Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse

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Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse—but It’s Even Weirder Than That

The website is attacking the users that made it the front page of the internet.

By Nitish Pahwa

March 13, 20254:34 PM

Luigi Mangione in court, wearing a bulletproof vest, while the Reddit alien leans near him and makes a shushing motion.

Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Curtis Means/Pool/Getty Images and Reddit.

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Last week, Reddit administrator Worstnerd shared a significant update to the social network’s content-moderation standards. As of March 5, “users who … upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies will begin to receive a warning.” They added that the company will “consider adding additional actions down the road.”

On its face, the move is perplexing. Why would a website that ostensibly prides itself on giving its users and communities a platform for free speech choose to punish the same users and communities for simply voting on content? The answer comes down to the onetime Reddit user, alleged CEO killer, and quasi–folk hero known as Luigi Mangione.

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Up- and downvotes, as Worstnerd noted, are the key engine of the Reddit infosystem. The public gauge of approvals and disapprovals afforded to a given post or comment determines its visibility within its home subreddit, its prominence across the website at large, and the poster’s reputation within the user base. This serves as both a form of community moderation and a popularity contest, the means by which humble Redditors may earn wider attention or find themselves buried. It’s imperfect, like any moderation forum, but as a longtime fixture of the Reddit ecosystem, it’s something that’s recognized and (mostly) functional.

But there’s another important reason why the voting infrastructure has held as durably as it has: Although Redditors understand the power their votes have, they’d never had to worry about whether their votes would lead to their accounts being disciplined by Reddit. They never had to fear that clicking an arrow in one direction or the other could lead to top-down digital persecution—especially when it came to discussion of fraught and frequently policed topics, like the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

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Yet that’s how the implications of this new voting policy became unavoidable. On Friday, just two days after Worstnerd’s announcement, a moderator for the r/popculture community—which has existed since 2008—announced that the subreddit had been “closed.” They further noted that one of their fellow moderators “was suspended for approving comments that mentioned” just Luigi, not even his full name.

“Apparently saying ‘luigi’ is now against the rules too even though they never told us. All comments with the word ‘luigi’ get flagged as possible inciting violence,” the r/popculture moderator wrote. They linked to a screenshot that purportedly showed the suspended user getting flagged by a moderation bot for a comment that featured a YouTube link to the 1950s Louis Prima track “Luigi.” (The vintage big-band anthem has seen something of a social media revival as a frequent accompaniment for edited videos of Mangione.) R/popculture continues to feature new posts on a limited basis, having been “restricted” from wider view by Reddit for the time being, and its primary photo is now a reimagining of Mangione as a Jesus-like figure.

A company spokesperson then told the Verge that there’s no “sitewide filter for the word ‘Luigi’ or expectation that users stop talking about Luigi Mangione.” That didn’t seem to assure the broader community. The initial announcement, which had been flooded with skeptical comments, was cross-posted to dozens of other subreddits, occasionally with captions like “Literally 1984” and “Extremely bad news from our admin overlords.”

That same moderator shared a PSA in r/FreeLuigi (“a community to discuss healthcare reform and … keep up to date on the case”) that “the word ‘luigi’ is now flagged by reddit for violence.” They included a screenshot in which a user’s question about whether the community could still discuss the video game Luigi’s Mansion 3 had been flagged by the violence-moderation bot for mentioning the name Luigi.

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I spoke to one of r/FreeLuigi’s moderators shortly after this PSA had been shared. “I remember r/LuigiMangione got banned, then r/LuigiMangione2, then r/LuigiMangione3, and I think it went up to r/LuigiMangione6 before people were like, ‘We’re not going to keep doing this,’ ” she told me in a phone conversation. “I’d made one called r/LuigiFever, which was just photos of him, and that got banned too.”

The r/FreeLuigi moderator wanted to make clear that she and the large majority of her 36,000-strong community are not condoning violence against health insurance CEOs.

“The main goal of the subreddit is to maintain the presumption of innocence—the subreddit, the media, and the general public does not have the right to determine if he’s guilty,” she said. “No one in r/FreeLuigi wants anyone to get murdered, and no one is celebrating that a man died. There are obviously some crazy people on the internet who are. But an entire community of 30,000 people shouldn’t be punished for one person’s actions.”

She added that her own subreddit was taking extra moderation precautions, including using bots to monitor any troll activity, restricting mentions of Mangione to his mere initials, and forbidding the use of the phrase “Deny, Defend, Depose”—the words that were inscribed on the bullets used to kill Thompson. It’s all part of the effort to, as she put it, preserve r/FreeLuigi’s position as the “last safe space.”

The r/FreeLuigi moderator also pointed to another factor that she and many other Redditors believe led to this change on the website: Elon Musk. President Donald Trump’s extremely online lackey has aimed plenty of ire at Reddit from his perch at DOGE, first attacking the federal workers he’s been firing en masse for discussing the chaos on r/FedNews, then expanding his purview from there.

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I spoke with the moderation team for r/PublicFreakout, who told me: “It started with r/comics.” In late January, a cartoonist was permanently banned from the comics subreddit for “Nazi apologia,” after posting a comment dismissing the idea that Musk had made a Nazi salute at the inauguration (a gesture that, notably, had inspired a wide swath of moderators to block X links from their subreddits). Musk found that cartoonist’s tweet and called his ban “insane,” inspiring his followers to assail r/comics.

Some of the moderators of that subreddit also happened to help moderate r/WhitePeopleTwitter. So, while they were distracted by the comics brouhaha, an X account called “Reddit Lies” shared screenshots from r/WhitePeopleTwitter discussing the identities of Musk’s DOGE flunkies. The X owner then baselessly accused the subreddit of having “broken the law.” That led Reddit higher-ups to ban r/WhitePeopleTwitter for 72 hours, due to “a prevalence of violent content.” The community returned with some restrictions applied; cheekily, it now refers to itself in its bio as “White People Twitter BlueSky.” (Naturally, its members continue to heavily criticize Musk.)

There was yet another factor that members of the r/PublicFreakout team told me affected them personally. About a month ago, the right-wing technocentric outlet Pirate Wires—founded by an executive at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund—published an “investigation” accusing a “terrorist” network (read: pro-Palestinian users) of “astroturfing” its agenda within various popular subreddits, including r/PublicFreakout. After Musk boosted the article and brought it even more attention, Reddit’s Worstnerd announced that, although the company had “not identified widespread terrorist content on Reddit,” it was launching a formal investigation into Pirate Wires’ allegations.

After a couple of weeks, Worstnerd announced that they hadn’t found evidence of widespread manipulation or content sourced from “terrorist organizations.” While they did uncover “four pieces of terrorist propaganda” from a previously banned account, it was nothing remotely close to what the Pirate Wires article had claimed.

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Still, Worstnerd noted that Reddit was implementing extra moderation actions, such as “expanding our vote manipulation monitoring to detect smaller-scale manipulation attempts.” From what various Reddit moderators told me, it likely wasn’t a coincidence that the platform’s announcement in regard to vote-policing was posted the very next day.

“It’s a lot to deal with back to back to back,” the r/PublicFreakout moderators wrote to me. “This change not only puts pressure on users to correct their behavior—it makes users afraid to engage with voting. It puts pressure on mods to remove content before anyone sees it so that the user base isn’t punished.” The r/popculture moderator recently disclosed that they were “getting a lot of people reporting anything that mentions Luigi as inciting violence.”

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To the moderators of r/SecularTalk—a community for fans of the popular progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski—the fact that this change came after a controversy involving pro-Palestinian users clearly sent the message that “they want to warn and then ban people for upvoting Luigi or anything pro Palestine.”

“We know all of us are at risk of being banned or having the sub taken away at any time. We would rather that outcome than to censor anti-genocide posts or censor anti-Elon or anti-DOGE posts,” the r/SecularTalk mods wrote to me. Still, that hasn’t stopped their subreddit and user base—which is smaller than either r/PublicFreakout’s or r/FreeLuigi’s—from tangling with the new reality.

The mods said they had one instance when a user’s comment that simply read “agreed” was removed by Reddit. The mods manually approved it multiple times only to see it taken down by Reddit until the account was “suspended or banned.” They claimed, sharing screenshots with me, that the site is removing posts and comments and not putting them in the queue for mods to see, forcing them to manually snuff out instances of unfair retaliation. The r/seculartalk team also pointed out other examples of public discussions and topics that had fun afoul of Reddit’s “community safety” filters in recent times, including H-1B visas (a favorite topic of Musk’s), health care, and even political town halls.

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There are a lot of theories as to why Reddit is taking such a hard approach—but nothing clear. The r/FreeLuigi mod suggested that this was to placate advertisers, since Reddit is now suffused with customized ads whose vendors would prefer not to be seen as endorsing contentious topics. The revamp also may have resulted from the fact that Reddit went public in 2024, which led to the C-suite implementing controversial, much-protested changes in order to make actual money and get a nice stock value for its initial public offering. (Reddit’s share value is currently about 40 percent lower than what it was just a month ago.) The r/PublicFreakout team suggested that because of this public scrutiny, from both shareholders and government-linked figures like Musk, “Reddit is under serious pressure to get its userbase under control” and imposing whatever haphazard measures it can to accomplish this.

But Reddit’s moves might come back to bite it. Its most fervent users are clearly angry with Elon Musk and with a social media ecosystem that’s already been happy to suppress frank discussions of identity, race, gender, and class warfare under the censorious mandates of the Trump administration. Redditors continue to post anti-Elon and pro-Luigi content despite being removed and “filtered.” Users have threatened to leave the platform en masse before, but they might actually do so now that the most basic and fundamental mechanism of the website (i.e., voting) could lead to them being punished. It’s almost as if Reddit wants to drive away the very people who made it the front page of the internet in the first place.