Commentary

The Strange Social Media Surge For Luigi Mangione

Luigi Mangione is now famous. Just one week ago, we had never heard of him. But now, he has become so famous I don’t even have to recount the reason for his fame.

To me, what’s more interesting than Mangione’s sudden fame is how we feel about him. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, there is a lot of online support for him. An online funding campaign has raised over $130,000 for his legal defense fund. The hashtag #FreeLuigi, #TeamLuigi and other pro-Luigi memes have taken over every social media channel. Amazon, Etsy and eBay are selling Luigi-inspired merchandise in their online stores. His X (formerly Twitter) account has ballooned from 1,500 followers to almost half a million.

It's an odd reaction for someone who is accused of gunning down a prominent American businessman in cold blood.

There’s so much public support for Mangione, prosecutors are worried that it could lead to jury nullification. It may be impossible to find unbiased l jurors who would find him guilty, even if it’s proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

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I don’t want to comment on Mangione’s guilt, innocence or whether he’s appropriate material from which to craft a folk hero. Nor do I want to talk about the topic of American healthcare. I won’t even dive into the admittedly ironic twist that our latest anti-capitalist hero of the common people is a young, white, wealthy and privately educated scion who probably leans right in his political beliefs.

I do want to talk about how this has played out through social media, and why it’s different than anything we’ve seen before.

We behave and post differently depending on what social platform we’re on at the time. In sociology and psychology, this is called “modality.”  The way we behave is very different when we’re being a parent at home, an employee at work or a friend having a few drinks after work with our buddies. Each mode comes with different scripts, and we usually know what is appropriate to say in each setting.

It was sociologist Erving Goffman who likened this to being on stage in his 1956 book, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” Goffman said, “We are all just actors trying to control and manage our public image. We act based on how others might see us.”

Let’s extend this concept to the world of social media. What we post depends on how it plays to the audience of the platform we’re on.

Think of it this way. Posting something on Facebook is a little like getting up and announcing something at a town hall meeting that’s being held at your kid’s school. You assume that the audience will be somewhat heterogenous in terms of tastes and ideologies, and you consider your comments accordingly.

But posting something on 4Chan is like the conversation that might happen with your four closest bros (4Chan’s own demos admit their audience is 70% male) after way too many beers at a bar. Fear about stepping over the line is nonexistent. Racial slurs, misogynistic comments and conspiracy theories abound in this setting.

The thing that’s different with the Mangione example is that comments we would only expect to see on the fringes of social media are showing up in the metaphorical town square of Facebook and Instagram (I no longer put X in this category, thank to Mr. Musk’s flirting with the Fringe).

In the report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, the authors said,  “While this phenomenon was once largely confined to niche online subcultures, we are now witnessing similar dynamics emerging on mainstream platforms, amplifying the risk of further escalation,”

As is stated in this report, the fear is that by moving discussions of this sort into a mainstream channel, we legitimize it. We have moved the frame of what’s acceptable to say (my oft-referenced example of Overton’s Window) into uncharted territory in a new and much more public arena. This could create an information cascade, when can encourage copycats and other criminal behavior.

This is a social phenomenon that will have implications for our future. The degrees of separation between the wild, wacky outer fringes of social media and the mainstream information sources that we use to view the world through are disappearing, one by one. With the Mangione example, we just realized how much things have changed.

2 comments about "The Strange Social Media Surge For Luigi Mangione".
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  1. Artie White from Zoom Media Corp, December 17, 2024 at 3:13 p.m.

    Fair assessment, Gord, but I think it's also worth considering our collective affection for the anti-hero, the vigilante, the underdog, and the outlaw. Think of figures like Billy the Kid, John Dillinger, Batman, David vs. Goliath, and other cultural icons—both fictional and real. This may be a particularly Western or American predilection, but nonetheless, Mangione is a real-life figure who perhaps taps into a shared desire for a measure of justice that often feels perpetually out of reach.

    In such cases, the transgression can eclipse the heinousness of the act itself, resonating with anyone who has ever felt their life or circumstances were beyond their control.

    To be clear, I am not advocating for murder. Rather, I think this cultural tendency explains the celebration of Mangione on social media more than any notion of a shifting Overton window. Scorsese gave us Travis Bickle in 1976, a character born from the idea of "a man who would not take it anymore." That idea predates Bickle by centuries and will likely remain a part of our collective psyche for a long time, if not forever.

  2. Ben B from Retired, December 17, 2024 at 9:54 p.m.

    I hope that Luigi Mangione is found guilty and gets life in jail he isn't a hero in my opinion I don't get why he has so many supporters. Violence isn't the answer and isn't going to solve the problem or reform all I'll say on the matter.

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