Endless Thread - The Internet Does Its Thing with Luigi Mangione

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

The shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson captured the internet's attention last week. Then, a suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, was arrested, and social media really went wild. Why, in a week of historic headlines from around the world, did this story captivate so many, so thoroughly? Show notes: Suspect in CEO’s Killing Had Discussed His Health Struggles on Reddit (The New York Times) r/GetNoted (Reddit) What Can We Learn From the C.E.O. Shooting Suspect’s Goodreads History? (The New York Times) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Hey. Oh, hey there.

How are you doing? How are you feeling about the world, the state of our country and the world? You know, the news this week has been super rough. WBUR is in its fundraiser right now. Yeah. And we've had a genuinely really hard time. I mean, it's easy to talk about the importance of a news source like WBUR. Yeah.

But we're having a really hard time doing the whole, like, and we also bring you joy. And so I'd like to think that endless thread helps with some of that, even though when there is news like there is right now, we can also help kind of explain it in our own way. And be familiar voices, helping wade through unfamiliar territory. I think that's right.

And also you can help us by going to wbUR.org slash donate. Yes. That too. That too. Friends. Very important. Yeah. How are you doing?

I'm good. I'm feeling a little like everything is completely out of control. And I feel like this story, I've just been like doom scrolling. Reddit as I, uh, as I am one to do all the time, but particularly this story of the United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, being shot and killed by someone who now is apparently in custody. A suspect, who has been, I believe, charged at this point at the day we're recording this, the end of the day, Tuesday.

Luigi Mangione. Mm-hmm. What has been surprising to me is just how, at least on the Internet, the support of the shooter has been full, 100%. Like, get out the guillotine, shoot them all, kill them. And what strikes me about that is that feels like a sort of step change in how we talk about accountability for the wealthy? Yes, for sure.

There is huge news happening everywhere, but I think the fact that online and in the spaces that you and I frequently occupy, the fact that the death of United Health Care CEO is the story is telling. And that's why we're talking about this. What do you think it's telling us? It is both the story of a murder, which captures people's attention for, you know, obvious but sad reasons.

But also you really feel this tension of, was this justified or not? Online, at least. I mean, that's what I mean about accountability, right? Like, we're in this zone where I think a lot of people don't think that there will be accountability for the CEO of an organization that a lot of people would say, denies 30% of claims and basically is set up as a profit-making machine that has blood on its hands of, I don't know, tens of thousands of people for denying them health care. Like this is in this like really tricky zone of like there is no struggle but the class struggle. And that's what I see online in the way people are talking about this. I would also say that that this story is one where the internet and I mean the internet,

at large, people online, people on social media, on platforms like Reddit, feel like they can help investigate because it is a developing story. Oh, yeah. And so when there are holes to fill in, the internet generally gets to work at trying to fill in those holes. And at a time when we leave such vast digital footprints from our typical social media accounts to our say Goodreads accounts, the internet knows how to get to work in a way that can be productive and helpful and super counterproductive and confusing. Yeah, it's like internet do your thing. Oh my God, the internet did its thing. Yes. And I also think there's another layer of it too because this was an unsolved but very publicly viewed killing.

And it reminded me of the Boston bombing, the Boston Marathon bombing and what we were. Reddit did in response to that. And the very negative impacts of that, especially as I was seeing some stories online about online investigators, like people on TikTok and elsewhere, essentially actually refusing in some ways to investigate or try to solve this. There was like a bunch of people, a bunch of internet users who were like trying to figure out where this guy was or just sort of participating in that mystery of like, oh my God, who could this guy have been?

What were his motives, et cetera? And then there were people who were like semi-professional, whatever, TikTok investigators who were effectively refusing to engage in that manhunt for what appeared to be a mix of reasons, like somewhere in between let's let the professionals deal with this to I don't want to get attacked because myself or docks to myself because of how many people. are this guy's like, he's like Robin Hood. Like people were cheering online this guy getting away. Yeah. And we should not say everyone.

But. Right. Yes, when you take a spin through Reddit, and now that this person has been named especially, you scroll through and search this guy's name on Reddit and you will find an overwhelming amount of support. Guys, wake up. New Luigi Lord's just drop.

Some people are zooming in on the middle of the eyebrows. I think that's just because it's greeny. Yeah, no, I don't believe. for a second that this guy just got caught. I believe that this guy made a very conscious choice to get caught. So, multiple news sources, including People magazine, have found his Reddit account. Bro's Twitter has gained 232,000 followers and hours. Absolutely ridiculous.

He's kind of cute, though. Can I say that? Today, on Endless Thread from WBUR, we're talking about... How the Internet is talking about. Luigi Mangione. Memes, manifestos, conspiracy theories, and uncomfortable truths.

A thing that jumped out to me very quickly, obviously there were assumptions made very early on, and those assumptions may have had some merit in that people were like,

oh, this person has to have or have a loved one who had their health care denied or gone, had some version of their, health care go terribly sideways. It's since come out that apparently this guy had back surgery that did not go well and seems to have changed his personality according to some reports, which is apparently a thing that happens. But again, that's a lot of speculation. I think

the thing that jumped out to me very quickly was the other side of it. So the fact that according to a few people, there started to be the scrubbing of information on other public health care CEOs. So people were flagging, for instance, that photos and pages on Wikipedia were being changed and edited in real time. So one of the examples of this supposed scrubbing I saw on late stage capitalism, that subreddit, do you know that one? Yes, of course. Always on late stage capitalism. And the title of the post was, oh, the rich are real scared. Hmm.

And this was a screenshot of the David Joyner Wikipedia page. And it says an editor has nominated this article for deletion. That's what it says at the top of the page. And it says, David Joyner is an American business executive. He is the president and chief executive officer of CVS Health. So, like, these are some of the things that people start to see and say, oh, people are reacting to this. And, like, now that this person has been executed, maybe there will be more. And the super-rich CEOs are trying to make it hard to find them and kill them.

Now, of course, any publicly traded company, a little bit of research. you can get past the Wikipedia article and actually find the names of people who are the leaders of publicly traded companies and it's relatively easy to find images of those people on the internet. So like, I think this is like the lowest level of like internet research that someone could do

if they were wanting to go after a CEO. So I don't know how much actual deterrence that is, but I found that in reaction, apparent reaction, to this killing. and that jumped out to me as kind of interesting. Okay, so speaking of scrubbing from the internet, something that I found is Redditors commenting on the fact that the suspect himself is a Redditor.

And they tag an account. The username is Pep Mangione. And that happens to also be this person's actual Twitter or X account. And so if the X account and the Reddit account are the same, they believe that this account was suspended. So I'm going to click on the account right now because it is hyperlinked in the post that I'm looking at. Okay.

And indeed, it says this account has been suspended. So suspended is not straight up banned or removed, as far as I know. It's suspended for a period of time. What we don't know is whether what these Redditors are asserting is true, which is that the suspect was super active. and had a ton of content and engagement on Reddit. Yep. And people are saying that as soon as he was named, Reddit admins swooped in, suspended that account.

And I've contacted that. We know it is suspended. Yep. But what was the order of operations? So I did reach out to Reddit. Our former partners, our former podcast partners, Reddit. Exactly. I did reach out just trying to get confirmation of that. Did you know for sure that this was his account? when did the suspending happen? And if invited them on

to explain the reasons for suspending the account and what their procedures are around this. Cool. Because the interesting, well, a lot of it's interesting to me, but part of it is a person's Reddit account is technically public information. Yep. And so when you suspend the account,

you are removing a lot of clues about the person. potentially. And it raises the question of who has the right to have access to those clues. Does the public have the right to still have that information at their fingertips? Did they suspend the account to withhold the information and pass it along to law enforcement? And if so, don't we still have a right to see it? I mean, it could be that there's a very good reason for this and someone would say, no, no, no, here's why we had to remove it or just restrict the access to that information for X, Y, and Z, and I'm completely open to that. But I did find it interesting that if this person was an active Redditor, that suddenly an account would be suspended

and you wouldn't be able to see their existence on Reddit. That I totally agree that is like fascinating and like befuddling, I guess. And I think also that that feeds into a lot of what we were also seeing online and what also always happens when something like this happens and the internet kind of like starts to try to solve for the thing or answer questions before the news media does, which is just a reality of the world that we live in now, which is this like explosion of conspiracy theories at the same time. And just to say, as of the time that we're taping this, I have not heard back from Reddit about to confirm that, yes, they suspended the account right away and to comment on why and what the

plan is for the suspect's Reddit account. So we'll see. We'll see what they say. Yeah. More about the conspiracy theories and the misinformation in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader.

Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can have. Help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, so one of the general conspiracies that, like, has exploded since Luigi Mangione has been brought in. I mean, there are a lot of, immediately the Internet has questions about Luigi. Of course. And lots of memes.

Anyone named Luigi is going to get memed. Yep. But one of the general conspiracies I saw that I thought was, again, just like kind of interesting or notable. Or this seemed very, like, internet-y to me, the way people dive in and start to do research is immediately people were talking about the eyebrows of the suspect who was brought in and comparing those eyebrows to the eyebrows of the very sort of grainy image that we had of the shooter who had, you know, a face. mask on and his hood up, et cetera, but seem to have some like pretty distinguishing kind of chiseled maybe features, one could say, like, I don't know. How would you describe the features in that image? I don't feel like I could make them out enough to describe them as chiseled, but I know what you're talking about with the eyebrows, where they, Redditors are saying that Mangione's eyebrows

are, there's more there. They're bigger and they're, they're. There's more of a unibrow. There's more, it's inching towards a unibrow, whereas in the original photo of the suspect that was released, they did not appear to be quite so approaching unibrow, hood. Yeah. And this is the kind of thing that I think just like blows up when this sort of thing happens, right? Like people just start tearing everything apart and coming up with all sorts of wild theories.

Yes. Eyebrows look pretty different from picture to picture, I will say. You need some good lighting to see what percentage of unibrow achievement one has. So along with the conspiracies came a lot of digging into as soon as this guy was named the information that exists online about him. And that's also sort of a fascinating thing to watch in 2024, fascinating and maybe a little bit macabre like, to watch is like the internet, as soon as there's a name, like the internet finds out every possible thing that might have been left as a trace or a fingerprint or a, you know,

a sort of philosophical position that this person has had on the internet. Yeah, so one example of this is his Goodreads account. And his Goodreads activity has gotten more attention because of a reviewer. he left for a very particular book. This is called Industrial Society and Its Future. Oh, yeah. Written by Theodore John Kaczynski. Classic.

AKA the Unabomber. And this does appear to be a legit review, according to Fortune magazine. Mangione writes, It's easy to quickly and thoughtlessly, well, I think he meant to say thoughtlessly, write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic. in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies, but it's simply

impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out. And this is because Ted Kaczynski was known to be anti-corporate. And Mangione quotes in his review, a take that he found online. And in this, quote, it says, When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, meaning Kaczynski's, but to see things from his perspective, it's not terrorism, it's war and revolution.

And then further down, were animals just like everything else on this planet, except we've forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival. Violence never solved anything is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.

Jeez. Yeah. So this review was left in January of 2024, and someone really went through Mangione's Goodreads takes and saw that he happened to give Ted Kaczynski's book four out of five stars. The thing that sort of fascinates me and also makes me wonder where we're all going, and why is there a hell sign right there and why am I in this basket is like McDonald's, which is, you know, the place of business

where somebody recognized Mangione's upper brow, apparently, and called the authorities in Pennsylvania after days and days of this, like, super intense manhunt, McDonald's has been absolutely, dragged and review bombed by users. Yeah. That particular location in Altoona, Pennsylvania, yeah. It does not have four out of five stars. No.

Like Ted Kaczynski's book, according to Luigi. It has like a half a star at this point. And apparently Google stepped in to help McDonald's rectify this, which, again, Wow. Interesting. And I actually saw a tweet of Burger King saying, we don't snitch. Now, I think the good news is that Burger King is not that stupid.

And Snopes has reviewed this because it really blew up this Burger King tweet, this supposed Burger King tweet. Was it actually tweeted from the Burger King account or this was a total Photoshop job? This is just a Photoshop job that blew up for like half a day. Okay. And again, this is like the thing that's like so complicated. about how we actually like digest information now as this like globally connected network of users

when something really big happens, the news of that actual factual thing happening spreads like lightning. And the sort of like calling through the sort of processing that we all do of that news is more and more confused and mixed up and full of conspiracy theory and full of Photoshop things and fake things and rumors, et cetera, et cetera. And now we have 50 times that amount of misinformation like slammed into our craniums

every time something like this happens. Yeah. And that freaks me out. It freaks me out too, for sure. And I try to look for the little bright, spots where you can get them. Love a bright spot. Can I get a bright spot?

You can. You can. I will mention a subreddit that I stumbled upon in looking at some of this. It's called Get Noted. Yeah, yeah. Yep. And this is a subreddit that draws attention to the times when people get fact checked on Twitter or X, of course, now.

So you may have seen, if you are on the platform X, you may have seen a post that you're not sure if it's true or not. And then you'll see a little community note, or it'll say, like, readers added context to this post because it might be misleading. So there was a tweet from someone whose username is not important in this moment, but they supposedly tweeted out the suspect's manifesto, because it was said that he was found with this three-page handwritten manifesto on him when he was arrested. Mm-hmm. This manifesto was posted to a substack.

Mm-hmm. And this person tweets it out. Readers added context, which is the substack was launched after the suspect was already arrested. Also, this is missing quotes noted by a police official who saw the suspect's handwritten manifesto. Hmm. So there's reason to doubt this manifesto. And I heard about all of this on get noted, the subreddit.

And so that to me is a little bit of a bright spot because it's a place where you can go to just see the things that deserve a more critical eye. And someone commented when this particular tweet was posted with the manifesto and said, I get the feeling this sub is going to get a hell of a workout in the coming days, weeks, and months. And that is true. And I'm glad to know that places like this on the Internet exist to say, hey, take a beat, take a breath. Let's wait and see if this is verified. Because could it be that this is his manifesto?

You know, it looks like it's missing key information. Then again, Newsweek went ahead and published something saying unverified Mangione Substack manifesto shared online. And so to even share that to their site will make some people think that it is more likely to be legitimate than not. Well, I think what I like about that, and just to be absolutely clear, like, I am pro internet users figuring things out. One of the things that's complicated in all of this is like, yes, it does freak me out, this sort of like breakneck speed at which we all digest this stuff and come up with theories and try to chase those theories down, et cetera, et cetera. But I want to believe that internet users can work together to actually. solve for things. And that includes universal health care, by the way. But I also just think, like,

that's a really happy thought of, you know, just thinking about the fact that we can be teammates in discovering and maintaining and communicating the truth. And the adage in journalism, at least, is being right is better than being first. And it sometimes feels like that rule doesn't apply online because it is, you know, citizen journalism and citizen fact-finding missions are citizen-based. They're not actual publications, but I think if we all try to adhere to that more, we'd be in a better place. And as long as you're standing behind me in the line for the water fountain, I totally agree.

I was first. Oh. But yes, if there are major developments, we will be there for you following as others follow along online. Be nice to each other. Oh, my gosh, please. Please just be nice to each other. Just a little post script for you here. As of finishing this episode, we have not heard back from Reddit.

But reporting from the New York Times cited a Reddit spokeswoman who said the company's policy was to suspend accounts that may potentially be. be related to suspects in high-profile criminal investigations. As to the logic for that policy, they did not elaborate. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by us, Amory Severson, and Ben Brock Johnson. We produced a little bit of it, too, I would say. We scoured the internet.

We looked at the internet, and we copied some links and pasted them in a document. I spent way too much time scrolling through content on a story that is tough, tough waters to be swimming in. Yeah. That's what we do. Point being, Grace Tatters, the MVP here. Mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikas. The rest of our team is Emily Jenkowski, Dean Russell, and managing producer, Summit to Joshi. If you got an unsolved mystery and untold history or a wild or concerning story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up.

Endless thread at WBUR.org.