From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, September 15th.

So the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University was obviously incredibly disturbing and horrible in its own

right, but also very disturbing was how quickly graphic footage of his final moment spread across

social media platforms. Just moments after Kirk was fatally shot in front of a live audience of thousands, multiple

videos from various angles of the event, as many of you know, went viral on nearly every social

media platform.

If you happen to be casually scrolling through X on Wednesday afternoon, you are likely

served the gory video unprompted amongst the mundane content that

you typically consume. That's just one example. We're not even singling out X here. This resulted

in what some are describing as a mass traumatic event that's raised urgent questions about content

moderation and our relationship with violence

online. While questions still remain about the shooter's motives and the long-term consequences

this act of political violence will have on the nation, like we were discussing in our previous

segment, we will look now at the ubiquity of violence on social media, and specifically

how many children, among others, wound up seeing

this awful murder without the platforms doing anything preventative that arguably they could have done

without stifling free speech. We'll do this with Adam Clark S.D.'s Senior Technology correspondent at Fox.

Adam, thanks for joining us for this.

Welcome to WNYC.

Thank you so much.

How quickly did what go online and who saw it?

The videos went online immediately.

...