Almost immediately after Mr Thompson was shot dead, the internet began to lionise his suspected killer. On TikTok, people posted videos of a “CEO assassin” New York City walking tour. On Spotify, playlists dedicated to the suspect started to appear.
Once Mr Mangione was arrested, these fans came to his defence.
The start of his legal battles prompted anonymous donors to chip in thousands of dollars towards his defence through various online fundraisers.
Etsy was flooded with pro-Mangione apparel, while Amazon pulled similar products from their site.
The McDonald’s worker alleged to have turned him in has become a target for online hate, while the fast-food franchise itself has been spammed with bad reviews.
The police department in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that arrested him even received death threats.
Much of this online reaction has focused on his looks, with the internet dubbing him the “hot assassin”.
Indeed, Mr Mangione’s appearance, which he showed off in shirtless social media posts, is now clearly part of the appeal, said cultural critic Blakely Thornton.
Americans are effectively “programmed” to trust and empathise with men who look like Mr Mangione, he said.
“That’s why they are the protagonists in our movies, books and stories.”
Public adoration for handsome men accused of crimes is not new – from Ted Bundy to Jeremy Meeks, violent men have developed cult followings.
But Professor Tanya Horeck, an expert on digital culture and true crime from Anglia Ruskin University, says that social media has given those sentiments massive visibility, and helped them spread.
The internet has caused “a blurring of the lines between celebrity and criminality”, she told the BBC, adding that when people see a good-looking person pop into their feeds, their first thought is lust, not moral criticism.
“The mood around Luigi Mangione is ‘thirst’,” she said.
Beyond his appearance, a large part of Mr Mangione’s online appeal is clearly his apparent ire against the private healthcare industry and corporate elites in general. US media has reported that Mr Mangione was arrested carrying a handwritten document that said “these parasites had it coming”.
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a non-profit extremism research group based in New Jersey, said that after the shooting the hashtag #EatTheRich went viral.
Since Mr Mangione’s arrest, variations of “#FreeLuigi” were posted on X over 50,000 times, likely getting tens of millions of impressions. And by some measures, the NCRI said, engagement with posts about Mr Thompson’s killing across platforms like X, Reddit, and others surpassed that of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July.
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