Who is the “reddit kid”? And what is the relationship with Charlie Kirk’s murder?
Without people who are immersed in this culture, they understand the genealogies of memes and the logic of their use, investigators will be completely helpless. Therefore, policemen and prosecutors have to study from experts, from internet sociologists, and digital culture researchers. This is a new skill, absolutely necessary: read the motivations of the perpetrators hidden in digital codes. The fact that the perpetrator himself lived so hard online makes it very difficult to separate one from the other – says prof. Magdalena Grzyb, a criminolist from the Jagiellonian University. – Radicalization does not take place according to a simple left -wrapping scheme. The divisions are liquid, not obvious and very difficult to predict for security services – he adds.
Krystyna Romanowska: School colleague Tylor Robinson, assassin Charlie Kirk, in one of the online rollers describes him as an ordinary “Reddit Kid”. Who is the “reddit kid”?
Prof. Magdalena Grzyb: Maybe first about what Reddit is? Reddit is a huge website that works like a set of thematic forums. However, it is less mainstream than Facebook, Instagram or Tik-Tok.
Users set up so -called “Subreddity”, or smaller communities focused on specific topics: from politics, through sport, to memes, computer games or niche interests. Unlike Instagram or Tiktoka, where images and fast video dominate, Reddit is more debatable, you can say – relational. It is a platform where people exchange links, comments, create memes, have long conversations. Almost microwatures and subcultures are created here, discussing topics on topics, sometimes very hermetic, with their own language, codes and a sense of humor. Interestingly, Reddit also has a content assessment mechanism – posts and comments can be “plus” (upvote) or “downs”. Thanks to this, the most popular and engaging entries go to the top of a given discussion or even to the main page of the website. This means that Reddit is sometimes called the “main side of the Internet”, because this is where trends are born, which then travel to more massive social media.
And “Reddit Kid” is a young person heavily immersed in the internet culture.
He speaks memes and jargon, conducts talks as in the comments on the forum, values points and likes like life currency and treats memes and Inside Joke’s as the main references in everyday life. In Reddit, he spends most of his time, builds relationships mainly online. At school or in an offline environment, she can be seen as withdrawn, lonely, “different”. However, it operates very intensively on the web, absorbs content, creates memes, enters the subcultures that, from the outside, can be completely incomprehensible from the outside.
It was this incomprehensibility and hermeticity that was very visible in the first days after the murder. It was not known what the motives of the killer were, and the entry into the world of his content on Reddit was still complicating the matter. A lot was said about enigmatic codes, such as inscriptions on cartridges (from the leftist song “Bella Ciao” to homophobia), old memes (like this photograph in which Robinson in “Slavic Przykucca” is stylized by “Groyper”, i.e. a symbol of an extremely right -wing organization), joking short shortcomings, allusions to all subcultures. How are investigators in this?
Neither the police nor the Governor of the Utah state had a clue how to read these characters. For investigators, testing the motives is always tedious to apply beads, but – I have the impression – that in the case of “reddit kids” these procedures are much more labor -intensive and not obvious than during other crimes.
The very fact that the killer could not be set on any of the political parties is proof that the old predictable political divisions no longer exist. What matters is what is in … Reddit.
