What are the politics of Tyler Robinson, the man suspected of killing Charlie Kirk? While the ongoing investigation hasn’t yet settled on the answer, many social media users have been sharing photos of Robinson wearing a T-shirt that supposedly reveals his political affiliation.
X account US Homeland Security News, which is known to disseminate false disinformation, declared that there is a photo that proves with “no question” that Robinson is a “Democrat militant Antifa leftist”. The photo shows the suspect wearing a dark gray baseball cap and a blue T-shirt that says “Harris Walz”, referencing Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate during the last US presidential election, and her running mate.
Another X user also shared another photo that they said proves that Robinson is a Democrat. The image is very similar to the previous photo. The suspect is wearing the same grey baseball cap, but this time his pro-Harris T-shirt is grey, not blue.
A third photo of Robinson has also been circulating widely online; however, in this image, Robinson appears to be wearing a pro-Trump T-shirt.
“We have a MAGA [Editor’s note: the acronym for Donald Trump’s campaign slogan "Make America Great Again"] problem, not a ‘far left’ problem in this country,” commented one reddit user, who shared a photo of Robinson still wearing the grey baseball cap, but this time alongside a red T-shirt with Trump’s campaign logo and the slogan “Make America Great Again”.
The same photo, doctored three different times
It turns out that all three of these images are doctored versions of the same original photo. If you carry out a reverse image search (learn how by checking out our handy guide), then you’ll pull up the original image, which Robinson had posted to Facebook. A variety of media outlets used it in their coverage (examples here and here).
In the original photo, Robinson is wearing the grey baseball cap that appears in all three doctored photos. He’s also in the same position: standing by his bed, in his room. However, in the original photo, he’s wearing a plain, wine-coloured T-shirt with no slogan on it.
The image showing Robinson wearing a grey Harris T-shirt was actually generated by AI, based on the original image. One clue is that the word “president” is misspelled (written as “presidInt”, with an I instead of an E). Spelling errors like this are common in AI-generated images. But the most important clue is that, at the bottom of the image, you can see the logo for Grok, the AI of Elon Musk’s social media platform X, which confirms that the image was generated by artificial intelligence.
As for the other two photos, a classic photo editing software or possibly AI could have been used to replace Robinson’s wine-coloured T-shirt with the blue pro-Harris T-shirt or the red, pro-Trump shirt.
Another baseless accusation about a Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt
Some people have also put forward theories that Robinson was a member of the Salt Lake City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a far-left American political organisation … and once again, the proof was apparently in the T-shirt. Adherents of this theory have been sharing an image of a young man they say is Robinson wearing a red DSA T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Bee the Change”.
While this photo wasn’t doctored, the man in the photo is not Robinson. In fact, he doesn’t look much like him at all, as you can see if you look at the mugshots taken after Robinson’s arrest. Moreover, US news outlet The Washington Post reported that the organisation doesn’t have a single member named Robinson.
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