In the hours after the fatal shooting of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Dr Nicholas Kardaras held his weekly college class on the impact of digital media on mental health.
“I walked into my classroom that afternoon and one of my students said, ‘Oh, Kirk was just shot, we think he might be dead’,” said Kardaras, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York and one of the country’s foremost addiction experts. “Then another one — who is getting their mental health degree — said, ‘Well, yeah, but he had it coming’.”
Kardaras, a psychologist who has spent over a decade studying the online radicalisation of young people, was a little taken aback but not altogether surprised by the student’s response.
