On December 10th, Twitter user @Deepsinghbadhesha shared this picture on his page, which gained widespread media attention and resulted in the image being mass-circulated online.
On Wednesday December 4th, CEO of the UnitedHealthcare health insurance company, Brian Thompson, was shot and killed by Luigi Mangione in midtown Manhattan, New York. 26-year-old Luigi has officially been taken into custody by Manhattan police. Since then, there has been a divide on social media regarding the Luigi Mangione situation, with multiple people sharing posts, thoughts, and even memes online. Many users have been calling him a “hero” and labeling this event as “the start of a revolution” in support of Luigi’s actions, while others are condemning it and calling it an unjustified murder. His supporters have even gone as far as to raise funds for his legal defense team on GiveSendGo, with funds reaching over $120k in the last week.
(CLAIM)
An example of this Luigi Mangione support trend is Twitter user @deepsinghbadhesha, an attorney and policy advocate who shared this post on Twitter with the caption “Y’all are so unserious” claiming that super Mario Bros. merch is being sold in the hundreds of thousands in solidarity and association with Luigi Mangione. This post got 260k likes on Twitter and 7 million views. It was then shared on multiple media platforms like Threads and Instagram, where users are actually believing that these hats are being sold in massive numbers to support Luigi, with some users even stating they will buy it for themselves. Others are saying how much of a “disgrace” it is that so many people are supporting a murder and saying nobody is taking the situation seriously.
Upon further investigation, the post turned out to be fake, with the original listing on Amazon being 100 hats sold in the last month, not “100,000 bought today.” It was also revealed that the hats have been sold out and taken off of amazon since December 10 because of sales from the holiday season, implying sales were never due to Luigi at all to begin with. So, the post was in fact digitally altered to include 3 extra zeros to mislead people into thinking that there are 100,000 people who are willing to buy hats to support Luigi.
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Caption:
Mario Bros. beanie hats sold for how much?!
Rumors have spread online saying this Amazon seller has sold 100,000 Luigi beanies in a day as a form of support for Luigi Mangione. The reality is that these hats have only sold 100 units in the past month. However, the online support for Luigi is very real.
#Trustify #factcheking #freeluigi #mariobros #amazon #luigimagione #unitedhealthcare
Investigative report:
1. I screenshotted this post I saw on Instagram
2. Put the image on Google reverse image, and these were my results:
Didn’t find much, but there were lots of reposts on threads and even Reddit where people claimed that this is a symbol of hope and the start of a revolution.
3- next, I put the image on TinEye, where I got 2 results.
First, I found the original photo proving that the number of hats sold was 100 in the past month, not 100,000 in a day, which proved the picture was digitally manipulated and the extra three zeros were photoshopped. I also found the original tweet that spread this rumor.
4. After opening the original tweet, it turned out that X actually flagged the tweet for misinformation. Community notes below confirmed the actual truth of these beanie hats.
https://x.com/deepnotshallow/status/1866301190486765990?s=46
By: Jana Salem
Trustify 