If you haven’t seen the video of a bullet killing Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah, you’re one of the lucky ones. When most people opened X, Instagram, YouTube, or any other platform on Wednesday afternoon, the gore was there waiting for them.

This was by design. While images of graphic violence have always spread online, users once had to search them out. But more recently social media companies have made them inescapable as they’ve backed away from content moderation, sometimes in the name of free speech. That meant horrifying videos of Kirk’s assassination went viral in the immediate aftermath of the event, in a way that traumatized people en masse. The videos were viewed more than 11 million times from the moment Kirk was shot until he died two hours later, according to the Ne

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