Viral antisemitic posts about Charlie Kirk assassination amass 139m views on X

Viral posts on X spreading the antisemitic conspiracy that either Israel or Jews were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk reached 139 million views in the five days after his murder. None of the viral posts featured Community Notes. 

The conspiracy echoes longstanding antisemitic tropes that paint Jewish people as holding outsized control and of seeking to manipulate world events.ⁱ Researchers identified 126 viral posts promoting the conspiracy, each with at least 100,000 views.  

Posts varied in the details of the conspiracy, with some directing blame for Kirk’s murder at Israel broadly, while others blamed Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, or Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency. Some blamed Jewish people more generally. Examples include: 

• “Israel Killed Charlie Kirk I have an inside source If anything happens to me it was Israel.” (7.7 million views)ⁱⁱ 

• “I think Israel killed Charlie Kirk…” (3.7 million views)ⁱⁱⁱ 

• “Charlie kirk turned on the jews, this is why they ordered his execution” (793,300 views)^iv 

Researchers used a search query to find the most-viewed X posts mentioning Charlie Kirk alongside relevant keywords like “Israel”, “Mossad” or “jew[s]”. These posts were then analyzed to find those with at least 100,000 views with either an explicit claim or strong implication that Kirk was assassinated by Israel or by Jewish people. 

Not a single Community Note appeared on the 126 conspiratorial posts 

Researchers checked each of the 126 viral posts promoting the antisemitic conspiracy about Kirk’s assassination, finding that 0% of them displayed Community Notes at the time that research was carried out. 

X’s Community Notes is a crowdsourced fact-checking system that allows users to provide context, clarification, or corrections on posts.v Notes are only shown to users if they receive “enough” votes from contributors with “different points of view”.vi 

This analysis suggests that the Community Notes system is failing to correct antisemitic conspiracies, despite Musk claiming: “We’ve put maximum resources and attention behind Community Notes. So, if somebody tries to push a falsehood like Holocaust denial or something like that, they can immediately be corrected”.^vii 

Examples of antisemitic conspiracies 

• This post with 11 million views claims that Israel killed Charlie Kirk so that conservative commentator Ben Shapiro could take over Turning Point USA.^viii 

• This post claims that the Israeli intelligence agency known as Mossad was behind Charlie Kirk’s death.^ix 

• Several posts by the influencer Jackson Hinkle made either heavily implied or direct claims regarding Israel killing Charlie Kirk.^x 

• This post by Stew Peters claims that it’s “Pretty obvious that Israel ordered the hit after Charlie started noticing”, referencing the antisemitic dog whistle of “noticing” Jewish control.^xi 

• This post says “Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since Israel killed Charlie Kirk to initiate a global race war.”^xii 

• This post shares screenshots of recent posts made by Benjamin Netanyahu about Charlie Kirk and claims “He’s worried. It was Israel”.^xiii 

Methodology 

Researchers used an AI-assisted process to identify 126 of the most viral posts on X that promoted the antisemitic conspiracy that either Israel or Jews assassinated Charlie Kirk. This process involved filtering posts – using a keyword search and by applying an AI model – before manually assessing a final dataset of posts. 

To do this, researchers used a licensed third-party tool to identify the 20,000 most-viewed posts on X that mentioned “Charlie Kirk” alongside relevant keywords such as “Israel” or ”jews”, excluding reposts. The time window for posts was 6:00pm on September 10th, 2025 through 4:40pm on September 15th, 2025. Removing duplicates left 19,524 unique posts in the dataset. The full set of keywords for the query were: 

(“Charlie”|“Kirk”|“Charlie Kirk”) & (“jew”|“jews”|“Israel”| “Jewish”| “false flag”| “mossad”) 

These posts were then filtered by utilizing OpenAI’s GPT-4o large language model with the aim of identifying those containing the conspiracy that Charlie Kirk was assassinated by Israel or by Jewish people. Each post was assigned a score from 0 to 10 indicating the likelihood that it contained the antisemitic conspiracy theory. 

To evaluate and calibrate the model, researchers sampled a set of 300 posts for human labelling. Based on these labels, a decision threshold of 7 was chosen. At this threshold, the model achieved a recall score of 77%, meaning it correctly flagged nearly eight out of ten posts that contained the antisemitic conspiracy theory. At this threshold the model also achieved a precision score of 88%, meaning that when the model flagged a post as containing an antisemitic conspiracy theory, the model was correct almost 9 out of 10 times. Overall, this results in an F1 score of 82%.  

This process flagged 5,240 posts as likely containing the conspiracy theory. Out of this set, researchers manually reviewed all posts that received at least 100,000 views, with at least two researchers reviewing and agreeing on a final set of 126 viral posts containing the conspiracy theory. These posts held a total of 139,264,439 views. Posts were only included if they contained either an explicit claim or strong implication that Charlie Kirk was assassinated by Israel or by Jewish people. 

All data analysis took place from September 15th, 2025 through September 19th, 2025. 

Overview of dataset 

Researchers identified 126 ‘viral’ X posts promoting antisemitic conspiracies about the assassination from 75 unique accounts. Each of these ‘viral’ posts has at least 100,000 views and two researchers verified they promote antisemitic conspiracies. 

‘Viral’ posts in the analysis averaged 1,105,273 views each. Another 5,114 posts were flagged by our AI analysis as containing antisemitic conspiracies, but were not manually verified. These other posts averaged 23,100 views each. 

The remaining 14,284 posts in the dataset studied mention Charlie Kirk alongside keywords like “Israel”, “Mossad” and “Jews” but were not flagged by our AI analysis as containing antisemitic conspiracies. They averaged 44,188 views. 

The following table summarizes key statistics about the dataset used for this research. 

Category	# Unique Posts	% Unique Posts	# Views
Antisemitic conspiracy posts verified by reviewers	126	0.65%	139,264,439
Other posts flagged as containing antisemitic conspiracy by model (Precision = 88%)	5,114	26.19%	118,135,124
Other posts classified as not containing antisemitic conspiracy (Recall = 77%)	14,284	73.16%	631,183,444
TOTAL	19,524	100%	888,583,007