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Like nearly everyone else on the internet, yesterday the staff of 404 Media learned the name “Luigi Mangione” and sprung into action. This ritual is now extremely familiar to journalists who cover mass shootings, but has now become familiar to anyone following a news story that has captured this much attention. We have a name. Now: Who is this person? Why did they do what they did?
In an incredibly fractured internet where there is rarely a single story everyone is talking about and where it is impossible to hold anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes at a time, the release of the name Luigi Mangione sparked the type of content feeding frenzy normally only seen with mass tragedy and reminiscent of an earlier internet age when people were mostly paying attention to the same thing at once.
The ritual goes like this. You have a name. You try to cross-reference officially-known details released by authorities with what you are able to glean online. Have you identified the correct “Luigi Mangione?” Then you begin Googling and screenshotting his accounts before some of them are inevitably taken down. Did he have a Twitter account? An Instagram? A Facebook? A Substack? Did he post about the [tragedy and/or news event]? What were his hobbies and beliefs? Who did he follow? What did he post? Did what they post align with the version of a person who would do [a thing like this]? What are his politics? Is he gay or straight or trans or religious or rich or poor? Does he seem mentally ill? Is there a manifesto?
Then you try to find out who knew him. Can you reach his family? His friends? A colleague or ex-colleague? How about someone who went to high school with him and hasn’t talked to them in a decade? A neighbor? Good enough. Close enough.
Then comes second-level searching based on what you found in the original sweep. You stop searching his name and start searching for usernames you identified from his other accounts. You search his email address. You scan through his Goodreads account. What sort of information was this person consuming? What does it tell us about him?
Then you write an article. “Here’s everything we know about [shooter].” Or “[Shooter] listened to problematic podcasts.” Or whatever. The Google News algorithm either picks it up, or it doesn’t. It gets upvoted on Reddit or it doesn’t. It gets retweeted or it doesn’t. Your editor is happy, because you have found an angle. You have “hit the news.” You have “added to the conversation.”
Monday night, NBC News published an article with the headline “’Extremely Ironic’: Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO Slaying Played Video Game Killer, Friend Recalls.” This article is currently all over every single one of my social media feeds, because it is emblematic of the type of research I described above. It is a very bad article whose main reason for existing is the fact that it contains a morsel of “new” “information,” except the “information” in this case is that Luigi Mangione played the video game Among Us at some point in college.
If you are one of the more than 500 million people who have played Among Us, you will know that it is a cartoon video game that is similar to the IRL party game Mafia, in which players are randomly assigned the role “crewmate” or “imposter” at the beginning of each round. The imposter tries to blend in with the crewmates and needs to kill someone without being detected. At the end of each round, everyone discusses who they think the imposter is and then votes them off the spaceship. Among Us is not a game for children, but it is a game that is entirely normal for children to play, and it was incredibly popular during the height of the pandemic in 2020, to the point where after normal Zoom hangouts became bleakly depressing, people began to play Among Us with their friends and colleagues to pretend we were doing social events. Many people I know who have never played another video game in their lives have played Among Us, because it is a social thing that anyone can figure out and it is also incredibly popular.
This is to say that the fact that Mangione played Among Us is about as relevant as saying that he breathes air or eats food or sleeps sometimes, and yet, the fact that he played this game became the headline and lead to a national news story that supposedly tells us something about the man who allegedly murdered a healthcare CEO. This is journalistic malpractice by the writer’s editor, and the writer of this article—who has been covering a whole host of topics over the last few months, jumping from major news story to major news story—is getting righteously dunked on by their colleagues and by the public at large for doing such a credulous nonstory. It is not really the writer's fault. Their editor should have prevented this story from being framed in this way, and has hung the writer out to dry and to be ridiculed. But I am positive lots of people are clicking on the article.
The NBC News article is just one of countless in this general genre. Some of them are better than others. Many of these types of articles, when written about mass shooters, are toxic for society—for a brief moment there was a concerted effort to not name mass shooters or do biographies about them because experts believe that such coverage valorizes them and inspires others. But people read them and so they will continue to exist forever and always, and then people on social media will share the stories and say “you don’t hate the media enough,” and when referring to these types of articles they will unfortunately be correct.
Mangione’s story is actually different because the overwhelming majority of society does not sympathize with, empathize with, or agree with the ideologies of mass killers. Publishing their manifestos or their ideologies or biographical information valorizes them, and that is bad. Mangione’s act, regardless of anything else, has had the effect of speaking to systemic cruelty of the American healthcare system that all Americans suffer under and which has caused untold amounts of death and pain. And so people—including me—want to know who Mangione is and what made him allegedly do this. It’s just that it’s not clear what we are actually learning from years-old social media accounts.
Writing about the problem with writing about the killer is not new. It is also easy because it is easy to criticize the work of others. We also have written about the UnitedHealthcare shooting because it is an incredibly important news event where there is an extreme vacuum of information. The assassination, as we have all written, speaks to the horrifying state of healthcare and capitalism in this country and has been a uniting force between left and right—overwhelming healthcare costs do not care who you have voted for. This event and this moment feels very important.
How to cover it, and how to cover the alleged killer, though, remains very difficult. When I learned the name Luigi Mangione, I did all of the things described above. In fact, I think I did them extremely quickly and extremely well. We do this ritual because maybe he did publish a manifesto or maybe there was a simple story to tell people. But when it became clear that wasn’t the case, any morsel of information became good enough for a news article.
Within minutes of the release of his name, I had joined the Discord channel of the game development club he cofounded at the University of Pennsylvania. They were already talking about him! Someone had mentioned that Luigi Mangione himself was actually still a part of the Discord server. “Dude what, this is insane,” one user said. “Just the publicity we needed,” they added, as if the small computer game development club at an Ivy League school is an entity that needs to worry about its “publicity” at all, in any way.
I found Mangione’s Github (not hard), then I found his Substack account, where he commented (irrelevant) things on Substacks that I have heard of. Then I found one of his WordPress blogs (private). Then I found another of his WordPress blogs (not private, but very old). We, like everyone else, dissected his Goodreads reviews, his tweets, his Instagram, his Facebook. My unrelated group chats were popping off about a Google Doc someone found which was apparently Mangione's high school paper about class struggle in ancient Rome (his Roman Empire?)
It became clear immediately that Mangione, the person, has many characteristics in common with the type of people that we often cover at 404 Media. He is interested in—possibly skeptical of—artificial intelligence. He is a game developer. He follows and comments on Substacks and is from Maryland. I am from Maryland—maybe I know someone who knows someone who knows him? By random chance I saw on the surfing subreddit that someone who knew someone who knew him said that he hurt his back surfing in Hawaii. Is this real? I have no idea. But maybe a lead?
Like I said, how and if to cover this stuff is complicated. Is a Github project about AI from 2017 relevant to 404 Media readers because … we write about AI? Is the Facebook app he worked on in high school notable because it says something about the Facebook app ecosystem during the Cambridge Analytica years? The answer, honestly, is “of course not.” And yet, in the feeding frenzy of a news story like this, everything feels like fair game and every morsel of information feels like it could be somehow relevant, even though it surely is not. In fact, dissecting random accounts from many years ago does not just not inform the public, it muddies the waters about what actually happened and why.
I do not plan on ever doing a murder or anything that ever puts me into the news in the same way Mangione is now. But whenever something like this happens I find myself thinking about my own digital footprint, which is extremely vast and in many cases extremely outdated. I do not think that my high school Live Journal or Facebook posts that I don’t even remember says anything about who I am as a person now or why I do literally anything that I do. But if you are good enough at Googling me you can probably find accounts I have and accounts I didn’t even know that I had and use it to build some sort of narrative about my life. I have met thousands of people in my life and plausibly any journalist could get in touch with one of them within a few moments and maybe they would say something about me—does that reflect who I am or why I do anything that I do? Probably not!
As we were all rifling through all of Mangione’s accounts, we at 404 Media were discussing if anything we had found rose to the level of “blog.” I told the other 404 Media people: “idk what we would write if we were even supposed to try to write anything, but he’s doing like open source AI and game development stuff. I’m going to email him. i dont want to do ‘everything we know about XYZ.’” We hit up Firaxis, a game developer where he worked, for comment. Same with TrueCar, a place where his LinkedIn says he works now. I emailed Mangione and messaged him on Discord: “Hi there - I'm a reporter with 404 Media - looking to talk to you. Hit me back if you have a sec,” I said on Discord, as though, in police custody, he would respond. (An aside: I once did this with the Crypto Couple, who were just sentenced to prison; I did hear back literally years later.)
We theorized about what his motivation—as viewed through his Goodreads reviews—might be. Several hours into this I had what I can only describe as a shitfit, and realized that I had just wasted my day. I was mad at myself for doing this exercise at all, knowing from the outset that I probably would not write anything, that I had a lot of other completely unrelated things to do, and to be real, knowing that the time I had just wasted would mean that I would have to do those “other things” probably late at night.
“I think let’s pivot off this, it’s distracting me incredibly. I have wasted the day and am now upset at myself,” I said. “Only thing I can think of [writing] is a meta story about how everyone rushes to find everything someone has ever done online, and how that is often like a useless act.”
