A week into fall semester at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, the campus's grassy, terraced courtyard bakes under the heat of full late August sunlight. The sound of trickling water from a fountain that meanders through the space beckons students to stop, chat and unwind. But Collin Grannis, who graduated over the summer, said the space hasn't had much activity since Charlie Kirk was assassinated there last year.
"It used to be very lively. People doing homework, people taking their food to eat outside, people to hang out. I remember people taking naps on the grass, like right in that area," Grannis recalled. "And it's been fully cleared out because people have that association with it."
The quiet of the courtyard belies the violence that took place in it a year ago, and the deepened social rupture that followed. The hard-right activist was killed in front of an audience of thousands while he was debating a student with progressive political views. The co-founder and then-leader of Turning Point USA, Kirk was arguably the most influential conservative youth movement leader in a generation – and his death set off an unprecedented frenzy of intimidation, harassment and threats that seemingly reached into every corner of the country.
As the country has seen an accelerated erosion of political norms over the last decade, violence and personal attacks have become a persistent dynamic. A wide array of civic actors - from elected officials and judges, to teachers and librarians – have found themselves at the receiving end of abuse and intimidation over political differences and culture war rifts. Despite this, everyday Americans could largely avoid the mob's ire as long as they weren't singled out by high-profile social media accounts like LibsOfTikTok. But Kirk's death changed this, according to several security experts who help prevent and mitigate online abuse.
"After Charlie [Kirk was assassinated]. … you didn't need to be [targeted by] one of the big [social media] accounts, obviously, for anyone to find you," said Shauna Dillavou, CEO of Brightlines, a doxing prevention service. "Your neighbor found you or your friends found you. A comment in a closed group chat that would get screenshotted and passed up the chain. And that was the big shift: the neighbor-on-neighbor, trusted circle, inner sanctum violence."
Doxing, the public release of someone's personal identifying information without their consent, is a tool that has been used by the political right and left. Dillavou said that in the U.S., its use has evolved and shifted – first largely seen within gaming subculture, then among violent extremist groups and actors, and later deployed by high-reach social media accounts. Kirk's death, Dillavou and other experts said, removed the final guardrails – democratizing the practice of doxing at a speed and scale they never had imagined.
"That creates terrible impacts for people," Dillavou said. "It's job losses. It's career losses. People have to move. They get death threats, and lawsuits. And … those impacts are lasting."
"Hell, call their employer"
Just hours after Kirk was gunned down, a website devoted to exposing "anyone celebrating Charlie's death" invited the public to submit leads. Titled "Expose Charlie's Murderers," the website billed itself as "the largest firing operation in history," and suggested that individuals posting speech unsympathetic to Kirk or his death were "supporting political violence online."
According to Kat Green, founder of the doxing mitigation nonprofit Endora, it was one of several websites attempting to "out" Kirk detractors. Together, Green says these sites listed names, pictures, employers, social media handles and other information about scores of people who likely never imagined that their social media posts would be dangled in front of an angry mob. She said she and others in her line of work had never before been so busy.
"It's a limited pool of people who help with that right now, and everybody was slammed," said Green. "So we all started working together to see what we could learn about the sites and who was behind them."
The phenomenon of using technology to corral negative attention to crowdsourced targets was not new. In fact, for many years Kirk's own organization, TPUSA, featured a "Professor Watchlist" that encouraged college students to report professors teaching "leftist propaganda." But Green and others said this felt different because the call to participate came from the highest levels of leadership. On the Monday after Kirk was killed, Vice President Vance sat in the host chair of Kirk's podcast and implored listeners to "get involved."
"So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out – and, hell, call their employer," Vance said. "We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. And there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination."
"There is just a very different speed and power dynamic around the post-Charlie Kirk assassination, where you have the vice president essentially endorsing some of this," said Shannon Hiller, executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University.
To Dillavou, the tech-enabled outing of Kirk critics felt less like a call to civility, and more like incitement to violence.
"Doxing is stochastic terrorism," she said, referring to a phenomenon in which an influential voice's call to violence increases the likelihood that a random "lone wolf" will act on it. "The idea with doxing is not that the information about you – your personal information, your home address, your phone number – exists online. It does. It's that … that someone takes up the mantle to come after that person. "
While the "Expose Charlie's Murderers" website eventually came down, mirrors of the site remain online. Just as concerning, said Hiller, is the possibility that the cultural shift that Kirk's death unleashed – the use of doxing to silence opposing political views – will stick around as a feature of the country's disintegrating political discourse.
"We're trying to grapple with which of these things are persistent dynamics in our environment and which are new … in the current context with the current administration in an online environment," she said.
Kirk memes
Inevitably, discussions around doxing will land on subjective questions about when, or whether, the practice is acceptable or necessary. For Dillavou and Green, doxing is different from unmasking someone to hold them accountable for harmful behavior. The latter, they say, also promotes safety by alerting members of the broader community to a potentially dangerous person.
"It's the same as like a sex offender registry, in my mind," Dillavou said, noting that she does not struggle much with the question of whether it's ethical for antifascists, for example, to dox members of white nationalist groups. "What their membership in that [white nationalist] group suggests is that they believe that some people should be harmed on the basis of their skin color or on the basis of their political beliefs."
But Dillavou said that societally, any tolerance of doxing puts everyone at risk.
"Any doxing anywhere is harmful to all of us everywhere," she said. "We are all vulnerable to it."
This larger discussion – about whether it is appropriate to post personal information about people with whom we disagree – is one that Hiller said has not meaningfully taken place, even after Kirk's death. Technology has, she said, made it all too easy to circumvent the uncomfortable work of speaking across the political divide.
"We've been living in that world of accelerating reduction of barriers to doing that sort of thing online versus face-to-face to your neighbor," Hiller said.
" I … actually know all my neighbors and disagree politically significantly with some of them. If one of them ever posted something that I felt really worried me or my family, I would talk to them about it. I would say, 'Hey, you may not have realized the impact this has on me,' " she said. "But I think that people don't do that. It's unexpected to do that in person."
Ironically, it was also technology that ultimately helped bring the frenzy of doxing to an end In the aftermath of Kirk's assassination.
"That continued for months and really only subsided once people started pushing back legally and once younger audiences on the internet made a joke out of it and just flooded the zone with the meme-ification of Charlie Kirk," said Green. "I think opening the floodgates to every piece of surrealist garbage about Charlie Kirk just made it impossible to track down. It was too much to wade through."
Kevin Haslem, a sophomore at Utah Valley State University, said that even in the period leading up to the anniversary of Kirk's killing, it felt like adults on the campus couldn't directly talk about what happened.
"Professors, especially around this time of year as being it's the first anniversary, are kind of a little bit uneasy or a little bit guarded on how to talk about it," Haslem said, "Because just mentioning Charlie Kirk, of course, brings up a lot of a lot of heated emotions."
