Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, U.S. foreign adversaries have been using false or incendiary claims to further divide Americans. Russia, China and Iran hope to stoke political divisions in the U.S., according to a new report from NewsGuard.
Misinformation campaign
NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation online, found from Sept. 10-17, there were 6,200 mentions of Kirk’s name across official Russian, Chinese and Iranian state media.
“A lot of it has been pushing anti-Western sentiment and sort of seizing on the news and the interest in the topic to push their respective geopolitical interests,” McKenzie Sadeghi, editor of AI and foreign influence at NewsGuard, told Straight Arrow News.
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Each nation did it in a different way.
Russia framed it against Ukraine, linking Kirk’s murder to U.S. military aid for Kyiv.
Iran framed it against Israel, claiming the Israelis orchestrated the attack on Kirk because of his opposition to the U.S. military strikes on Iran.
China spread false claims about the accused killer Tyler Robinson to paint the U.S. as unstable and divided, which is not entirely inaccurate according to a recent Gallup poll.
There is no evidence any foreign nation had any involvement with Kirk’s killing.
“A lot of the coverage we were seeing was sort of aiming to amplify a lot of the existing divisions and debates going on online,” Sadeghi said.
Gov. Spencer Cox, R-Utah, shared his concerns about this just two days after the shooting.
“What we are seeing is our adversaries want violence,” Cox said. “We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”
Russian misinformation
NewsGuard found most of the misinformation came out of Russia.
The organization cited an example of ultranationalist writer and Vladimir Putin ally Alexander Dugin who wrote a post comparing Kirk’s death to the death of his daughter Darya. She was blown up in a car bombing that Russia blamed on Ukraine.
A daily Russian tabloid even printed the headline “Ukraine has found the culprit in Kirk’s death: it turned out to be Zelensky.”
“With Russia in particular, we’ve seen a lot of articles suggesting or accusing Ukrainian involvement,” Sadeghi said.
Impact of misinformation
While the goal of spreading misinformation and dividing the U.S. is clear, did it work?
NewsGuard recently partnered with YouGov for a poll that found 1 in 5 Americans believed at least one Russian disinformation narrative.
“We’re also seeing as well that people are increasingly turning to AI tools to get facts and get news and information,” Sadeghi said. “So last week, the day of the assassination, when it happened, many people were turning to these chatbots to validate some of these claims that they were seeing. And what we saw was that these chatbots were repeating them and falsely saying that they were true.”
Sadeghi said the chatbots are working off the same sources the misinformation comes from in the first place.
History of misinformation
This isn’t the first time these countries have used misinformation to further divide the U.S.
“With the Los Angeles protests earlier this year and the pro-Palestinian protests that broke out across U.S. college campuses last year, they similarly seized on these events to push their narratives about Ukraine or Israel or whatever enemy it is, and trying to implicate them in that attack and sort of drum up support for their motive,” Sadeghi said.
The misinformation about the LA protests mainly came from China and Russia. They pushed similar narratives, claiming the U.S. was hypocritical, unstable and declining.
“We’ve often seen that whenever there’s a high profile breaking news event, it’s very common for Russian, Chinese and Iranian state media to sort of weaponize that event and push these false claims,” Sadeghi said. “So, for example, the Syrian rebel takeover back in December, we saw the same exact pattern play out where Russia was accusing Ukraine of being behind the rebel offensive, Iran blaming Israel and China sort of using it to mock the U.S. So it’s a very common pattern that we’ve seen.”
What can be done?
There’s a wide-ranging web of what needs to be done to stop the spread and damage of misinformation.
“Countering it and addressing it requires actions from a range of groups, whether that’s platforms or other entities and researchers,” Sadeghi said. “Just given how prevalent and widespread the issue is.”
Cornell University has a list of ways to stay media literate and understand not everything you read on the internet is a fact. Those include double checking sources, sticking to reputable sources and diversifying your sources.
Social media companies have taken some steps to counter misinformation but some have rolled back those initiatives under the Trump administration, including Facebook.
