The “smear campaign” regarding "personal tapes" that attempted to infiltrate r/FreeLuigi and why it’s concerning that the story has spread so far so quickly.
TLDR: My theory is someone is attempting to influence the potential jurors by making the "personal tape" situation common knowledge/established "fact" by spreading this story all over the internet.
Hi guys! After reflecting on the situation, I wanted to post my own thoughts on the situation that happened yesterday as a moderator and why it is a big deal for supporters, the case, and potential jurors.
Yesterday in the middle of the night several accounts attempted to post an article posted by The Sun about alleged sex tapes Luigi Mangione made. This subreddit has a minimum karma and account age so they were all removed by the automod without a human moderator seeing them. Later, 2 established accounts who have never posted in this subreddit posted the links again, this time with different titles. I declined both posts because (to me at least) it was obvious tabloid bullshit that they made up out of thin air and was not relevant to the subreddit.
Later, someone posted this post that described the “obvious smear campaign” that was going on with this story. This post was targeted by HUNDREDS of weird accounts that have never participated in this subreddit and had weird account history. We sometimes get a lot of traction on the subreddit, but a post getting 84,000 views in 24 hours is pretty rare unless it is a major update. Aside from that, almost none of the accounts joined our subreddit as members and the view to upvote ratio was way off compared to the average in the subreddit. This was the only post made about the “scandal” on the subreddit at the time, so this could be why that post was targeted. I think there were like 400 comments and only 150 ish are actually visible to the public.
Edit: I wanted to make something super clear: There were over 100 random accounts banned yesterday and over 200+ comments from suspected bot accounts. In my opinion, this was not a coincidence and the post was specifically targeted as a place to leave weird comments. As the moderator, I removed them - so nothing looked out of the ordinary publicly. This is what happened behind the scenes.
The comments left were abhorrent. The sexual comments were out of control and they were all promptly removed and banned from the subreddit. There were dozens of comments made requesting links in different variations of phrasing. All of the people who were requesting links and making weird comments had zero history in this sub and had odd account history. I do not believe anyone who is an active member of this community participated in requesting links or sexual comments. I will spare you of the NSFW comments because this is a SFW subreddit, but here are some examples of odd comments made by different accounts all within the same minute:
No one on this subreddit has literally ever called him a sex icon or said The Mirror was a reliable source. It's also odd that two different accounts used the same verbiage at the exact same time.
I am not much of a conspiracy theorist, but this activity was so odd that I started to think someone was fishing to get “quotes” from “crazy supporters” to get content for follow up articles to continue the spread of the story and make the "tapes" seem like established fact.
I got a Google Alert this morning for this story:
I am not going to link it, but the article says it went viral on X/Reddit yet there are no direct quotes from Reddit but several quotes from X. There were several posts about the “scandal” on Reddit including r/gaybros, r/trueanon, r/conservative - but none coming from true “supporters” that would make the movement look bad. It’s almost like they intended to have quotes pulled directly from Reddit but didn’t get any that they thought would benefit their article. Now the story has shifted from reporting on the personal tapes to the people who are consuming this type of content.
Someone commented this screenshot from the donation page and it's pretty clear that someone is attempting to go to all of the corners of the internet where Luigi Mangione is supported to further the spread of this story:
I strongly believe there is an orchestrated effort to spread this stupid tabloid story to taint the potential jury because previous efforts haven’t worked effectively.
This sort of story isn’t meant to make Luigi look bad with his current supporters. This story is EVERYWHERE right now - which is exactly what someone would want if they wanted this story to become “common knowledge” with the rest of the public. Unfortunately there are many people who show prejudice towards others based on their sexual preferences and this is the exact kind of story that would turn off older, conservative people from potentially supporting him. This same prejudice might prevent a lot of people from associating with supporters because they might think others will see them as supporting homosexuality and pornography.
Maybe I am super paranoid and this is all in my head, but let me make something extremely clear:
This story is completely fabricated and there are no tapes, photos, or anything else “leaked” onto the internet. This was a creative writing experiment for someone.
Don’t play into the games. Let this story die and get back to doing what we can to support Luigi’s presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial.
I love the Twitter and TikTok girlies, but you guys are doing exactly what they want by talking about it and making tons of posts/comments about it. I know it's funny to joke about but the court of public opinion is extremely important and a line has to be drawn somewhere. Please stop spreading this story, you are hurting Luigi’s case.
Also, if you would like to compensate me for having to deal with the weird comments, please consider donating to Luigi’s legal defense fund: