After Charlie Kirk's Killing, Doxing and Intimidation Turn Neighbor Against Neighbor

Kirk, a hard-right activist and co-founder and then-leader of Turning Point USA, was killed in front of thousands of people while debating a student with progressive political views. He was arguably the most influential conservative youth movement leader in a generation, and his death unleashed an unprecedented frenzy of intimidation, harassment and threats that reached into corners of the country, according to NPR News.

At the Orem, Utah, campus, Collin Grannis, who graduated over the summer, said the grassy, terraced courtyard used to be lively. People did homework, ate outside and napped on the grass, he recalled. Now it has been fully cleared out because people associate it with the violence that took place there a year ago.

The quiet campus space reflects a deeper rupture. Over the last decade, the country has seen an accelerated erosion of political norms, with violence and personal attacks becoming persistent. Elected officials, judges, teachers and librarians have faced abuse and intimidation over political differences and culture war rifts. Everyday Americans could largely avoid the mob's ire unless they were singled out by high-profile social media accounts such as LibsOfTikTok, but Kirk's death changed that, according to security experts who work to 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 the doxing prevention service Brightlines. "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 is the public release of someone's personal identifying information without their consent. Dillavou said the practice has been used by the political right and left in the United States and evolved from gaming subculture to violent extremist groups and then to high-reach social media accounts. Kirk's death, she and other experts said, removed the final guardrails and democratized doxing at a speed and scale they had never imagined. The consequences, Dillavou said, include job losses, career losses, people having to move, death threats and lawsuits, and those impacts are lasting.

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," it billed itself as "the largest firing operation in history" and suggested that people posting speech unsympathetic to Kirk or his death were "supporting political violence online."

Kat Green, founder of the doxing mitigation nonprofit Endora, said the site was one of several attempting to "out" Kirk detractors. Together, Green said, the sites listed names, pictures, employers, social media handles and other information about scores of people who likely never imagined their posts would be dangled in front of an angry mob. She said she and others in her line of work had never been so busy. "It's a limited pool of people who help with that right now, and everybody was slammed," Green said. "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 direct negative attention to crowdsourced targets was not new. For 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. He added that while he did not believe in political violence, he did believe in civility.