The assassination of Charlie Kirk triggered a vast social media discussion both in the United States and internationally. As the U.S.’s polarized context appears to increasingly shape political debates abroad, this event provides a window into how online conversations unfold after instances of political violence, shedding light on both the transformation of existing tensions and the emergence of new ones.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination, an act of political violence, intensified national debate about polarization and free speech. We examine public attitudes towards political violence, assessing whether the incident and ensuing debates are perceived by Canadians as a shared concern or a uniquely American issue.

We evaluate how the death of Charlie Kirk, a prominent right-wing American commentator, has provoked widespread online debate. Controversy around the legacy of Kirk has sparked discussion around the increasing partisan divide, ideological polarization, and threats of political violence. That has spilled over into the Canadian information landscape.

With high confidence, it appears that though the Kremlin has exploited Kirk’s death as part of its information warfare strategy, employing tactics outlined in the FBI’s Doppelgänger affidavit.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has been followed by a massive amount of polarized online discussions in the Canadian information ecosystem, fuelling disinformation, partisan conflict, and mobilization exposing the risk of targeted and/or large scale unrest and physical harm.

This minor incident was likely caused by a single entity or actor using a set of newly created bot accounts with posts composed by either a low-quality (cheap) or poorly prompted generative Large Language Models (often described generically as AI) [Incident Update (IU) 6]. This network of bots consistently posts about recent news topics and are only incidentally interested in Canada or Canadian politics content [IU6].

While we continue to study the bot incident related to Pierre Poilievre’s rally in Kirkland Lake, we also aim to provide additional context about bot activity in the Canadian information ecosystem. Specifically, we wanted to know to what extent bots were present in commentary directed at other politicians, and how these bots tend to engage across politicians and platforms. To do so we examine potential inauthentic coordinated activity on the Facebook and 𝕏 accounts of Leader of the Official Opposition Pierre Poilievre and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to better understand what bot activity looks like in regards to prominent Canadian politicians. 

To try and better understand how the Kirkland Lake bot incident might have happened, we investigated whether free generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Co-Pilot could be used to deliver this type of attack. We wanted to see if there are any safeguards in place to prevent commercial AI tools from being used in cases like this. We show almost all large free commercial AIs are not prepared to mitigate this kind of election interference.