It’s too early to pinpoint an exact motive behind the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, according to Utah Governor Spencer Cox, but the lawmaker didn’t mince words on social media’s role in generating animosity among Americans.
In an interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker, Cox said friends of the suspect, Tyler Robinson, confirmed he had dived deep into “dark places of the internet.”
“I can’t emphasize enough the damage that social media and the internet is doing to all of us, those dopamine hits,” he added later. “These companies—trillion-dollar market caps, the most powerful companies in the history of the world—have figured out to how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage.”
Cox likened it to a fentanyl addiction and changes in brain chemistry that ensue, saying it’s designed to “get us to hate each other.”
He said that he’s continued to see social media’s role play out in real time since Kirk’s death, reaching “every corner” of society.
In fact, gory video of the shooting quickly spread on social media—even on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform. TikTok, Meta, and other platforms have said they will remove clips of the killing.
“The conflict entrepreneurs are taking advantage of us,” Cox warned. “And we are losing our agency. And we have to take that back. We have to turn it off.”
He also doubled down on his earlier statements that social media is a “cancer” that has played a role every assassination or attempted assassination in the last several years.
Calling social media algorithms “evil,” Cox noted that Utah passed first-in-the-nation laws in 2023 requiring children to obtain their parents’ permission to use social media apps during certain times of day.
But a trade group representing companies like TikTok, X, Meta, and Snap sued the state to block the laws. In September, a federal judge prevented Utah from enforcing them.
Meanwhile, Robinson is due to appear in court on Tuesday, and Cox told NBC that the suspect has not been cooperating with authorities.
But he added that Robinson’s boyfriend, “who is transitioning from male to female,” has been cooperating. Cox also confirmed that while Robinson grew up in a politically conservative family, there was “leftist ideology” associated with the assassination.
Although Cox has been praised since Kirk’s death for his pleas to reject violence and engage in a more civil way, he said Americans shouldn’t take their cues on how to act by listening to any one person.
“In my conservative philosophy, and, quite frankly, in my faith philosophy, we believe in agency,” he explained. “We believe that we are each individually responsible for ourselves. And the United States of America is a collection of a lot of different people. And again, no president is going to lead us out of this. It’s going to be every single one of us.”