Epistemica

The phrase “Words are not violence: violence is violence” is making the rounds on social media following Charlie Kirk’s shooting. There is a hidden straw man in the phrase, something akin to “everything that is not explicitly violence isn’t as bad as violence.” But there are often complex causes of violence, and there are other forms of harm than violence. The phrase replaces the substantive claim that speech can cause or constitute harm with the doctrinal truism that violence is violence, conflating legal categories with moral and causal responsibility, and overlooking that threats, targeted harassment, incitement, and systematic dehumanization are speech acts that foreseeably produce harm, including violent outcomes. Influence is cumulative and probabilistic, and denying causal contribution because it is indirect is fallacious.

It is a mistake to assess the danger of influential figures only by asking whether they directly call for violence. Ideas go through networks, reshape social norms, and accumulate into outcomes that no single post or video would predict on its own. When prominent right-wing personalities inject hatred, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories into those networks, the resulting harms are dispersed and probabilistic, but morally traceable when their volume is sufficient and their hateful rhetoric is visibly amplified on social media. We can and should identify the compounding damage that influence can produce even when it remains just shy of illegal incitement.

Misinformation propagates faster and more broadly than accurate information on large platforms, particularly in political domains. Moralized and outraged content (ragebait) also receives social reinforcement, further amplifies its spread and normalizes transgressive speech. There is now an attention economy structurally biased toward emotionally charged falsehoods.

There is also a shared rhetoric of many high-visibility rightwing figures who frame opponents as existential threats, minorities as contaminants, or public servants as enemies. Stochastic terrorism describes the dehumanizing propaganda increases the statistical likelihood of ideologically motivated attacks while preserving the speaker’s deniability. It is indirect and probabilistic, yet intelligible: inflammatory narratives create ambient permission for harassment and violence by receptive individuals.

On August 9, 2025, a gunman motivated by anti-vaccine hostility fired more than 180 rounds near the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing Officer David Rose. The attacker sought to send a message against COVID-19 vaccination and was a product of the cumulative anti-vaccine disinformation effort spread by various rightwing influencers and leaders.

Collective responsibility is distinguishable from shared responsibility. Collective responsibility concerns harms attributable to organized entities. Shared responsibility concerns how individuals bear responsibility for a harm brought about together, even when no one person’s action is decisive. There is a clear diffusion of agency in modern media ecosystems. Platform designers, producers, editors, bookers, advertisers, and star personalities together create and sustain feedback loops that predictably generate harm. Moral appraisal should track those structures.

One can be blameworthy for contributing to a harmful practice one does not directly control, especially when one benefits from it, refrains from counteracting it, or foresees that one’s contributions will facilitate wrongdoing by others. The language of “it was just rhetoric” or “I did not tell anyone to act” fails to absolve foreseeable, avoidable contributions to a dangerous environment.

Hannah Arendt observed that politics often corrodes factual truth, in part because stubborn facts constrain power. When public figures erode the very distinction between fact and fiction, they make citizens manipulable. The contemporary flood of falsehoods, amplified by algorithmic curation and grievance entertainment, does precisely this. Arendt’s warning suggests that politics allergic to factual truth invites domination by whoever can most effectively mobilize fantasy. We are there now.

Trump and many others on the right cherry-pick their moments to be outraged about. Congress held a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk, but the right was literally silent on the political assassination in Minnesota. It has gone beyond the false “Both sides do this” narrative and into the realm of Trump painting the left as violent political terrorists.  Most politically motivated violence in the past decade has been perpetrated by those on the right with perpetrators having social media trails rampant with rightwing figures like Kirk.  Evidence regarding the structure of the right-wing media ecosystem in the United States suggests distinctive amplification patterns that keep false stories in circulation even after debunking. There is an asymmetry that serves as a feature of the system, not a universal nature of American politics.

We know the limits on the restrictions to free speech. American legal doctrine properly limits state punishment of speech to cases like imminent incitement under Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). Joel Feinberg draws from Mill’s harm principle in his series on various harms and non-harms, and the limits of legal pressures on free speech. His account of the harm principle shows why a legal floor on state restrictions on speech does not settle our duties as citizens. Feinberg argues that wrongful setbacks to others’ interests can be produced by speech through intimidation, credible threat, defamation, and systematic demeaning that foreseeably facilitates harmful conduct, even when prosecution is unwarranted. Influence is cumulative, and denying causal contribution because it is indirect is a mistake.