Did TikTok kill Charlie Kirk?

Blazing Reader,

Cal Newport, in a blog he posted Friday, blames social media platforms for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He describes X, Bluesky (which I'd never heard of before) and TikTok as "toxic and dehumanizing," claiming that they "are responsible, as much as any other force, for the unravelling of civil society that seems to be accelerating."

While obviously not the sole cause, I do believe he has a point. Last year, I abandoned X and Facebook, finding them relatively useless for generating new readers for my novels. The environment fosters an attention span shorter than a gnat's hiccup (such people make lousy readers of thick novels).

Worse, it's a place where people make sweeping judgments about people like Charlie Kirk after watching a 30-second clip, followed by 30 hateful comments. They ignore the hour-long videos he has on his YouTube channel, where he has unabridged debates with people who disagree with him.

Henry Zebrowski, for example, has posted a meme of Charlie Kirk just before he was shot with the words "Anti-Vaxxer Finally Gets Shot." It takes a lot of dehumanization to say something like that on a public forum.

Cal Newport describes social media as "an attention factory" where people are "toiling anonymously" while "billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths."

When its current overseer, Elon Musk, bought Twitter and turned it into a free speech platform with a really strange name, freedom-fighters cheered. Instead, he may have done freedom a better service by burning it to the ground.

John C.A. Manley

P.S. You can read Cal Newport's post, "On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society," over at CalNewport.com

P.P.S. The only "social media" platform that I do use to promote my work is GoodReads. It's a great place to discuss books with other book lovers. You can join GoodReads and follow me here.

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.