As news broke that conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event on a college campus last week, Hasan Piker’s Twitch chat was spiraling. Messages flooded onto the streamer’s channel. “Disavow quickly and vehemently for your own safety,” one chatter urged. “Pleeeeeeaaaase don’t do public debates anymore,” begged another.
Piker, one of the most prominent progressive creators online, was set to face Kirk in a live debate at Dartmouth University on September 25. Now, still on air with new details about the killing flowing in by the minute, Piker was openly weighing what it meant for his own work as well. “I go out to public settings like this all the time. So there’s a level of closeness in that regard because of the nature of what I do,” Piker told his viewers. “I have a policy of not living in fear, but we’ll see. I might have to reconfigure certain things.”
The killing of Kirk has jolted the political influencer world, forcing creators across the political spectrum to rethink the ways they interact with their fans and audiences. For years, these creators have received threats, both vague and dangerously targeted, but last week’s shooting has turned a concern that may have seemed abstract into a concrete possibility. Now, some creators are taking new security measures and paying closer attention to the provocative comments and messages they frequently receive. But even as they fortify their personal lives, many of these influencers are pushing harder than ever creating political content, unwilling to slow down in an industry where constant output is the name of the game.
One Democratic creator with a large following who frequently attended campaign rallies for President Donald Trump last year says they are working on setting up security systems at their and their parents’ homes. The creator, who spoke to WIRED under the condition of anonymity to protect their and their family’s safety, cited an uptick in threatening messages since Kirk’s death as their rationale.
They shared an email that read, “YOU F*CKING CANNIBAL PIECE OF S*IT WE WILL MEET SOON!!!” as one that pushed them over the edge. “We probably can't do any events if we don't have someone at least watching our shoulder,” the creator says, referring to themself and their camera operator.
The potential safety risks are real, and standard security from local law enforcement might not be enough to protect creators at public events. During a press conference hours after the shooting in Orem, Utah, last week, Utah Valley University police chief Jeff Long talked about what other security measures his team, which coordinated with Kirk’s detail, could have undertaken.
“You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately today we didn't, and because of that we had this tragic incident,” Long said.
Chris Falkenberg, a former Secret Service agent and founder of Insite Risk Management, says this is a systemic problem.
“We do not do a good job in security of anticipating new types of attacks or new types of victims. Therefore, most security efforts are in response to attacks that have already occurred and successful attackers,” says Falkenberg. “Successful assailants either find novel ways of attacking, or they find a new way of putting old wine in new bottles by attacking somebody else or attacking a different location.”
For some creators, Kirk’s killing has only crystalized the risks they’ve long associated with this career. “Most of us knew that we were in danger or had some level of threat just by being public,” the person behind Organizermemes, an anonymous, left-leaning X account, tells WIRED.
But even small amounts of hesitation could affect a creator’s bottom line. “You have to be somewhat open to meeting people,” this person says. “Everything is a choice between comfort and safety. Does that one thing you don’t do a major event for mean that you don’t get that sponsorship? This stuff is so freelance-heavy.”
Rather than pulling back, some creators are leaning even further into producing political content following Kirk’s killing, despite facing attacks and doxing attempts. Kimberly Hunt, a progressive creator with more than 170,000 followers on TikTok, was publicly doxed and says she was fired from her full-time job as an HR official after posting a video last week criticizing Kirk and his history of targeting marginalized groups of people. (Her employer did not respond to a request for comment.) Instead of retreating, Hunt says, she now plans to focus on producing political content full-time and has created a GoFundMe for followers to help fund her transition into independent work.
“You didn’t shut me up. You just cleared my schedule,” Hunt said in an Instagram post linking out to the GoFundMe on Tuesday.
As of publication, Hunt has raised nearly $70,000 to support her channel.
Conservative creator Cam Higby and a handful of his friends have organized a spur-of-the-moment campus tour, which started this week in Georgia, to debate people in Kirk’s honor. Shortly after Kirk’s killing, Higby says, he and four of his friends quickly drafted a plan to travel the state until they “run out of money.”
“We really want to show conservatives who are very heartbroken, devastated, and scared about Charlie's death, that somebody is going to continue and that we're not going to back down, we're not scared, and that we're going to fearlessly defend our ideas,” Higby says.
Asked if the group is taking additional security precautions, Higby says, “I don't want to say exactly what we're doing, because I think it's kind of a security breach in and of itself.”
David Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor and gun-control activist, has been the subject of conspiracies for nearly a decade and has seen an uptick in threatening messages over the past week. Soon after law enforcement officials released a CCTV image of the suspected shooter last week, Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok, responded to several posts falsely suggesting that the shooter resembled Hogg.
“There will always be, whether it’s real people or bots or anonymous accounts or whatever, who are going to make these threats. But to have this agent of X spitting out incorrectly, alleging that David is the shooter, is just unbelievable,” a spokesperson for Hogg’s political organization Leaders We Deserve says.
Kirk’s killing has highlighted a truth most creators already knew: Their visibility puts them at risk, but their livelihoods depend on them staying visible.
“Part of my rate is the ‘someone might kill me tax,’ which is crazy,” says Organizermemes.
