America’s Violence Addiction: how social media became a forum for bloodsports
This piece was published on my newsletter, Future Proof, on 11th September, 2025. Between then and now — 12/09/25 — a suspect has been apprehended in connection with the murder of Charlie Kirk. Rather than amend the piece to reflect that, I leave the blog as it was originally written and published, as I think it makes a substantive point about the way we speculate about political violence in the wake of a needless murder.
A couple of weeks ago I started writing a blog with the pithy title “Violence in the Stream: is this what we are?”. It was off the back of a couple of incidences of extreme, shocking violence that were live-streamed to a captive audience. But then, last night, the conservative polemicist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah and the issue seemed, to me, to have reached a more serious inflection point.
Kirk was a star — albeit of a politics I find personally distasteful. He founded Turning Point, a right-wing youth movement, in 2012 when he was still a teenager. Since then, two Trump presidencies had accelerated him into the upper echelons of political thought. With the 2024 Presidential election cycle, Kirk began a series of debate tours of American campuses. He would go around the country and go head-to-head with liberal minded students, challenging the (alleged) left-wing bias within American academia. The videos of these events — some of which saw Kirk taking on dozens of students at a time — made him a mainstream media personality. On social media they fed both sides of the political spectrum. His supporters amplified moments where the college dropout got the best of his leftie contestants. On the flip-side, videos of him getting “owned” on issues like abortion and immigration routinely went viral amongst his critics. Either way, it made him more famous, more important.
The premise of Kirk’s routine — encircling himself with his staunchest critics — was to walk, like Daniel, into the lion’s den. I would be hard pressed to find a single issue, on all of God’s green earth, on which Kirk and I would have agreed, but it was clear that he took this stuff seriously. In an age of cynicism and reactionary conservatism, where young men so often see anti-foreigner, anti-woman, anti-LGBT rhetoric as a cheap path to notoriety, at least Kirk’s approach was honest. He put his head in the jaws of the lion and then tried to talk his way out.
Which brings me back to the piece that I was going to write.
A couple of weeks ago, Raja Jackson — the son of Rampage Jackson, a famous American MMA fighter (more on MMA in a second) — live-streamed footage of him beating a pro-wrestler, Stuart ‘Syko Stu’ Smith, to within an inch of his life. The incident was broadcast live on Kick, one of the major streaming platforms (and one perceived as having a more permissive content moderation policy than its bigger rivals, Twitch and YouTube). In the video, Jackson flips his opponent (in a manner familiar to WWE fans) and then starts to beat his head in a relentless frenzy. The staff in the ring appear shellshocked. It takes several seconds for anyone to intervene, by which time traumatic damage has likely been done to Smith. (Jackson has yet to be charged for the assault).
A few weeks ago, Vice reported on a video that has been circulating, for sale, on Telegram called ‘The Vietnamese Butcher’. The video purportedly shows the killing of a Vietnamese man, seemingly in a consensual (whatever that could possibly mean) act of kink-based suicide. “A snuff movie is essentially a murder, filmed and distributed for commercial purposes,” Vice’s Ben Ditto reported. “The existence of genuine snuff has never been proven… until now.”
And yet, watching Raja Jackson unleash on his prone opponent, it was hard not to feel like we’re living in a very snuff-adjacent age. The bloody attack — its filming and distribution — were clearly for commercial purposes. The fact that it did not result in a murder was a coin toss left to fate. Syko Stu could just have easily succumbed to his injuries. Would it then have met the qualifying criteria for a snuff film?
And what about the death of Raphaël Graven, known as Jean Pormanove, a French streamer who died back in August. His final moments were broadcast on Kick. Pormanove had been part of a “death game” which involved violence and humiliation at the urging of participants and viewers. “I feel like I’m kidnapped with their shitty concept,” he wrote to his mother, shortly before his death. But the returns were clear. In August 2024, a year before his death, Pormanove was the 4th most popular Kick channel in the world, with 3.41m watch hours. That should have made him one of the most power media personalities on the social internet, yet he died, alone and desperately. It was another snuff film, perpetrated by a community that has become inured both to the actuality of violence and its potential.
The incident with Jackson troubled me, particularly, because it is on a continuum with how an American-led social media climate is heating up. The incident took place in a wrestling ring which is symbolic in itself. At the start of the 20th century, professional wrestling in the United States transitioned from a sport (based on the ancient traditions of Greco-Roman wrestling) to a choreographed performance, half dance, half theatre. It was greeted, at first, by controversy, with people feeling short-changed, but developed into a massive entertainment product. People knew it was scripted, yet they still invested in the characters and the match-ups. In the latter part of the 20th century, it graduated to one of the biggest entertainment products in America, if not the world. It presented a culture rooted deep in masculinised violence, yet was fundamentally bloodless (traumatic brain injuries, such as that sustained by murderer Chris Benoit aside).
For some, that would be enough. But the 21st century has seen MMA — a similar product to pro wrestling, just a) real, and b) really violent — accelerate beyond WWE as a commercial product. YouTubers and TikTokers have engaged in both boxing and MMA fights as part of their audience development, and these aren’t play fights but genuine bloodsports. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were due to publicly cage-fight, only for Musk to pull out, citing a minor injury. The appetite for scripted reality is drying up, but the thirst for violence remains unslakeable. And so when Raja Jackson flipped the script on Syco Stu, he was bringing that sudden shock of unfettered violence into an arena based on an illusion. Out with the 20th century, in with the 21st.
There is an increasing edge to the way that content is being created online. It is, in part, a race to the bottom, where the diminishing returns from platform disbursement create bigger incentives to bait engagement (and what baits engagement more than, say, needlessly initiating arguments with disabled people in supermarkets?). But there’s also something in the exsanguinated detachment of the internet that gives rise to a world in which young men (and it is predominantly a) young, and b) men) feel they have no meaningful stake. If your life is conducted largely on Reddit or 4Chan or Telegram or Discord or the in-built PlayStation voice chat, why would you care about social norms? Why would you feel invested in the mutual agreed accommodations that are essential to a functioning society? Why would you let people merge at a busy T-junction? Why would you put the orange juice back in the fridge when you realise its pulp-free? Why would you not talk in the cinema during the movie?
And why would you not see violence as just abstract entertainment? If you’re watching an iShowSpeed stream from eastern Europe where he baits locals into mistakenly using racial slurs, why would you not hope the scene devolves into violence? Why would you wish that MrBeast’s contestants, scrabbling to stay in the game and win some ludicrous cash prize, wouldn’t descent into chaos? Why wouldn’t you pray that Jake Paul and Tommy Fury knock seven bells out of each other? Everything is bloodsports now.
The murder of Charlie Kirk has quickly been condemned as an act of political violence. Across the spectrum, figures have rushed to sympathise with his young family and make clear that there is no place for political violence. Yet, we still don’t really know whether this was an act of ‘political violence’, as many people interpret it (perhaps we will, by the time you’re reading this). If it was intended as an act of political violence, it was of mind numbing stupidity. Left-wing rage against Charlie Kirk is real — he has spent years expounding many ideas that people, myself included, find abhorrent — but his death simply serves to create a new martyr of the right, galvanising that cause and further cleaving it from moderates and liberals. Assassinating someone with huge influence but no power runs contrary to the (scant) logic of political violence.
But as the footage of Kirk’s death circulated on social media last night, it was reminiscent of so much of the violent imagery that circulates in the American internet ecosphere these days. Footage like that should be shocking. But that increasingly hysterical note to live-streaming these days has created an environment where a young man being murdered at university debate feels almost like an expected acceleration, rather than a bolt from the blue. Much of Kirk’s oeuvre has been designed to test the limits that people will go to in debate before they resort to physical violence. His proposition was never really “can we settle this with civilised debate?” but “are you going to hit me?”. Putting your head in the jaws of a lion and trying to talk your way out is all well and good, but it’s worth remembering that lions don’t speak English.
And the internet is fostering an increasing number of stakeless radicals, with whom one cannot conduct a meaningful dialogue. Whether that’s Luigi Mangione or Vance Luther Boelter, who murdered a Democrat politician and her husband just a couple of months ago, there is a creeping normalisation of extreme violence. It is part of gun culture, sure, (which is as mysterious as ever to us in Europe) but it is also part of an internet culture. A social media culture which disinhibits, removes accountability, and which irreparably screws up adolescent dopamine receptors.
And it’s on platforms, too, to do better. A platform that allowed one of its biggest creators to die slowly and horribly on-stream (whilst making a profit from that), isn’t, in my opinion, doing everytthing that it could. It allows the fabric to fray, putting short term commercial interests ahead of maintaining buy-in from social stakeholders. But rather than getting better, as our moderation tools improve, things are getting worse with dramatic intensity. Violence is part of entertainment and it’s part of politics, and that’s on all of us.
And so we end up here, in a bloody mess.
