As soon as Republican Rep. Chip Roy saw the video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination on social media, he called his wife and told her to make sure their son, who is also named Charlie, didn’t see it.
“‘I don’t want him to see that, so tell him to stay off all the devices,’” the Texas lawmaker recalled of the conversation with his wife.
“You know you don’t put certain things in front of your kids,” Roy continued, noting his son was also a fan of Kirk.
Like many others, Roy first saw the graphic video of Kirk getting shot on a Utah university campus on social media. And, like many others, the uncensored video appeared in his feed again and again in the hours and days after the shooting.
“You know I don’t love getting out as a lawmaker, saying, ‘You shall take X down.’ But shouldn’t we have some kind of rules of the road? We used to have decorum,” Roy said.
Many Republican lawmakers, who for years have advocated for more expansive freedom of speech on social media platforms, are now grappling with the consequences of social media platforms easing content moderation policies.
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, conservatives criticized social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for their content-management policies targeting misinformation and violent or obscene videos.
Republicans have said these policies disproportionately target conservative speech, and that the involvement of government agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in targeting election-related disinformation violated Americans’ First Amendment rights.
The backlash culminated in Elon Musk acquiring Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, renaming it to X and disbanding the platform’s content-moderation team and trust and safety policies.
In January — just days before Trump returned to office — Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads and Instagram, similarly laid off fact-checkers that used to work for his company and adjusted Meta’s content review policies.
As of Friday, videos of Kirk’s assassination are readily available on X without any content warning. X did not respond to a request for comment.
Meta told NOTUS that videos of the shooting are only available on Meta platforms like Instagram behind a graphic content warning and are not eligible for algorithmic recommendation or for teenager accounts. TikTok told NOTUS that some distant angles of the shooting are still available on the platform, but are not eligible for algorithmic recommendations. TikTok is working to take down close-up videos of the incident.
Many right-wing lawmakers who cheered those moves by social media companies are now working through how to protect their constituents from the ugliest parts of the internet.
“My big concurrent concern is protecting free speech, protecting the First Amendment,” Rep. Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee and one of the loudest voices against what he has called government censorship, told NOTUS.
“I have not seen the video. I chose not to, but I haven’t thought about it in a First Amendment context. I just didn’t want to see something that gruesome,” Jordan said. “But for me, it’s all about the First Amendment. I’d have to maybe talk to some experts and see.”
“Maybe there should be some kind of warning before. You see that on television, where they warn people ahead of time,” he added. “But my main focus is to avoid what we saw in the Biden administration. What I’m most concerned about is having some ‘disinformation government board’ that’s going to tell us what we can post, what we can tweet, what we can read, what we can say.”
Other Republican lawmakers agreed that they like social media policies better now. Some think it’s on the users to take more responsibility in curating the content they see.
“I’ve seen it, I wish I hadn’t seen it. But I was in the news business for 35 years and I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff,” Rep. Mark Alford told NOTUS.
“I don’t think that we do a good enough job at guarding our hearts,” Alford said. “There’s a lot of information and a lot of bad images out there that are accessible. There’s also a lot of bad food out there, too, we don’t need to be eating.”
Rep. Chuck Edwards said that the government should not play a role in restricting what people see on the internet.
“You’re on a very slippery slope when you do anything to restrict free speech,” Edwards told NOTUS. “I don’t think we want to look at the government to solve our problems. I believe that the heart of the issue is within the hearts and minds of Americans.”
Edwards added that he would like platforms to take more responsibility for the content they recommend to young people and adhere to more consistent content moderation policies.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden took it a step further, saying that even though he chose not to watch videos of the shooting, he thinks social media platforms are doing the right thing by not taking them down.
“It is only galvanizing the support for the memory of Charlie Kirk and the values that he stood for,” Van Orden said. “It’s galvanizing the right because they can’t get it out of their heads now.”
Rep. Andy Harris told NOTUS that he thinks social media companies should be the ones to decide how they moderate their content.
“I mean, some of that is a free speech issue. I mean, look, it was terrible to look at, but it wasn’t pornography; that is something that, obviously, would cross the line. So I’d be very wary about limiting that,” Harris told NOTUS about the Kirk video.
Other lawmakers like Rep. Ralph Norman think that finding a balance between freedom of speech and protections is “a valid question” but not something they’d want regulated.
“It is what it is. As long as it is not AI and false, it is what it is,” Norman said. “Do I like it? No. But it is what it is.”
But something that many lawmakers agree on is that, while they want to keep advocating for freedom of speech, social media has increasingly become a negative force in American life.
“I don’t know exactly what the balance is,” Rep. Frank Lucas told NOTUS. “I do know that social media, we were told 25 to 30 years ago, would be the great equalizer of society, the great debate producer, and it has become the ultimate gossip source.”
Others just wish social media hadn’t been invented in the first place.
“I would like to just unplug the internet. Honestly, our lives would be immeasurably better if we just didn’t have these damn devices,” Roy told NOTUS. “All I know is, I’d rather give my kids a case of beer and a pack of cigarettes than this damn phone.”