alt Hacker News> A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
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> He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported.
You're missing the story here. Any popularity of a murder in the streets is exceptional. The expected value for "What fraction of the population supports this (alleged) murderer?" is much closer to zero than the ~25% that Mangione polls at, never mind the 40-odd% that he polls with young people.
This is also why twitter drove journalism (and perhaps even the country) off a cliff.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.