We Obviously Shouldn’t Ignore Left-Wing Online Radicalization

Some new research raises warning signs

It could be that someone, somewhere, has posted something negative about Luigi Mangione on Bluesky. I just can’t find it. I’m logged in to a burner account that isn’t blocked by anyone, and this search reveals only fanboying and fangirling over the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Try for yourself — if you do find anything remotely critical of Mangione, I think you’ll also find that it’s outnumbered, by a 10:1 or 50:1 ratio, by posts valorizing him.

Bluesky’s views on Mangione, it should go without saying, do not reflect the country’s. According to polling from the Center for Strategic Politics, as of about a month ago only 19% of Americans viewed Luigi Mangione at least somewhat positively. . .

. . . and only about 12% at least “somewhat” approved of the murder itself. . .

Maybe those “onlys” deserve scare quotes. This was a political assassination — you would hope these numbers would be lower! And younger (under-45) Americans viewed Mangione more favorably — about a third viewed him in at least a somewhat positive light.

Either way, the point is Bluesky is wildly out of touch with America on this one. If you spend a lot of time on Bluesky, you might come to think that there is overwhelming support for Luigi Mangione’s acts. That’s what happens when you plug into a community with particular beliefs every day: You come to adopt the community’s norms. Does the average Blueskyer know that their views on Luigi Mangione are unpopular? Maybe? Does it matter to them? Of course not. They view Mangione as a revolutionary figure, and of course the average bourgeois robot isn’t going to understand the importance of a bloody proletarian revolution (even one sparked by a rich kid).

Recently, Joel Finkelstein and his team at the Network Contagion Research Institute have done some interesting work on this subject. A lot of it is in the form of white papers that haven’t been peer-reviewed, so some caution is warranted. On the other hand, anyone who reads this newsletter knows that peer review is itself no guarantee of quality, so I don’t know where that leads us — I just know that I find this work interesting. (On a recent Blocked and Reported, I was critical of the claim that some other recent NCRI research demonstrated a causal connection between exposure to DEI ideas and authoritarianism, which was how many people were interpreting it. When I asked Finkelstein and one of his co-authors, Lee Jussim, about this, I thought their responses were fair and their own interpretations of their work appropriately hedged and modest.)