Transmedia True Crime in the Algorithmic Era Symposium

This mini symposium will explore contemporary developments in Transmedia True Crime from Innovative YouTube channels to AI Victim stories to Luigi Mangione as a 'hot' Felon

This mini symposium will explore contemporary True Crime in the present Algorithmically Mediated Digital context.

Tanya Horeck: ‘The photograph is handsome, as is the boy’: The ‘Hot Felony’ of Luigi Mangione

On December 4th, 2024, an unidentified shooter killed 50-year-old Brian Thompson, the white male CEO of United Healthcare, on a sidewalk in Manhattan. Five days later, a 26-year-old white man named Luigi Mangione was charged with Thompson’s murder. Viewed as a folk hero by many for his challenging of the profit-driven healthcare industry in America, Mangione has become an internet sex symbol through viral memes that obsess over his ‘Italian good looks’. This paper asks: What is at stake in the rapid online commodification of Mangione as a ‘hot felon’? I assert that the sanctification and smuttification of Luigi Mangione go hand in hand, and that it is necessary to interrogate how notions of race, sexuality, and gender figure in the iconography of his idealised, and celebrified masculinity.

Bethan Jones: 'This is part one of our story': Centrring the victim in AI true crime content

This paper examines the use of AI digital afterlife tools to animate photographs or create AI videos of victims. True crime is already considered a morally ambiguous genre with concerns relating to exploitation and sensationalism, and the prioritisation of entertainment over ethical reporting. Undertaking a content analysis of videos and comments posted to social media, the 2025 Netflix documentary 'American Murder: Gabby Petito' and the Christopher Pelkey AI impact statement I explore the ethical implications of the use of AI in relation to true crime.

Michael Goddard: ‘Let’s Give it a Goo’: That Chapter, Mr Ballen, Coffeehouse Crime, Danielle Kirsty and Transmedia True Crime on YouTube

This presentation will explore how True Crime channels on YouTube are doubly transmedia, both in terms of their remediated contents but also in terms of their tendencies to expand into multiple formats including at the very least audio podcasts but also multiple other channels. While these channels use the same elements of geo location images, surveillance, interrogation and courtroom video, still archival pictures, sound effects, and background music, each have their own quirks. This presentation will select some individual videos from these channels that illustrate this innovative mode of transmedia true crime storytelling, focusing on examples that intensify this through crimes involving social media activities on the part of perpetrators and/or victims. Finally, it will consider how Streaming docu-series like Don't F*** With Cats further highlight the activities of Internet true crime fans as an extra-judicial vigilante activity with unpredictable results.

Dates & times

Date	Time	Add to calendar
11 Jun 2025	5:00pm - 7:30pm	apple google outlook

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