Russia leverages Kirk shooting for propaganda as false claims surge
Russian state-controlled media outlets and allied social media accounts have seized on the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to push narratives that favor the Kremlin and aim to divide Americans and potentially ingratiate the Russians with President Donald Trump, researchers say.
News organizations such as Sputnik and the former Russia Today (now RT) have extensively covered the killing, the arrest and the continuing political fallout, emphasizing theories shared by Trump’s most conservative allies and highlighting comments by people who said they were unmoved by Kirk’s death.
“RT was quickly taking to amplifying insensitive or cruel response to it by Americans, sometimes tagging influential conservative accounts,” said Emerson Brooking, director of strategy at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Brooking said the Moscow-based multimedia company has waded more deeply into U.S. issues in the past week than it previously had since Trump took office in January, marking a potential change in strategy. After RT was sanctioned last September by the United States and banned by YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, it retreated from intense coverage of U.S. politics.
Russian outlets and individuals who amplified them have also pushed Russia-centric narratives, with some commentators claiming for instance that Kirk was likely to have been killed by Ukraine for opposing U.S. aid to that country. That echoed claims made about the assassination attempt on Trump last year.
A spokesperson for the White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Iranian figures have said Israel was behind Kirk’s death, while Chinese outlets and supporters have used bogus claims to exaggerate U.S. divisions, according to research by NewsGuard, a news site rating company.
Some foreign outlets amplified conspiracy theories or false claims that circulated wildly in the aftermath of the shooting. Chinese sites, for instance, latched onto false claims from the left that suspect Tyler Robinson had contributed to one of Trump’s campaigns or was a proven follower of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, as well as conservative assertions of a wide conspiracy reaching to liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros, a perennial target for antisemites.
Brooking said Russian propagandists may have gotten so busy in part because there was so much graphic video available for them to circulate and because the attack occurred at about 9 p.m. Moscow time, not in the middle of the night as with the July 2024 attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania.
Yet Russian efforts are likely to have had little impact on the heated American conversation, said Clemson University professor Darren Linvill, who tracks output from Russian troll accounts.
While Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) warned last week that Russian and Chinese bot accounts were amplifying U.S. divisions, Linvill said, the primary impetus for discord was domestic.
“I wish I could tell you this is the Russians or the Chinese,” he said. “Sadly, this is all our own doing.”