When do syzygies depend on the characteristic of the field? Even for well-studied families of examples, very little is known. For a family of random monomial ideals, namely the Stanley--Reisner ideals of random flag complexes, we prove that the Betti numbers asymptotically almost always depend on the characteristic. Using this result, we also develop a heuristic for characteristic dependence of asymptotic syzygies of algebraic varieties.