No, Bluesky Isn't Celebrating the Death of Charlie Kirk

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Following the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday, some of his fellow right-wing media leaders called out a supposedly toxic hub in which liberals and leftists were gathering to celebrate the killing: Bluesky.

“Actually, you should go see what they are saying on BlueSky right now,” podcaster Stephen L. Miller wrote on X. He urged liberal commentator Ezra Klein to repost a sympathetic message on Bluesky and “report back.”

Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist, wrote that “deranged left-wing personalities on BlueSky deliberately incite violence, and when it happens, they take the psychopath's route of mocking and gaslighting the victims.”

Even some large accounts not associated with the right-wing content mill identified a trend. “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination,” author Tim Urban said . “Such unbelievably sick people.” Elon Musk piggybacked on that one, “They are celebrating cold-blooded murder.”

Kirk's killing is an unqualified moral disaster. If indeed a critical mass of left-of-center people were celebrating it in the digital streets of Bluesky, that would be a sign of a political movement's decay and the irredeemability of a social media platform.

The problem with this story is that it is not true. If you spent your Wednesday absorbing thousands of posts on Bluesky—as I did, for whatever reason—it would be difficult to make an honest case that the platform's users were celebrating en masse. There were indeed a lot of people doing that. Just not close to a majority, let alone “every post.” And while overwrought right-wing characterizations of the left-of-center response were egged on by some of the largest accounts in conservative politics, the lefty joke about Kirk's death did not come from movement leaders. The feeling that Bluesky was treating Kirk's murder like an online VE Day does real harm to all of us, because it's a stand-in for a broader effort to connect the vile work of one killer to millions of people who would condemn it. That effort is poison.

Everyone's social media experience will be different based on whom they follow. Urban, the author who said, “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination,” follows no one on the platform and found many not-nice posts by searching Kirk's name . Some of those posts were celebratory. Others resurfaced previous comments Kirk made about gun deaths being a fair trade for Second Amendment rights. Many conservatives have interpreted direct restatements of Kirk's views as somehow being hateful comments upon his death. If restating Kirk's record sounds disrespectful, that's not on the man's eulogists.

But let's be clear: Plenty of people wrote mean, off-color things that they wouldn't say out loud. They were in Bluesky's algorithmic “Discover” feed, which has a way—much like X's—of surfacing outrageous posts. You will find some gutter rats on Bluesky, and the only difference between them and X's is that there aren't as many of them, and fewer of them come from the political right. Where people will post, there will be bad posts. The Washington Post's Will Oremusreported that Bluesky was removing close-up videos of Kirk's assassination and suspending accounts that encouraged violence. If X is doing the same, it's not doing a great job, as it just took me six seconds to find the close-up footage of Kirk's death. (Don't do it, by the way.)

These Bluesky posts weren't anything approaching a majority, and from accounts with followings of more than a few hundred people, they were downright rare. I found this collection by New Republic writer Greg Sargent to be pretty representative: All of the actual politicians said exactly what they should say. Bluesky posters also took pains to remind one another that the internet is searchable. Most heeded that advice. In fact, almost all of the viral posts taking joy in the murder came on X , where they were joined by posts from right-wing media leaders informing their followers that the left wants them dead. By the standards of text-based social media platforms open to anyone who wants to sign up, the discussion on Bluesky was about as humane as you could imagine. Which isn't to say it was great , but welcome to the internet.

To describe Bluesky as left of center is correct. To describe it as not that much fun is fair enough. But to argue that it's a hub for the glorification of political violence is not. To suggest that it has a monopoly on that kind of celebration is complete fantasy. Charlie Kirk, after all, was not a Bluesky poster. That Kirk once urged an “amazing patriot” to bail out the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer is not a reason to celebrate his demise. It is actually a reason to do the opposite. Political violence becomes a cycle of retaliations, and you either do your tiny part to break that cycle, or you don't.

It is bleak to even be calling Kirk's death “political violence” at this juncture, before authorities have even found the shooter. But his killing was political the second the shooter pulled the trigger, because it became an object for commentators to use as they pleased. Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, found a motivation before finding a shooter , and so did President Donald Trump, in the least surprising development of the day. Preferring to wait for a motive isn't gaslighting, nor is it pretending that political grievance didn't motivate the killer. (I would guess that it did!) But ideally we wouldn't jump ahead, because those jumps result in attaching the killer's beliefs to people who don't share them. Anyone who's disturbed enough to kill a civilian political figure in cold blood is liable to have “politics” that a lot of people, even those with shared enemies, would find to be gibberish.