The Algorithm Is Making Us Hate and Kill Each Other

We are ruled by an attention economy that monetizes outrage, blood, and death.

Police secure Utah Valley University after Charlie Kirk was fatally shot. Within minutes, the video of his killing spread across social media.

Seven companies control a third of the S&P 500 and most of the algorithms that shape the internet.

That concentration of power isn’t just an economic statistic — it too can be a matter of life and death.

Because the reality is this: these companies have designed systems that radicalize our country, divide us against each other, and, in too many cases, turn our neighbors into killers.

You may disagree with me on gun control. You may disagree with me on the Second Amendment, red flag laws, or magazine limits.

But surely we can agree on this: we cannot allow Meta, X, TikTok, and the rest of Silicon Valley’s oligopoly to destroy us from within.

The algorithm is not neutral. It is engineered to keep us online longer, angrier, and more extreme. It rewards the shocking and the violent.

It pushes the grotesque into our feeds because outrage generates engagement, and engagement generates profit. The result is simple and terrifying: our political, economic, and technological systems are wired to reward violence, destruction, and death.

We are living under what Pope Saint John Paul II rightly called the “culture of death.”

Today’s assassination of Charlie Kirk brings this into the open. The wildfire spread of his killing across social media was not an accident.

It was the inevitable outcome of a system designed to amplify blood.

Videos of his final moments traveled faster than any obituary or word of comfort could. The algorithm didn’t hesitate; it simply did what it was built to do: convert death into content and content into profit.

We must confront this head-on.

Because every one of these murderers, from Buffalo to El Paso to Uvalde, was radicalized online.

Every one of them followed the breadcrumb trail of hate, fear, and violence that the algorithm laid out. And every time it happens, our government offers thoughts, prayers, and platitudes — while refusing to do a damn thing to hold these companies accountable.

America, if we cannot agree on gun reform, can we at least agree on algorithm reform?

Can we agree that no private corporation should have the unchecked power to decide what billions of people see, hear, and think each day?

Can we agree that when a system rewards violence with visibility, it must be dismantled and rebuilt?

We cannot keep living like this. Not when our democracy is fraying, not when our children are being raised in an environment where violence is one click away, not when our shared public life is collapsing into curated feeds of rage.

The truth is stark but inescapable: the algorithm is killing us. And if we don’t confront it — if we don’t break its stranglehold on our politics, our communities, and our very sense of reality — it will keep dividing us, radicalizing us, and making murderers out of us.

This emerging dictatorship of death will not end until we confront its machinery. The time to begin is now.