Luigi Mangione: the murder suspect who became a controversial viral phenomenon on the internet

After being seen at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in the United States, on December 9, Luigi Mangione was arrested as suspected of being the author of the cold-blooded murder of Brian ThompsonCEO of insurer United Healthcare, on December 4 in New York. From the first moments after the murder, mixed reactions were unleashed on the internetwith many users ironizing or celebrating in some way what was considered an act of protest and resistance against the American health insurance system, and against United Healthcare in particular, often accused of caring only about profit to the detriment of legitimate compensation for the sick. The Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiroalso had to intervene, reiterating his opposition to this type of heroic celebrations: “People are not killed in cold blood to solve political problems,” he warned: “In some dark corner the murderer is celebrated as a hero. Listen to me: he is not a hero. The real hero is the person who called the police“.

Social anger against McDonald’s

Google’s own page McDonald’s of AltoonaHowever, he was the target of negative criticism, which praised Mangione’s character and charged, in return, the worker who alerted the authorities (some even called him ‘class traitor’). The search engine itself had to block these types of reviews glorifying In general, Luigi Mangione himself is rising online as a symbol of proletarian resistance against the overwhelming power of financial interests: his Instagram profile, @luigi.from.fijihad reached 21.5 thousand followers in the hours after his arrest, before he was currently untraceable.

The same success occurred with his profile on X/Twitter @PepMangione (currently with more than 279,000 users) and the hashtag #FreeLuigi (free Luigi) is also spreading on the same social network, populated with comments describing him as “one of the most brilliant minds of our generation” (quoting the poet beat Allen Ginsberg) and they even compare him to Nelson Mandela as an unjustly imprisoned figure. Petitions and fundraisers are also emerging on the internet to pay their legal expenses (the popular platform GoFundMe seems to have blocked these types of initiatives, which are instead present in alternatives such as GiveSendGo, which has already raised more than $5,000).