How memes, gaming and internet culture all relate to the Charlie Kirk shooting

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Dara Kerr here, filling in for Blake Montgomery, who promises he’ll come back from vacation. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the memes, gaming and internet culture behind the shooting of Charlie Kirk.

The bullet that killed conservative activist was inscribed with a message: “Notices bulge OwO whats this?” The online world quickly recognized the reference. It’s a phrase used in internet culture to troll people in online role-play communities, specifically furries (a subculture that cosplays as anthropomorphic animal characters).

“The phrase has been popularized not only as a way of making fun of furries and related communities for being cringe, but has also been embraced by furries as a way of owning the meme,” writes Know Your Meme, a website that documents viral phenomena. “Ultimately, the phrase is portrayed in memes as being one of the most cringeworthy things someone could possibly write to another person.”

Other bullet casings recovered by law enforcement in Utah also had etched inscriptions that appeared to nod to online gaming and insider memes, which have become part of the intense social media speculation on a possible motive for the killing. One said: “O Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao”, another said: “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO.” The first message refers to an Italian anti-fascist folk song that has become a gamer reference that’s big in Twitch and Discord circles. The second message is what web culture writer Ryan Broderick calls “just boilerplate edgelord speak” in his newsletter last week titled “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme”.

The final inscribed casing that law enforcement released said: “Hey fascist! Catch!” and was followed by an up arrow, right arrow and three down arrow symbols. The arrow sequence appears to reference the video game Helldivers 2, and is a set of commands used by players to release a 500kg bomb in the game.

The alleged shooter, Tyler James Robinson, is a 22-year-old from a small town in Utah near the Arizona border. He is accused of killing Kirk at a campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Kirk was struck by a single bullet fired with a “high-powered bolt action rifle” from a distant rooftop.

As the suspect was steeped in online culture, so was Charlie Kirk, who was 31. He was at the school on behalf of his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA. He’d become known worldwide speaking about and debating others, often on his extremist views on race, immigration, gender identity and gun rights. Kirk’s rise to fame was also largely bolstered by being extremely online.

As my colleague Alaina Demopoulos wrote:

A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.

Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.

Read the full story here.

Meta was hit by two separate whistleblower claims last week. One by a group of six former and current employees, who allege the social media company has covered up harm to children on its Metaverse virtual reality devices and apps. And another by Meta’s former head of security for WhatsApp, Attaullah Baig, who alleges the company brushed aside major security and privacy flaws in its messaging app, according to the New York Times.

In response to my reporting about VR devices, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever said the company has approved 180 studies related to its VR Reality Labs since 2022, which include research on youth safety and wellbeing. “These few examples are being stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative,” she said, adding that Meta has introduced features to its VR products to limit unwanted contact and supervision tools for parents.

One of the first whistleblowers was Sophie Zhang, who brought her findings to the Guardian in 2021. Zhang documented how Facebook allowed political manipulation in more than 25 countries, which led to disastrous circumstances in several places including Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Honduras. Later that same year, Frances Haugen turned over to the Wall Street Journal reams of documentation verifying much of Zhang’s allegations and also bringing to light Facebook’s knowledge of how its social media apps harmed teens.

In 2023, Arturo Bejar also went to the Wall Street Journal with evidence that Meta knew its algorithms for Facebook and Instagram were pushing content to teens that promoted bullying, drug abuse, eating disorders and self-harm.

This year alone, eight more whistleblowers have come forward. Baig and the group of six former and current employees went public last week.

US lawmakers are taking the allegations seriously. Politicians as disparate as Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, and Richard Blumenthal, the democrat from Connecticut, have said they see eye-to-eye when it comes to regulating Meta and other social media companies.

“The details in these disclosures are hard to stomach – because they reveal such major risks to kids’ safety, and because they are so painfully familiar. Yet again, Meta is revealed to be willfully misrepresenting abuses on its platforms,” Blumenthal said of the whistleblower claims last week. “‘Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil’ is simply not an acceptable business philosophy.”

Blumenthal added that he and other senators were looking forward to pushing ahead with “long overdue reform”.