You don’t wake up most days expecting to see someone killed, much less in graphic detail. But that’s what happened to millions of people last Wednesday, when Twitter automatically loaded videos of American commentator Charlie Kirk’s assassination and pushed them into our algorithmically driven feeds. The motives behind the murder are still a mystery, even as everyone from President Donald Trump to hosts on Fox News and other powerful right-wing media figures try, with increasing desperation, to pin it on some version of “the left”. But one thing is already abundantly clear: in Canada, we cannot afford to go down the road Americans are determined to continue traveling. 

We have the advantage of living in a country that isn’t nearly as marbled with the high-powered guns and weapons of war that are commonplace in the United States. And we lack, for now, the two-party political system that inevitably sorts all issues into unhelpful and often destructive binaries. But we do share this ironically named thing called “social” media, and it’s capable of doing nearly as much damage to our country as it so obviously is to America. As American writer Sam Harris argued on his Substack, “In the last 48 hours I’ve........

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