By DAVID BAUDER, AP Media Writer

Charlie Kirk’s mastery of social media was key to his rise as an influence in conservative politics. So the extent to which his death and its aftermath have played out on those forums shouldn’t come as a surprise.

In a microcosm of life today, social media is where Americans have gone to process last week’s killing in Utah and is the chief tool his supporters are using to police those they feel aren’t offering proper respect. Investigators are probing the time the man accused of killing Kirk, Tyler Robinson, spent in the “dark corners of the internet” — anti-social media, if you will — leading up to when he allegedly pulled the trigger.

On the other side of the world, as the Kirk story preoccupied Americans, Nepal reeled from a spasm of violence that erupted when the government tried to ban social media platforms.

All of this is forcing a closer look at the technologies that have changed our lives, how they control what we see and understand through algorithms, and the way all the time we spend on them affects our view of the world.

Cox emerges as powerful spokesman against social media

Utah’s governor, Republican Spencer Cox, believes “cancer” isn’t a strong enough word to describe social media. “The most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage … and get us to hate each other,” Cox said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, urged Americans via social media to “pull yourself together, read a book, get some exercise, have a whiskey, walk the dog or make some pasta or go fishing or just do anything other than let this algo pickle your brain and ruin your soul.”

Chilling videos of Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination immediately overwhelmed sites like X, TikTok and YouTube, and companies are still working to contain their spread. Confrontational material and conspiracy theories are pushed into social media feeds because they do precisely what they’re designed to do — keep people on the platforms for longer periods of time.

“I do think we’re in a moment here,” said Laura Edelson, a Northeastern University professor and expert on social media algorithms. “Our country is being digitally mediated. Where we interact with other people, how we interact with broader society, that is more and more happening over feed algorithms. This is the most recent in a long line of ways that society has been changed by media technology.”

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Divisive content and the proliferation of the video of Kirk’s death may not have been the goal but are the direct result of decisions made to maximize profits and cut back on content moderation, Edelson said.

“I don’t think there are people twirling their mustaches saying how great it is that we’ve divided society, except the Russian troll farms and, more and more, the Chinese troll farms,” she said.

X owner Elon Musk posted on his site this past week that while discourse can become negative, “it’s still good there is a discussion going.” Conservative media star Ben Shapiro, who considered Kirk a friend, admired how Kirk was willing to go to different places and talk to people who disagreed with him, a practice all too rare in the social media era.

“How social media works is a disaster area, fully a disaster area,” Shapiro said in an interview with Bari Weiss on a Free Press podcast. “There’s no question it’s making the world a worse place — and that’s not a call for censorship.”

How people act on social media is a bipartisan problem, said Shapiro. The most pervasive one is people who use the third-person plural — “they” are doing something to “us,” he said. That’s been the case when many people discuss Kirk’s death, although the shooter’s motives haven’t become clear and there’s no evidence his actions are anything other than his own.

Collecting inflammatory posts from both sides

The liberal MeidasTouch media company has collected inflammatory social posts by conservatives, particularly those who suggest they’re at “war.” Meanwhile, several conservatives have combed social media for posts they consider negative toward Kirk, in some cases seeking to get people fired. The Libs of TikTok site urged that a Washington state school district be defunded because it refused to lower flags to half staff.

GOP Rep. Randy Fine of Florida asked people to point out negative Kirk posts from anyone who works in government, at a place that receives public funding or is licensed by government — a teacher or lawyer, for instance. “These monsters want a fight?” he wrote on X. “Congratulations, they got one.”

A Washington Post columnist, Karen Attiah, wrote Monday that she was fired for a series of BlueSky posts that expressed little sympathy for Kirk. But she wrote on Substack that “not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them.” A Post spokeswoman declined to comment.

So much of what people use to talk about politics — algorithmically driven social media sites and cable television — is designed to pull Americans apart, said James Talarico, a Democratic state lawmaker in Texas who recently announced a bid for the U.S. Senate. “We’ve got to find our way back to each other because that’s the only way we can continue this American experiment,” he said on MSNBC.

Among the most persistent examples of those divisions are the lies and misinformation about elections that have spread for years through online social channels. They have undermined faith in one of the country’s bedrock institutions and contributed to the rage that led supporters of President Donald Trump to violently storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Whether meaningful change is possible remains an open question. Nepal’s unrest illustrated the dangers of government involvement: Social media sites were shut down and users protested, suggesting it had been a way to stop criticism of government. Police opened fire at one demonstration, killing 19 people.

Persuading social media sites to change their algorithms is also an uphill battle. They live off attention and people spending as much time as possible on them. Unless advertisers flee for fear of being associated with violent posts, there’s little incentive for them to change, said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at EMarketer.

Young people in particular are becoming aware of the dangers of spending too much time on social media, she said.

But turn their phones off? “The reality of the situation,” Enberg said, “is that there’s a limit to how much they can limit their behavior.”

Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York and Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some Democratic senators say they are deeply concerned that a Pentagon plan to allow military lawyers to work as temporary immigration judges will violate a ban on using service members for law enforcement and affect the military justice system.

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The letter, sent to the military services and provided to The Associated Press, comes two weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved sending up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department to serve as temporary immigration judges. It is part of the steps the Trump administration has taken to use the military in broader ways than previously seen, particularly in its immigration crackdown, including sending the National Guard into American cities and deploying active duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“These military officers would serve under the command and control of the Attorney General and would execute administrative determinations at the direction of the Attorney General,” according to the letter signed by 12 Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It added that “these actions are inherently law enforcement actions that may not be performed by members of the armed forces.”

“We remain extremely disturbed about the impacts on readiness of using military personnel to perform what are traditionally Department of Justice functions,” the letter says.

The nation’s immigration courts — with a backlog of about 3.5 million cases — have become a key focus of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration enforcement efforts. Since Trump returned to office, dozens of immigration judges have been fired, while others have resigned or taken early retirement.

The senators’ letter, sent to the offices of the top military lawyers for the four services on Monday, is asking the Pentagon to say where the roughly 600 lawyers will be coming from and for insight into what legal analysis the military has conducted into whether the move would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. That law prevents the military from conducting law enforcement outside of extreme emergencies.

A Pentagon memo that described the plan said the lawyers should not be detailed for longer than half a year. The memo also showed that Pentagon officials were cognizant of the possibility for conflict with that law and said the Justice Department would be responsible for ensuring that the military lawyers do not violate it.

The Democratic senators said they were “deeply concerned” that pulling those lawyers away would have an impact on service members who are going through the military’s judicial system.

“These reassignments come at a time only shortly after Congress completely overhauled how the military investigates and prosecutes serious ‘covered’ criminal offenses … by establishing the Offices of Special Trial Counsel (OSTCs) in each of the Services,” the letter read.

Those offices were set up by Congress in 2022 as part of an effort to reform the military justice system by moving decisions on the prosecution of serious military crimes, including sexual assault, to independent military attorneys, taking that power away from victims’ commanders.

The offices began taking cases at the end of last year.

The letter asks the Pentagon what it will do to “preserve the OSTC’s progress in building specialized trial capacity” and what the services will do to “ensure that diversion of OSTCs, trial counsels, and defense counsels does not create delays or diminish quality in court-martials.” The senators say that the plan is a demonstration of how “the Trump administration views skilled personnel as pawns to be traded between agencies, rather than as professionals essential to their core missions, in order to advance misguided immigration policies.”

By MELANIE LIDMAN, Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) — Nine hours of frantic negotiation with the Israeli military. A last-minute scramble to find trucks in a devastated Gaza Strip, where fuel is in short supply. Six hours of frantic packing, carefully stacking cardboard boxes on open flatbed trucks.

With an Israeli airstrike looming, aid workers carried out a last-minute rescue mission to salvage thousands of priceless artifacts from a Gaza warehouse before the building was flattened.

The warehouse contained artifacts from over 25 years of excavations, including items from a 4th-century Byzantine monastery designated as a World Heritage Site by the U.N. cultural organization UNESCO, and some of the oldest known evidence of Christianity in Gaza. The Israeli military said the building housed Hamas intelligence installations and planned to demolish it as part of their expanded military operation in Gaza City.

“It’s not just about Palestinian heritage or Christian heritage, it’s something important to the world heritage here, protected by UNESCO,” explained Kevin Charbel, the emergency field coordinator for Première Urgence Internationale (PUI), a humanitarian organization which has worked in Gaza since 2009. PUI is a health organization that also works toward the protection of Gaza’s cultural heritage.

Negotiating against the clock

COGAT, Israel’s defense body in charge of humanitarian aid, notified PUI of the demolition plan last Wednesday morning. The warning was triggered by a notification system managed by the international NGOS to let the Israeli military know that a specific area is a sensitive site such as a school, hospital, or warehouses holding humanitarian aid.

Charbel, who is based in Gaza City on a temporary humanitarian rotation, spent nine hours furiously negotiating with the Israeli military for a delay to allow workers to move the artifacts to a safer location. But the challenge was larger than just holding off the military. As Israel expands its operation in Gaza City, other organizations were in disarray, and no one could locate trucks to transport the artifacts at such short notice.

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“Five minutes before I had to accept this was going to be evaporated in front of us, another actor offered us transport,” said Charbel. PUI worked with the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem to move the artifacts to a safer location in Gaza City that is not being disclosed for security reasons.

The French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EBAF), a venerated archaeological institution in the region which oversaw the Dead Sea Scrolls excavation in Israel, was responsible for the storage of about 80 square meters (860 sq ft) of archaeological artifacts in the Al-Kawthar high-rise building in Gaza City. PUI was providing security for the site.

Dozens of ancient archaeological sites have been found in Gaza, including temples, monasteries, palaces, churches, mosques and mosaics. Many of them have been lost to urban sprawl and looting. UNESCO is struggling to preserve some of those that remain. Some of the sites date back 6,000 years, when Gaza was a central stop on trade routes between Egypt and the Levant, and the emergence of urban societies began to transform farming villages.

The artifacts rescued this week include ceramic jugs, mosaics, coins, painted plasterwork, human and animal remains, and items excavated from the Saint Hilarion Monastery, one of the oldest known examples of Christian monastic communities in the Middle East, according to UNESCO.

No time for normal preparation

Starting just after sunrise on Thursday, workers rushed to pack five flatbed trucks with as many delicate artifacts as they possibly could in the space of six hours. Artifacts, which had been carefully stored and documented in the warehouse, were hurriedly packed in cardboard boxes, with nearly 2,000-year-old pottery resting on the sandy ground.

Charbel noted that transporting such old artifacts usually requires intense preparation and special provisions to protect delicate objects, something that wasn’t possible in this instance. The Israeli military does not allow the use of closed container trucks, exposing the artifacts to additional dangers. Several items were broken en route and others had to be left behind. Israel destroyed the building on Sunday, claiming Hamas had positioned observation posts and intelligence-gathering infrastructure within it.

Over the past week, Israel has demolished multiple high-rise buildings in Gaza City, part of its dramatic warnings to civilians to evacuate ahead of the ground offensive, which began on Tuesday morning.

As Israel’s ground operation expands, the artifacts are being held in a different location in Gaza City. However, they are outside, exposed to the elements, and remain in grave danger as strikes intensify.

UNESCO said Israel has damaged at least 110 cultural sites across the Gaza Strip, including 13 religious sites, 77 buildings of historical or artistic interest, one museum, and seven archaeological sites, since the beginning of the war in October 2023.

During the archaeological rescue, Charbel said, he and other aid workers also wrestled with deeper questions. Did it make sense to direct so many resources, including desperately needed fuel and trucks, risking the lives of multiple people who worked under constant threat of bombardment, for inanimate historical objects, when the humanitarian situation is so dire? Charbel said he was worried about spending so much time arguing over the archaeological artifacts when they also needed to negotiate with COGAT about life-saving water, food, and medicine.

“But we accepted to do this, because it’s so valuable, this stuff, it’s of such importance to world history and also Palestinian history,” said Charbel. “Destroying early examples of Christian history in Palestine would erase it forever.”

By MATT O’BRIEN, AP Technology Writer

The parents of teenagers who killed themselves after interactions with artificial intelligence chatbots are planning to testify to Congress on Tuesday about the dangers of the technology.

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Matthew Raine, the father of 16-year-old Adam Raine of California, and Megan Garcia, the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III of Florida, are set to speak to a Senate hearing on the harms posed by AI chatbots.

Raine’s family sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman last month alleging that ChatGPT coached the boy in planning to take his own life in April. Garcia sued another AI company, Character Technologies, for wrongful death last year, arguing that before his suicide, Sewell had become increasingly isolated from his real life as he engaged in highly sexualized conversations with the chatbot.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

Hours before the Senate hearing, OpenAI pledged to roll out new safeguards for teens, including efforts to detect whether ChatGPT users are under 18 and controls that enable parents to set “blackout hours” when a teen can’t use ChatGPT. Child advocacy groups criticized the announcement as not enough.

“This is a fairly common tactic — it’s one that Meta uses all the time — which is to make a big, splashy announcement right on the eve of a hearing which promises to be damaging to the company,” said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a group advocating for children’s online safety.

“What they should be doing is not targeting ChatGPT to minors until they can prove that it’s safe for them,” Golin said. “We shouldn’t allow companies, just because they have tremendous resources, to perform uncontrolled experiments on kids when the implications for their development can be so vast and far-reaching.”

The Federal Trade Commission said last week it had launched an inquiry into several companies about the potential harms to children and teenagers who use their AI chatbots as companions.

The agency sent letters to Character, Meta and OpenAI, as well as to Google, Snap and xAI.