The last speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Andrea Carson, whose focus is on Facebook response to the assassination of far-right US political activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed during a public appearance, and this was widely assumed in the media to be a case of left-wing political violence, though this has yet to be established.
It produced considerable public reaction, with some controversial statements resulting in the sackings or suspensions of various journalists; social media responses ran the gamut from grief through outrage to political blame, and show the polarisation of attitudes towards Kirk and the normalisation of political violence in the United States.
Political violence within democracies, and public attitudes towards it, is relatively poorly understood; the research focus has tended to be on violence between countries and violence within autocratic states. Political violence in the US has increased over time, and is more frequently driven by the right than the left of its political spectrum.
This study focussed on Facebook, which remains a major platform in the United States; it used the Meta Content Library as a source of reactions to the Kirk assassination. The project selected various mainstream media reports of the assassination, and examined the Facebook comments on those reports. This encompassed some 21,000 comments made about CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC reporting, which were analysed using Large Language Models and topic clustering.
Eight broad themes emerged from this, including sympathy for Kirk and his family (52%), blame (17%), rejection of political violence (10%), conspiracist beliefs (10%), concerns for the future (12%), antipathy and trolling (8%), backlash against online trolls (6%), and firearms debates (8%). Most such comments were civil, but they also showed evidence of polarisation; less than 2% were actively advocating for political violence, so this does not support the idea that political violence is being normalised in the US.
