Sam Harris: Log Off

This article is part of a Free Press series on “Repairing America in the Age of Political Violence.” Read the other entries, including from Abigail Shrier, Coleman Hughes and others, here.

I began my “Truth & Consequences” speaking tour this week in Seattle and San Jose, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk was on everyone’s mind. Before stepping onstage, I received texts from several friends who wanted to know the details of my security. One family member urged me to cancel the whole tour immediately.

Kirk was a political prodigy on the right and adored by a younger generation of Republicans. While I never met him, and didn’t follow his work closely, it was obvious that we weren’t political allies. It should go without saying that I feel nothing but sadness for him and his family.

His murder was an especially terrible crime for several reasons—the fact that it occurred on a college campus in front of thousands of students, the manner in which it was immediately broadcast on social media, the presence of his wife and children at the scene, and the unavoidable sense that both the causes and consequences had to be political. Whatever the killer’s motives, he dropped a match onto an information landscape that was ready to burn.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Je Suis Charlie

The Editors

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Rise of Political Violence

Bari Weiss

The Students Celebrating Charlie Kirk’s Murder

Maya Sulkin, Sean Fischer

Spencer Cox and Bernie Sanders Rise to the Moment

Peter Savodnik

Since deleting my Twitter account nearly three years ago, I’ve generally ignored social media. However, in the last 48 hours I’ve spent enough time studying the response to Kirk’s death to be further convinced that platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture. No metaphor does the problem justice. I’ve compared social media to a dangerous psychological experiment, a hallucination machine, a funhouse mirror, a digital sewer—but nothing captures the ludicrous insults, moral injuries, and delusions that millions of us avidly produce and consume online. If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis—and it will send us careening from one political emergency to the next. The fact that some of the most deranging and divisive content is being created (or amplified) by foreign adversaries—and that we have literally built and monetized their capacity to do this—beggars belief. We are poisoning ourselves and inviting others to poison us.