The brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University shocked the nation and exposed a moral rot in the modern media ecosystem that conservatives have warned about for years. Kirk was gunned down while speaking to students — a husband and father cut down in front of young people — and that carnage demands a full accounting from anyone who profited from the platforms that amplified the poison. Americans are right to be angry and fearful when political opinion becomes a death sentence on a college quad.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer has moved quickly and responsibly in the aftermath, formally inviting the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch and Reddit to explain themselves before Congress on October 8. This isn’t grandstanding; it is oversight — a necessary check when private platforms become public squares that incubate radicalization and real-world violence. Comer and his committee are doing what the media and Big Tech have repeatedly refused to do: seek answers and demand real commitments to stop this from happening again.
Comer has said he wants to work with social media companies to get solutions to these problems, and that cooperation should include concrete remedies, not platitudes. The pattern is clear to anyone paying attention: too many violent actors over the last months were radicalized in private servers and fringe forums, and platform executives must explain why their systems keep producing dead bodies. Congress should push for transparency about algorithms, moderation practices, and the specific spaces where extremism festers.
Make no mistake — this is not a call to gut the First Amendment or launch a government censorship regime, as the disingenuous cable pundits warned the moment Republicans demanded accountability. It is a sober attempt to force companies that profit off engagement to stop monetizing rage, to break the feedback loops that attract the unstable and weaponize grievance, and to cooperate in removing graphic propaganda that inspires copycats and foreign disinformation campaigns. Our enemies abroad are already exploiting the chaos online to widen divisions; that reality makes this oversight even more urgent.
Some establishment voices, including unelected regulators, want to lecture conservatives about free speech while protecting the platforms that enable violence; we won’t be played. Conservatives defend the First Amendment fiercely, but we are not naive: speech that incites or celebrates political murder has consequences, and private companies that claim neutrality can no longer hide behind Section 230 while actively shaping what Americans see. If Big Tech wants the goodwill of the American people, it will stop treating our children and our politics like a profit center for chaos.
Congress should extract real commitments: rapid takedowns of violent content, better age and identity verification where necessary, transparent algorithm audits, and cooperation with law enforcement when threats emerge. Chairman Comer is doing the right thing by putting these CEOs on the record — now patriots and parents alike must keep the pressure on until those promises become policy and the graveyard of our political discourse finally starts to fill a little less. The safety of our campuses, our families, and our democracy depends on it.
