It took mere hours after Charlie Kirk’s death at Utah Valley University before recreations of the scene—in which suspect Tyler Robinson allegedly shot Kirk from a nearby rooftop—started appearing on Roblox. Rendered in Roblox’s crude, low fidelity style, people quickly created experiences (what Roblox calls the different games and locations on its platform) that lets users participate in or watch the killing play out. The following day, Roblox said it had removed more than 100 experiences that referenced the event.
It’s very likely these experiences drew just a tiny fraction of Roblox’s 111.8 million average daily users. (One clip shared on X of an experience called "assassinate charlie kirk” reported 12 active players at the time the video was recorded.) But the recreations of Kirk’s death found a wider audience when clips started circulating on TikTok and X, where they’ve received thousands of views, reposts, and likes. Several posts on social media suggest that some users were selling Roblox avatar skins designed to look like the T-shirt Kirk was wearing during the event, often with blood around the neckline. (Aftermath observed at least one of these avatars still available in Roblox at the time of writing.)
On Sept. 12, Roblox CEO David Baszucki responded to a post regarding the Roblox experiences from Florida representative and a former staffer for Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA Anna Paulina Luna—who, while on the House floor, blamed Democrats for Kirk’s killing. Baszucki said he was “saddened by the passing of Charlie Kirk" and continued, “Our Community Standards prohibit content and behavior that re-enacts specific real world violent or sensitive events or promotes terrorism or hatred against individuals or groups, and we do not allow any image or video sharing in chat.”
Though the juxtaposition of a graphic shooting and the childish nature of Roblox can be jarring, that the event quickly showed up in these spaces is not. It doesn’t matter the event: As Aftermath’s Nathan Grayson put it last year, “this clockwork cycle plays out following almost any event of significance; the modern internet has been engineered for it.”
When a shooter attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during his presidential campaign last year, recreations of the event popped up in Fortnite, Minecraft, and yes, Roblox. There have been players who recreate school shootings. People roleplay crossing the Mexican border, playing as both migrants and border control. There has been an experience in which players encounter an assassinated JFK and must complete an obstacle course to find the killer. Often, recreations spread further than the players who have actively participated even after being taken offline, thanks to social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X.
Dr. Rachel Kowert, a psychologist who studies extremism in games, told Aftermath that some of these in-game scenarios—she pointed specifically to recreations of Columbine and playing as a Nazi in World War 2 games in Roblox—could be explained as propaganda designed to radicalize people. She said there may be some of that when making and spreading Roblox experiences recreating Kirk’s death. Recreations of these sorts of events may also be a way for young people to “recreate and process” an experience; lots of people were "inadvertently exposed” to videos of the actual shooting with clips shared widely on social media, she said. “I would hypothesize that’s a minority of people, but it is a possibility.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean Roblox should be used as the place to process traumatic events. “If you need to roleplay process, go to therapy,” Kowert said. “These places are town squares. Not everyone wants to roleplay process that, like not everybody wants to see it on their TikTok feed.”
The reality of internet culture, though, is that it’s very hard to ascribe actual intention to memes—and these Roblox experiences are often memes. It’s the same culture that bewildered mainstream media in interpreting the engravings on the bullets used by suspected shooter Tyler Robinson; what was originally described as “transgender and anti-fascist ideology” ended up being references to video games and internet culture. Robinson allegedly said so himself in text messages sent after the killing: “remember how I was engraving bullets? The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme, if I see ‘notices bulges uwu’ on fox new[s] I might have a stroke.”
Memes are essentially a social currency online. Recreating violent events through memes can give a rush of attention and the thrill of being edgy. They often go viral on social media platforms like TikTok, which leads to an influx of clicks and views. This attention can translate into gain; sometimes it’s actual currency, as in the case of the Kirk assassination, where people were selling cosmetic items referencing the event.
“It’s impossible to know who’s doing it for the lulls and the clicks and who’s doing it because they’re radicalizing or actively trying to cognitively change the way you view and see the world,” Kowert said. “That’s why you can have none of it, because you can’t tell which is which.”
