The Fallout from Charlie Kirk’s Death Online

Also Inside: Google Search spikes and unprecedented engagement for right-wing social media

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Sep 19, 2025

Hi everyone—we’re Eric Coffin-Gould and Carly Evans: data analysts, long-time FWIW readers and guest authors for today’s edition. We are part of a new political communications organization called Resonate, where we specialize in measuring and monitoring what’s happening on social media.

We’re also the authors of a daily newsletter, What’s Resonating, that keeps political professionals and creators informed about what’s happening on the internet every weekday. If you find what we have to say today interesting (if depressing), we highly recommend subscribing.

For today’s FWIW, we’re breaking down the social media fallout of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the surge of engagement the right has seen online.

Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $11.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Texas State Rep. James Talarico announced his Senate campaign just ten days ago and spent 55x more on Meta ads last week than his primary opponent, Colin Allred, whose investments totaled a mere $6,632.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Both Virginia gubernatorial candidates made significant investments, though former Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s were approximately 5x that of her Republican counterpart, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

Unsurprisingly, California’s redistricting battle continues to attract big money. Gov. Gavin Newsom spent nearly $1 million in pro-Prop 50 Google and Youtube ads last week alone. Protect Voters First, sponsored by Hold Politicians Accountable, is bankrolled by mega-millionaire Republican activist Charles Munger, Jr. and ran more than a half a million dollars worth of ads in opposition.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $7.3 million on ads in 2025. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.5 million on ads in 2025. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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Quantifying the impact of Kirk’s death

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has been one of the most seismic moments on political social media this decade. The immediate shock of it had nearly unprecedented reach online, and the aftereffects of that rush of attention have given right-wing social media a substantial boost.

Consider this: according to Google Trends, search activity for Charlie Kirk in September was at least five times higher than George Floyd’s death in 2020, Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2022, or the selection of the pope earlier this year. In fact, Google searches for Charlie Kirk eclipsed the highest spikes for the NBA, NFL, World Cup, and Olympics since January 2020.

In our own social listening database, which consists of over 10,000 accounts across nine platforms, right-leaning pages saw a massive spike in activity last week. At Resonate, we use engagements—defined as the combination of a post’s likes, comments, and shares—as our most consistent metric to measure across different social media platforms.

Posts from right-leaning pages in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination on September 10th generated more engagements than the July 2024 assassination attempt against Trump, the November 2024 celebrations around Trump’s election win, or Trump’s January 2025 inauguration.

In terms of historical import, Kirk’s death is plainly less significant than Trump’s election win for conservatives—so why did it generate more engagement? One simple answer: Kirk was one of the most famous political influencers out there. He ranked 18th in total engagements among Resonate’s top pages. If you exclude organizations and filter to just individuals, he would rank 5th. At the time of his death, he had 14 million followers combined across Instagram and TikTok—and has gained another 8 million since. Even outside of politics, no influencer this famous has been killed in the influencer era.

Kirk’s death generated a reaction unlike anything we’ve seen in our social media monitoring. Accounts across the political spectrum received their most-engaged or highest-viewed post ever last week, including: Dean Withers, Turning Point USA, Riley Gaines, Topher, Team Trump, and many other right-leaning pages, including Donald Trump himself. Many of these accounts shattered their previous records for engagement or views on a single post.

This wave occurred across platforms: TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and of course the conservative bastion that is Twitter. Even after the initial shockwave passed, right-leaning pages as a whole were still generating 70 million engagements a day for September 13-16, more than double their daily average in the weeks leading up to Kirk’s assassination.

This is a huge turnaround. For much of the summer, left-leaning pages were actually “winning” on social media, riding a wave of outrage over the Epstein files and ICE raids, while right-leaning engagement was at its lowest level since the New Year. The MAGA movement that was showing signs of splintering over issues like the Epstein files and Gaza is now once again united on a single issue and reorganizing around a common enemy.

What comes next

New voices seem likely to rise up in place of Charlie Kirk.

Erika Kirk gained 5.5 million followers on Instagram in the past week, while Turning Point USA gained 3 million on Instagram and an estimated 5 million on Facebook.

Turning Point also claimed to receive at least 54,000 requests to start new local TPUSA chapters. At least 20 other right-leaning accounts unaffiliated with Kirk have gained 100,000 followers or more since September 10th, including Nick Fuentes, Jeffrey Mead, Piers Morgan, and Brandon Tatum. Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire have also seen a resurgence after previously falling out of favor among the right, with Shapiro promising to take up Kirk’s mantle.

So what happens next? So far, right-leaning pages have used their newfound attention to focus on two things: violent rhetoric against the left and repressing free speech — especially calling for the firing of anyone who remotely criticizes Kirk or accurately contextualizes events around his assassination. The latter seems likely to spark a backlash and galvanize Democrats into a counterresponse, with early signs indicating that Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension by ABC late Wednesday night sparked huge engagement for the left online.

This should be a rallying point for Democrats.

ABC’s capitulation to pressure from the Trump administration is the latest example of media companies muzzling or firing reporters who criticize or question things Trump doesn’t agree with. This isn’t free speech—and it certainly can’t go unchecked if we want to live in a democracy.

We call on left-leaning pages to aggressively call out these blatant attempts to exert control over what Americans can say and hear and pressure media companies to stand up for our rights and freedoms.

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