The real problem? YouTube, not Charlie Kirk

I’ve been hearing about this guy, Charlie Kirk.

Over the past couple of years, I have read about him many times. I’ve never taken the time or had enough interest to research him properly, but I’ve become aware that he is a consequential young Christian conservative, instrumental in turning out the vote for Trump. I understand that he has a robust social media following and that he frequents college campuses, where he invites any and all comers who wish to spar. He has sounded pretty arrogant to me. Until last week, I had never actually heard him speak, nor had I read anything he’s written. My knowledge of him has been purely second-hand.

I got more interested in this guy when I realized my own children have seen more of him than I have. They live part of their lives online, keeping company with, I now realize, people like Charlie Kirk (“Oh, he’s the bomb,” said my sixteen-year-old).

So I was interested to hear of the stir that had been caused when California Governor Gavin Newsom launched a controversial podcast on which he interviewed Charlie Kirk. I listened to it. To my ear, Gavin Newsom came across as a bit less appealing—a little too glib-- than I expected (as with Kirk, even though I had heard plenty about Governor Newsom, I had never actually listened to him, myself), and I did not find Charlie Kirk to be nearly as objectionable as I expected him to be. Yes, he did seem pretty full of himself, but he was an impressive speaker, incredibly knowledgeable about a range of subjects, and pretty polite. I could see why my teenage boys—and, according to them, many of their friends—find him appealing.

This, then, got me interested in finding out more about Kirk’s reach online. So I dialed him up on YouTube. The first video I watched seemed pretty innocuous. As I’d found while listening to the podcast, Mr. Kirk came across as knowledgeable— particularly about the Bible— and less antagonizing than he’d been portrayed.

The video thumbnail was wildly misleading; the student simply asked one good-faith question with which Kirk gladly engaged. But I soon realized that incendiary labels— regardless of the content of the video— are the hook that fuels YouTube’s engagement.

I recently finished Max Fisher’s outstanding book, The Chaos Machine, which laid bare the machinery of social media: Each click, each engagement, trends towards a more extreme or provocative interaction for the user. It’s how the tech giants retain our attention— and consequently, make money. Intellectually, I know this to be true, but since I avoid social media I have little experience falling down these rabbit holes. So, I gave up some of my afternoon and followed YouTube’s lead, clicking a new thumbnail from the menu presented each time I watched a video.

It only took one click to get to some of the most incendiary content dividing college campuses.

On the heals of this student whom Kirk had DUMFOUNDED, another click brought a lawyer who SILENCED Muslims, before the next video promised content so shocking that it caused a woman to nearly pass OUT. Having begun with Charlie Kirk’s conversation with a college student about Trump’s sexual assault trial, I was now into videos debunking the myth that Palestine is a legitimate place.

By now, if I’m being honest, the thumbnail descriptions started to make me feel queasy. I felt bombarded by ill will.

After just a few clicks, it felt as if the entire world was oriented around an existential struggle to crush, to destroy, and to humiliate.

I also caught on to the fact that much of the content being served up by YouTube’s algorithm was redundant— people had simply captured the same video and reposted it to ride the coattails of outrage en route to securing tens or hundreds of thousands of views for themselves.

After a few rounds of this, I was worn out. My mood was shot. Congress ERUPTS As Ted Cruz HUMILIATES Transgender Activist To Her Face. Ricky Gervais DESTROYS Woke Culture. Kash Patel DESTROYS Cory Booker With This One Response. I called it a day, with the words of technology expert, Max Streusel, ringing in my ears: you’re never extreme enough for the internet.

So Charlie Kirk: The human being, Charlie Kirk, stripped from the headlines of his videos, strikes me as an impressive guy, one with whom I would have many disagreements but whose intellect, faith, and drive I tentatively respect. But it’s hard to extend much grace toward a person who is so nakedly leveraging the dark algorithmic arts for personal profit and notoriety. This content is overwhelming, corrosive, and to my eye dangerous. I think my lesson from this little research project is that Kirk himself is not the extremist I imagined him to be. When he is mixed into YouTube’s algorithm, though, and leveraged to ratchet up users’ outrage, the recipe feels far more dangerous.

In his book, Fisher shares a metaphor that has stuck with me. Researchers have discovered that, although one might imagine the vast array of YouTube’s videos to be something like a cloud, in fact it is more like a subway map, with a user shuttled from one set of videos to another, a predictable pathway carved out by the algorithm. For most people, engaging with Charlie Kirk through social media represents just one stop in a journey toward ever more extreme content, with the social media platform’s AI-fueled algorithms serving as conductors. Charlie Kirk does not trouble me. But the experience of engaging with him online feels deeply worrisome.