The erasure of Luigi Mangione

The saga on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and how tech always serves the ruling class.

Stack Exchange is a large online crowd sourced content provider for questions and answers. The Stack Exchange network of sites includes everything from cooking, to politics, and Judaism and Islam. In 2021, it was sold to a private equity company Prosus for 1.8 billion USD. Its largest asset is Stack Overflow, a site tailored to programmers. The Stack Overflow site is a vital resource for software developers. Ideally, it makes it easy and free to ask questions and get professional assistance.

On Stack Exchange, all of the contributions on the site are contributed under a license maintained by a third party called Creative Commons; Creative Commons provides a license which states that licensed content must be perpetually shareable for any purpose including modification and by anyone including for-profit ventures, so long as the work remains properly attributed. This incentivizes content creation because every contributor is working on a corpus of work which is free from royalties and modification restrictions: everyone is bettering and growing the commons by using the site. The only “payment” we get out for our work is recognition: the right granted under the Attribution Clause. The Stack Exchange network is further “gameified” with rankings and reputation (a quantifiable standing) to encourage active membership and community while keeping things fun. Work hard, have a larger contribution to the commons and be recognized as such.

Alas, this minimal obligation of attribution is too much for some companies which have sought to erode this right. Right now, on Stack Overflow, Luigi Magione’s account has been renamed. Despite having fruitfully contributed to the network he is stripped of his name and his account is now known as “user4616250”. As reported by one of the moderators, Zoe, on Stack Overflow.

I can confirm SE, Inc. were the ones to clear his name. A reason was not specified anywhere obvious. Mods have been given explicit instructions not to touch that profile. While this particular incident may be limited to SO, the implications of this affect the entire network – Zoe - Save the data dump

Though I’m not a lawyer, even with a guilty verdict I don’t believe Stack Exchange is freed from their contractual obligation of attribution under the Creative Commons license. However, in the spirit of the site I put the preliminary legal question about the Creative Commons license to the experts on law.stackexchange.com.

Raising the Question

In order to get more information about the justification and reasoning for the unattribution, I asked a question on the “meta” site that helps run the network called meta.stackexchange. I have not received an official answer from the company.

Exceptional Treatment for Mangione

As pointed out in a comment, this kind of treatment is specific to Mangione,

This situation has a very direct precedent: "Frosty" (Ross Ulbricht) is still attributed under his chosen pseudonym and gets to keep the 500 not-very-organic upvotes on the question he asked in furtherance of the crime for which he was sentenced to life in prison and fined hundreds of millions of dollars. – Jeremy

The Ross Ulbricht case is even more egregious because he was convicted and his old pseudonym remains with his attribution as Ulbricht desired.

Potential Legal Mechanism Used

One user hypothesizes Stack Exchange is invoking a second seldom-mentioned license that contributors grant, many probably unknowingly. In this explanation you grant two licenses to Stack Exchange, one under the CC BY-SA, and one under an unnamed explicit license provided by the terms of use. However, even the suggestion of this “dual-license” theory being used in this case invoked tremendous push-back from users, and it was eventually subsequently deleted and hidden,

This license mentioned is provided by the Terms of Service which currently reads,

you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you as reasonably necessary to, for example (without limitation):

• Provide, maintain, and update the public Network

• Process lawful requests from law enforcement agencies and government agencies

• Prevent and address security incidents and data security features, support features, and to provide technical assistance as it may be required

• Aggregate data to provide product optimization

This means that you cannot revoke permission for Stack Overflow to publish, distribute, store and use such content and to allow others to have derivative rights to publish, distribute, store and use such content.

It would seem this would allow them to do whatever they want, and to relicense the content under any name under the CC BY-SA. Whether or not this is the legal mechanism used to remove traces of Luigi Mangione is unknown at this time, however there is a specific resource on the site detailing this dual-license scenario.

Retribution for Asking the Question

As of yet, Stack Exchange has not replied to the above post, but they did promptly and within hours gave me a year-long ban for merely raising the question. Of course, they did draft a letter which credited the action to other events that occurred weeks before where I merely upvoted contributions from Luigi and bountied a few of his questions.

It’s important to grasp the severity of my suspension: suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me. And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the network (by any measure I’m in the top 0.1% of members). All of that said, with the growth of AI and competition in their industry it’s never been easier to weather a ban from Stack Exchange, even if they are the big player.

The policy on providing a bounty is in their user’s help documents. They eventually did cite a separate recent policy created in 2023, but not before a very blunt statement that you’d have to really struggle to not see as an admission on retribution,

As to the question you asked today, Removing attribution because someone was charged but not convicted with a crime?, yes, that question brought a lot more attention to the overall situation, which includes your targeted voting/bounties. If you had not posted that question, it's unclear when your targeted voting/bountied would have been seen by Stack Overflow moderators. But, no, this suspension is not retribution for posting that question. Had you not posted that question and we became aware of the voting fraud situation, which we, eventually, would have, the response and suspension would have been the same.

That reads to me like “yes, it was retribution.” My response to this was simple,

Had I have not posted that question, you may have never been made aware of my transgressions though. You discovered this after an investigation which was prompted by my question. Let's remove ourselves for a second: if an employee steals a pen and he's fired from it only after reporting sexual harassment the company's defense can't be "we would have eventually fired you for stealing the pen", right? That's not a defense the employer can reasonably make at that point despite being otherwise actionable.

I concluded with the following,

That said, I don't feel I ever artificially did anything; but, I understand how it looks. I did find all the contributions from the profile page, and I did reward all the bounties to a specific user who I felt was trying to be productive (and oblivious to any celebrity he currently has). But this is hardly a "pattern." When you say "pattern" you're referring to this single case (granted over days) with this single user, that culminated in the removal of bounties and upvotes which I just found out about when you told me.

My side of the story is easy: I saw an alleged killer that I believe is wrongly framed who has a good head on his shoulders get swept up by the justice system. I went online and viewed his contributions and thought they were warranting of incentive. I wanted to incentivize him to become a productive member of society, and of our network. Let's correct that if it's against policy: keep the bounties removed and the upvotes removed, but a prior offense shouldn't sit as a Trump card for punishment now. I started a respectful conversation because I believe Luigi Mangione should NOT be treated as a criminal prior to a conviction. That's the request of his defense attorney (today), and I believe there is a trend for that to happen which is wrong.

That's all I'm doing here in asking the question.

Balance with other online accounts

How does this sit with how other tech sites react?

• GitHub, a division of Microsoft, still has Luigi’s profile online. This indifference to a mere charge should be applauded. It’s unfortunate Stack Overflow couldn’t chart the same course. LinkedIn, also owned by Microsoft, seems to have Luigi’s LinkedIn still active — however, I’m not sure this has been verified.

• Reddit has deleted his account (presumed to be /u/Mister_Cactus)

• Facebook and Instagram accounts are long gone. They even deleted his company page.

• Twitter removed the account and reinstated it later, after Musk got involved

• Goodreads made his account private, and waffled, reverting their decision a few times.

While all of these companies took different approaches the only one that chose to both erase him and keep the content, is Stack Exchange.

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A follow up to this article was published about this article itself being de-listed from the front page of Hacker News.