When a Shooting Spurs a Social-Media Cycle
A conversation with Charlie Warzel about the internet’s frantic search for a narrative
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In the hours and days that followed the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, even before any information was known about the suspect, social media was flooded with speculation and opinion. When Luigi Mangione’s identity was made public on Monday, the digital trail he left behind—and the difficulties of tying him to a particular ideology or movement—only intensified the cycle of reaction. I spoke with my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, about how the past week played out online, and why social media rewards the urge to make meaning even in situations where it’s not readily apparent.
Lora Kelley: What made this particular event so suited for quick reactions online, even before we had much information?
Charlie Warzel: It is a shocking thing to watch a video of an anonymous person gun somebody down in the street in midtown Manhattan. It is even more shocking when you find out that the victim is powerful. Then it becomes shocking that the suspect escapes, and that he’s not immediately caught. It defies all these different types of expectations. There was an information vacuum, essentially, during the whole manhunt. All we knew for a few days was that someone was shot in cold blood, the shooter got away, and the victim was someone whose industry is reviled by many Americans. When something this surprising happens, people want it to mean something. As I wrote today, the internet abhors a vacuum.
Lora: Why are many people online so quick to try to form narratives about a given news event? Is that just a very human impulse that the online ecosystem exacerbates?
Charlie: The old conception of the internet was that it democratized access to information, and that seemed utopian. It was seen as a tool for sense-making. What we’ve learned and seen since—the dark side of all this—is that the internet is this place where we try to make meaning, even where it doesn’t yet exist. On social media, people start marshalling all the evidence to support different claims, before we know anything for a fact. The most dangerous time for the truth is in the moments right after something happens. When there’s not much information, people can exploit the gaps. That’s not new, and it’s not just an internet thing.
But on social media, after something genuinely shocking happens, you can see that machine in motion: the way so many people—reporters, vigilante investigators, politicians, people who run shops online making merch—jumped in. There is a vicious cycle here. People post takes. Then people post takes about the takes.
People are trying to make this event match with their understanding of the world. There were so many people who immediately jumped to: The fabric of society is fraying, or This is the beginning of a lasting movement. Social-media users tend to try to sort things into very strict political camps. So they say: Was the suspect a leftist? Was he a conspiracy-theory crank? Was he a political activist?
Lora: How did the discourse shift once the suspect was identified and announced?
Charlie: At least based on what we know so far, this suspect doesn’t seem easy to put into a box. In some ways, acts of partisan violence are more easy to sort ideologically: when the man who sent pipe bombs in the mail turned out to have a van covered in MAGA bumper stickers, for example.
There is a history of people sorting through the digital breadcrumbs of someone who has committed an act of violence, in order to understand what might have pushed them to do that. This suspect defied a lot of expectations. He had seemingly praised the Unabomber’s manifesto on what appeared to be his Goodreads account. But he also seems pretty interested in Peter Thiel. And at the same time, he didn’t have an extremely partisan online presence. So he doesn’t sort evenly into any camps. People online hate that kind of nuance and uncertainty.
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