Just before Tyler Robinson turned himself in for the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, authorities say he appeared to leave a trail of incriminating messages on the online gaming platform Discord.
At first, his messages were playful. When a friend on a group chat noticed his likeness to the skinny white man in the grainy photos released by the FBI of the Utah Valley University shooting suspect — asking Robinson “wya,” an abbreviation of “where you at?” — Robinson was quick to joke: “My doppelganger is trying to get me in trouble.”
But in a later Discord chat, Robinson appeared to confess.
“Hey guys, I have bad news for you all,” Robinson said before he went to a police station the next day to surrender: “It was me at UVU yesterday.”
Discord, the gaming messaging platform used by more than 200 million people, now finds itself at the center of the Kirk murder investigation and a roiling, heavily politicized national discussion about the internet’s role in fomenting violent extremism. Some lawmakers are threatening to impose more aggressive regulations and oversight on social media platforms.
After federal agents served Discord with a search warrant, FBI Director Kash Patel said Tuesday at a Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing that agents are investigating “anyone and everyone” who interacted with Robinson on the platform. Asked if they were investigating more than 20 Discord users, Patel said, “It’s a lot more than that.”
“We’re running them all down,” Patel said.
But as prosecutors say they will pursue the death penalty — bringing seven charges including aggravated murder — Discord is only one part of the evidence investigators say they have against Robinson. They have cited DNA from the scene, text messages with his roommate and partner, and testimony from his family about statements at the dinner table about Kirk being full of hate.
So far, officials have provided no evidence that Robinson planned the shooting on Discord or that any of his contacts on the platform knew of a plan to target Kirk .
A Discord spokesperson said last week that an internal investigation has “not found or received any evidence that the suspect planned this incident on Discord or promoted violence on Discord.” Messages “about weapon retrieval and planning details,” the spokesperson stressed, “were not Discord messages, and likely took place on a phone-number based messaging platform.”
That did not stop Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, from sending letters Wednesday to the chief executive officers of Discord — and other online gaming and social platforms Steam, Twitch and Reddit — requesting them to testify at an Oct. 8. committee hearing on online radicalization.
“In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence,” Comer said in a statement. He called on the CEOs of Discord and other networks to “explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes.”
This is not the first time Discord, a network developed a decade ago for video gamers to chat directly by text, video or voice calls as they play games, has been accused of being a platform for extremists.
In 2017, two years after Discord was founded, white supremacists used the site to plan the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
The platform, which allows users to connect with other players, find teammates, get game updates and participate in community discussions, then took steps to prioritize content moderation. Over the next four years, it said in 2021, its trust and safety team swelled from one person to about 60 people, split between responding to user complaints and “proactively finding and removing servers and users engaging in high-harm activity like violent extremist organizing.”
But in 2022, Discord made the news again: Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white supremacist who killed 10 people in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket, used the platform for more than a year and a half to plan his attack.
While Discord is a platform extremists use to communicate, it is not the only one and extremists do not make up the bulk of its users, said Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino.
Rather than scrutinize Discord and other social platforms, Levin said, Congress would be better served examining the evolving nature of extremism.
“Discord is just the latest device, much like the cell phone,” Levin said. “If you target a platform, young people and extremists will find a new place to go.”
After the Kirk shooting, about 20 Discord users had been questioned, a law enforcement source told The Times. Not all of the people questioned were in the same chats.
Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and current president of West Coast Trial Lawyers in Los Angeles, said the texts and Discord conversations can be effectively used by prosecutors as a confession if they can be determined to come from Robinson.
“To the extent that those are his words, then absolutely,” Rahmani said. “They will be used against him.”
But Rahmani said there doesn’t seem to be any criminal liability for members of the Discord chat group where Robinson appeared to have to confessed to the shooting, unless any of them took steps to help Robinson commit the crime or hide evidence.
Merely being part of the chat group, he said, did not mean they were criminally responsible.
“A normal civilian, you and me, you have no legal duty to stop or report it,” Rahmani said.
Members of the chat would also not be required to stop or report anything to police, even if the killing was planned on the platform, he said. Unless someone in the chat was a mandated reporter, like a psychiatrist or therapist, they have no legal requirement to reach out to authorities.
“By not reporting, that’s not enough to be obstructing an investigation,” he said.
But that could change if someone in the chat tried to hide the text messages, or delete the conversations, Rahmani said.
“That’s an affirmative act,” he said. “That’s destroying evidence, and that’s very different.”
The platforms would have the same responsibility, Rahmani said, and although many of them take steps to monitor and report suspicious activity, not detecting or reporting it would not make them criminally liable.
In 1996, Congress passed Section 230, a law to protect the evolving world of online communication. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service,” it says, “shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
Catherine Crump, a clinical professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, said messaging and social media platforms have a virtual “ironclad immunity” from the content made by its users under Sec. 230. She noted that the law has long been viewed as out of date — artificial intelligence and algorithms to monitor speech or content, she noted, did not exist when it was passed — but the platforms are protected from their own content until an act of Congress makes changes.
“We’re dependent on Congress to act here,” Crump said. “And Congress has not been effective on doing that under any kind of administration.”
Focusing on Discord as an online source of political radicalization in this case, some argue, does not make sense: Evidence has yet to emerge that Robinson engaged politically on the site or discussed any plan to target Kirk ahead of the shooting.
According to officials, Robinson sent some of his most incriminating messages via text message.
After the shooting, court documents indicate, Robinson texted his partner to say: “Drop what you’re doing, look under my keyboard.” The roommate found a message that read: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.”
“What?????????????? You’re joking, right????” the roommate responded.
“You weren’t the one who did it right????” his roommate asked.
“I am,” Robinson responded. “I’m sorry.”
During the conversation, court documents show, Robinson told his partner he left a rifle wrapped in a towel in a bush and needed to retrieve it from a drop point. He also appeared to provide a motive:
“Why?” his partner texted Robinson.
“Why did I do it?” Robinson responded.
“Yeah,” the roommate replied.
“I had enough of his hatred,” Robinson replied. “Some hate can’t be negotiated.”
During Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called for the repeal of Sec. 230 and accused social media platforms of radicalizing users. “These companies are taking content that makes you sick, that could get you killed, get you poisoned, “ he said, “and there’s nothing we can do about it under our law … because of Section 230. “
It appeared to be a sentiment Patel agreed with.
“Do you believe that social media is one of the instruments radicalizing America and inciting violence?” Graham asked Patel.
“The data shows that social media is wildly out of control when it comes to radicalizing,” Patel said.
Graham then asked the FBI director if he would support a repeal of Sec. 230.
“I’ve advocated that for years,” Patel said.
