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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.