even want to call those "skills.". As someone else pointed out elsewhere, it was all non-sequitirs, strawmen, and gish-galloping intended to keep you off balance before declaring victory before his home crowd.

 

[AusPeter]

Red-state governors and voters don't believe in evolution.

To be fair SLC is a very liberal city. So don’t paint everyone in UT the same way.

 

[Raspberry]

One good thing about Cox's statement is, it shows that even Republicans, and surely non-committeds, are getting sick of social media bile. The Republican-in-Chief owns that bile, and so does his party by extension. It will be a good issue for a Democrat to run on, among others.

 

[Migz-DH]

Read the book "The Misinformation Age" by Caitlin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall, published in 2019. It answers some of the questions posed by Mr. Anderson (e.g., when large groups of persons communicate freely in attempts to learn about the world, polarization is almost inevitable, so there seems to be very little that can be done to make social media platforms [or even the internet in general imo] non-cancerous).

Some of the recommended interventions that the authors provided have already proven ineffective, but the book is still a great read to learn about how humans are prone to division even without cognitive biases or cognitive dissonance.

 

[charliebird]

On the way home from school my daughter told me about the shooting. I hadn’t even heard till she said it. The worst part is kids at school were passing the actual video around on TikTok and she saw it there. Just awful. She said she didn’t agree with his views, and when I asked if she even knew who he was before today she said no. I told her sometimes it’s enough to just say it’s terrible without sorting everything out right away. I hate how it spreads so fast and everyone feels like they have to have an opinion beyond it just being tragic.

 

[Deleted member 1085004]

I had to learn as a kid that the half sheet newspapers at the supermarket checkout with headlines like “Elvis is alive” were garbage. “How can they print that then?” I’d ask. “Freedom of the Press”. You just need to chuckle and then ignore it. Fast forward forty plus years and now a huge percentage of folks primarily consume the equivalent in the form of social media and entertainment news. I recently tried to remind my Mom of that distinction she drew back then between a real newspaper and those rags. Her response was unfortunately the secondary bad effect of the landscape today of “Well I don’t know who to believe.” Maybe one of these news aggregators sites with the right-left rankings can pivot to misinformation and disinformation ranking? It’s not an answer though if folks don’t switch to starting their days with these sites instead of a garbage half sheet… err social media and entertainment news.

The issue is the modern equivalent is the tabloids took over the mainstream because traditional media were labeled biased. So you have people watching radicalized garbage every day on FOX News and others spotlighting anecdotes and virtually every logical and psychological trick possible to manipulate people to hate.

Also, people want others to tell them how to think, they don't want objective dry statements in the news they want commentary and reaction. Or they try to do 'both sides' to things, even if one side is completely untenable and false. Have a scientist who did empirical research for years on things like vaccines or the climate? Well we need some shill without qualification to shout him down because of some anecdote or correlation or just because it feels like the scientist is wrong. It's a false equivalency of 'sides' versus reality.

If you do want a 'dry' objective style news source, I would rely upon AP and Reuters. A good newsletter I've found is 1440 Newsletter that removes the commentary. Then again, YMMV with those who are so far gone they no longer accept information unless it fits their worldview, so good luck if the news says an adverse event happens and its not due to weather manipulation, the Deep State, or other deep end theories.

 

[Aurich]

Speaking of politicizing

Trump Orders Flags Half-Mast for Kirk, but Didn’t for Melissa Hortman​

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...rk-but-didn-t-for-melissa-hortman/ar-AA1MmEoM

You gotta respect his dedication to making everything half mast though.

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

As for Kirk, he said "It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Now he is another grim gun death statistic. Some how I think his kids may disagree.

I've seen that phrased as "Kirk loses argument on gun rights", but I really wonder. Knowing that he would be killed with a gun, would he still have held that stance? I think it's possible he might have.

I mean, I disagreed with him about as much as it's possible to disagree with a single person, but he at least talked like he believed that. I wonder if he actually meant it? Would he have been principled enough to keep that opinion, knowing that it was his life that would be lost, and not that of some random stranger?

 

[Sal Algusto]

He also said he spent the past 33 hours 'praying' that the shooter was from out of state, out of the country, that it wasn't "one of us"... Cox can fuck all the way off

Ya, he was hoping that could be THE thing that's gone wrong with society. If the shooter had been anyone but a nondescript white kid he wouldn't have even mentioned social media. The Kirk quote about turning off your phone and internet fury and all that likewise wasn't sincere advice. He was trying to get people to stop hounding him about what his friends in the government were up to at that time.

 

[LeftCoastRusty]

Hey Cox, you know what's even worse at causing gun violence than social media? Guns. Maybe we ought to do something about guns sometime. Just for fun to see how it works out.

We did in the 90’s when assault weapons were banned at the federal level and gun violence dropped precipitously. Then Republicans refused to reauthorize it in 2004 and here we are.

 

[monkeywrench76]

We did in the 90’s when assault weapons were banned at the federal level and gun violence dropped precipitously. Then Republicans refused to reauthorize it in 2004 and here we are

This was an "ancient" bolt action hunting rifle. An assault weapons ban, which I am all for, would never cover this type of gun.

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

This is likely the worst article ever posted by ars.

Naw, the one about Snowden's girlfriend was by far the worst.

 

[timeline404]

It’s times like this that make me wish Christopher Hitchens was still with us. I’d have paid good money to see him tear through Kirk.

Hitchens defended even David Irving’s right to publish. Sure, he would torch Kirk’s politics, but probably still call the bullet the real obscenity.

 

[scrimbul]

The easy way out, find a scape goat. Today it's social media, before that video games, music, and comics etc. Granted it's certainly not healthy to consume social media (or any media for that matter) for hour and hours. Much like when we were blaming video games for every school shooting, the medium is global but this level of violence seems to be a pretty American thing.

I think we have a lot of problems and violence is one result.
*We've been cranking up the division in this country for years, and not just on social media.

*We've killed naunce (something we might be able to blame on social media).

* We don't really teach critical thinking anymore or really anything but how to take standardized tests. Also some media literacy wouldn't go amiss.

*Lack of trust in government, science, academics, and the media.

*Us versus them language is not uncommon in political discussion. Playing on peoples fears or trying to create new ones (especially of another group) is also not uncommon.

*Increasingly extremist politics becoming more mainstream.

*People just don't seem to respect each other. They've gotten ruder


As for Kirk, he said "It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Now he is another grim gun death statistic. Some how I think his kids may disagree.

Except the political middle has clearly failed for a long while now, so half of those points don't apply or aren't objectively correct.

 

[monkeywrench76]

Agree with this, you can probably date the modern era back to the post-Reagan/Bush Sr era with Gingrich. Obstructionalism was the name of the game then, using the budget as the excuse even though they clearly gave a crap less about it when Reagan was in office, creating the trickle-down myth.

You can track that lineage eventually to Obama with McConnell declaring his only goal is to make sure he's out of office and obstructing every federal judge vote, eventually leading to the Tea Party movement and MAGA and whatever this new era is becoming.

Really, all beginning from a bunch of entitled GOP boomers who were able to get a career, job, house, and family off of answering an ad back in the 50s and 60s when income inequity was much more reasonable, then turned that into giant gains in the 80s and 90s off of investments off of someone else's work with no taxes during a technological boom era that will never occur again.

Try to give the rich consume at all costs crowd anything back to society and recreate the conditions they benefited from, led to the obstruction and divisiveness to get the lower class to fight with each other. I mean, why worry about the executives fighting over who becomes the first trillionaire, there's a poor minority or immigrant taking a job or committing a crime somewhere causing all the problems.

I would agree but shift the start of the major decline at Clintons second term. the first 2 years with Gingrich and Clinton were ok and a lot got done on both sides of the political isle, however then it turned into a shit show and got worse each election with a short reprieve post 9/11.
I also think the fiscal conservative part of the republican party died when Bush Sr lost the election because he raised taxes a tiny bit to keep the debt low. After that it become more and more radicalized and less and less based in fiscal reality.

 

[scrimbul]

One good thing about Cox's statement is, it shows that even Republicans, and surely non-committeds, are getting sick of social media bile. The Republican-in-Chief owns that bile, and so does his party by extension. It will be a good issue for a Democrat to run on, among others.

If 'I'm not Trump' wasn't enough in 2024, then 'I'm not J.D. Vance who is a clone of Charlie Kirk' is not going to be enough in 2028 without gray area considerations as to how the stability of RNC policy and campaign infrastructure is addressed prior.

The debate stage is dead and nobody should take it seriously going forward as a method to sway the mythical undecided 20% of the middle that always seems to have its head up its ass with both-sides-ism and 'I'm not sure what to believe' but Kirk was doing as much as he humanly could to kill it.

 

[Fred Duck]

I don't particularly like social media and I use it very little - but I also think it is mostly a scapegoat for problems, conflicts and pathologies that have been around for decades or even centuries.

Social media is a force multiplier.

No, pouring petrol on an existing inferno didn't cause the initial blaze but it certainly doesn't help.

 

[odikweos]

I'm glad they're calling it what it is. I can understand people liking shiny things not being willing to part with them but your shiny ring of U238 is not a healthful item..

 

[taswyn]

Or is it time, as Cox's metaphor actually suggests, to treat social media as something irredeemable and to reach for the chemotherapy, the radiation, and the surgeon's scalpel?

Or, like healthcare in the US, will we just collectively shrug and say that either you can afford to pay for individual "treatment" (not sure what that means in this context... personal security? social media bots and influencers and even dirtier tactics?)--especially if that fuels multiple entire industries profiting off of it and the fear of the financial ruin represented by that--once you "catch a case of it"...

or you can die, tough luck.

Or is social media, unregulated, more akin to a "cancer causing chemical", and thus needs to be regulated just like other industries that cause cancer? Except, wait, Republicans are on a crusade to make fun of related warnings in California and remove all related regulations as much as possible, including for things like Asbestos, which is just absurd.

I mean, if the issue is hot takes and fast anger rather than calm approaches to engineering functional frameworks for FAIR and EQUAL success within a society... well, is the problem even "social media" or is it more simply American Conservatism and related political theory, which is highly to blame for the unregulated aspects of social media, the money above all else approaches, and the intentional inability to hold it responsible for INTENTIONALLY, ALGORITHMICALLY playing to the lowest common denominators in the first place?

Hmm. Lots of questions to ask, but you know, it's all only ever just asking questions.

 

[wastrel]

When the truth won't get you what you want, just lie.

 

[Derecho Imminent]

"It's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights"
Charlie Kirk
1993-2025

 

[ricerocket]

It feels like we're trying to rationalize unjustifiable people. Why doesnt Cox direct his righteous bs to the Commander in Tweets and his cronies? What is the first thing this administration and their ilk does when they want to communicate? Social media. They've made certain social media platforms into one that spews hate but somehow its not their fault.

And its really funny how there wasnt much empathy or rage when Rep Hortman and her husband were killed or Pelosi's husband attacked or.,,,,,,,..ohhh I see, its ok when its people that dont agree with their ideologies.

 

[AdrianS]

Those constant references to religion in America's public discourse look really strange to the rest of the West.

Nah, most of us have been aware of the USA's tendency to theocracy for a long time.

And a lot of conservative rage comes from their fear that the US may be becoming more pluralist.

 

[trevor_darley]

Social media is a cancer, so Republicans are going to checks notes pretend it's no big deal and cancel studies about it!

 

[Fifteen12]

Please -- this is just another excuse conservatives are going to run with to clamp down on any narratives, discussion, or facts, and the like that they don't like or agree with. Because freedom of expression is an anathema to the fascism core hiding beneath conservatism's thin shell.

Maybe don’t trust republicans, but social media issues are real and worth talking about. Too much doom and toon prevents us from actually taking about issues that matter.

 

[Fifteen12]

I think the problem here is not that humans did not evolve to process violent imagery or that technology itself is inherently a cancer. People have always been capable of encountering violence and history is full of examples of public spectacles far worse than anything on a screen.

…

It started in conservative media in the 90s, and everyone on every side has since rushed in to get those dollars.

Well, yellow, extreme journalism has been around about as long as people have had written word. You can even count propaganda memorials in Babylon as incentivized extremism.

 

[sxotty]

I'm in the cancer camp myself. But that may be because I stay away from it.

 

[Bigdoinks]

Charlie Kirk was a fake christian. He never went to church apart from promotional self-aggrandizing events, and pretty much abused Christianity as a crude cudgel to gain clout for himself at the expense of millions Jesus would have welcomed with open arms.

 

[jtwrenn]

If only they actually treated it as a cancer in a non bias way. They won't. Instead it will be only people who disagree with our orange leader. They are all liars at this point.

 

[Bzored]

Weird view I know but maybe guns are the cancer?

 

[F12]

Such narrow minded american views. Canada has tonnes of guns, all the same media.. where are all the school shootings there? What politicians/mouth pieces are getting gunned down there?

 

[dread pirate nancy]

You should checkout r/conservative, they are suggesting monuments.

And so it begins, more "Liberal Radicalization":