This is a work of fiction inspired by public conversations about online manipulation and political violence. It does not claim to reveal real, nonpublic facts about any person or case.
The first time Mara heard the phrase, it didn’t sound like a theory.
It sounded like a bruise you could press with your thumb.
It wasn’t justice. It was manipulation.
Not a slogan, not a chant—more like a verdict whispered through clenched teeth.
She was standing in a hallway outside a lecture room, waiting for a panel to begin.
Someone had taped printouts of screenshots to the wall like caution signs.
A dead man’s face was in half the images.
In the other half, his name had been bent into jokes, threats, prayers, and merchandise.
Mara had covered politics long enough to recognize the cycle.
A tragedy happens, a narrative forms, then the narrative becomes a weapon.
What she hadn’t learned—what she still didn’t know—was who sharpened it.
Or whether anyone had to.
The killing had already become a date people spoke as shorthand.
September 10, 2025, at a university event in Utah—an outdoor talk, a crowd, a sudden shot. (reuters.com)
The suspect had a name, an age, a case file thickening by the week.
Police, prosecutors, federal investigators: all of it moved with procedural gravity.
But online, gravity didn’t apply.
Online, the story fell upward, like smoke.
Mara didn’t go to Utah to write a think piece.
She went because her inbox had started to feel like it had a pulse.
Sources who never answered emails were suddenly sending voice notes at midnight.
Analysts who usually spoke in charts began speaking in metaphors.
One message, from a media researcher she trusted, was only eight words.
“Watch the outrage. It’s not behaving normally.”
Normally, outrage is messy.
It trips over its own feet, contradicts itself, burns out, and leaves scorched jokes behind.
This time, it organized.
Like something had arranged the chairs before the crowd arrived.
In the weeks after the assassination, misinformation didn’t just spread.
It multiplied—fake headlines, misidentified suspects, forged timestamps, AI-confident nonsense. (reuters.com)
Mara had read the fact-checks.
She had watched officials beg the public not to fill gaps with fiction.
But she also knew something uncomfortable.
Fiction is often faster than truth, because fiction doesn’t have to wait.
When she landed in Salt Lake City, the rental car smelled like citrus cleaner.
The sky was winter-clear, the kind that makes every edge look sharper than it is.
Her first stop wasn’t the crime scene.
It was a small office above a coffee shop, where a woman named Celine measured chaos.
Celine worked in “integrity operations,” which sounded like a church title.
In practice, it meant staring at feeds until your eyes stopped believing anything.
“People want one lever,” Celine said.
“A single villain. A cabal. A button someone pressed.”
Mara took out her notebook, careful not to look eager.
“What’s the reality?” she asked.
Celine smiled like someone who’d learned to smile in emergency rooms.
“The reality is the lever is crowdsourced.”
She opened her laptop and showed Mara a map.
Not geography—an influence map, pulsing nodes, sudden bursts, the architecture of attention.
“After the shooting, you saw the usual accounts,” Celine continued.
“Then you saw the accelerants—networks that specialize in conflict.”
Mara watched lines flare between accounts, some newly created, some ancient and dormant.
“Bots?” she asked.
“Bots, yes,” Celine said, “but also people acting like bots.
Copy-paste outrage. Templates. Pre-made scripts.”
Mara thought of the first screenshot she’d seen in the hallway.
A comment thread that looked like it had been manufactured in a factory.
“Why that case?” she asked.
“Why that death?”
Celine didn’t answer immediately.
She scrolled to a different view—language clusters, translation patterns, time zones.
“Because it’s a fracture point,” she said.
“Because it touches identity, fear, power. And because video exists.”
Mara had seen the clips.
Unsteady, distant, brutal. The kind of footage that shouldn’t be shareable.
Yet it was shareable.
It ricocheted through platforms faster than any warning label could keep up. (washingtonpost.com)
Celine leaned back in her chair.
“What people call ‘engineered outrage’ is often just opportunistic outrage,” she said.
“Isn’t that the same thing?” Mara asked.
“No,” Celine replied. “Engineering implies design.
Opportunism implies a predator that finds an open wound.”
Mara wrote the sentence down.
Not because she agreed, but because it held a kind of clarity.
On her second day in Utah, she drove toward the university.
The campus was quieter than the internet had been.
A winter wind picked at flags, shook branches, worried the edges of posters.
Students crossed walkways with coffee cups and backpacks like the world still made sense.
Near the place where the event had happened, there were memorial notes.
Not dramatic—handwritten, folded, taped carefully.
Mara read one that said, simply, “Stop using his death.”
She stood with the sentence until it felt heavier than paper.
A campus official met her in a conference room.
He was tired in the way people get tired from repeating the same sentence to different faces.
“We’re still struggling to make sense of it,” he said.
“Students saw things they can’t unsee.” (uvu.edu)
Mara asked about security, about planning, about the ecosystem that forms around political events.
He answered what he could, and what he couldn’t he bracketed with process.
There were investigators, there were protocols, there were ongoing proceedings.
The institution was careful not to speculate.
Outside, Mara walked to her car and sat with the engine off.
She listened to her own breath in the quiet.
It was strange—how the internet’s version of the day felt louder than the place itself.
As if reality had become a footnote to commentary.
That night, in her hotel room, she watched the podcast clip again.
The one everyone was quoting.
A man with a microphone, a recognizable cadence, saying the kind of sentence that makes algorithms purr.
He didn’t claim he had documents; he claimed he had instincts.
He said outrage wasn’t organic.
He said it was engineered.
He said the attack wasn’t failure—it was permission.
Mara paused the video.
Then she played it again, paying attention not to the words, but to the shape of them.
Permission.
It was an old word in a new costume.
In war reporting, people talk about “signals” and “green lights.”
In politics, people talk about “dog whistles.”
On the internet, permission often looks like repetition.
The same narrative appearing in a hundred places at once, like it was scheduled.
Mara didn’t believe the clip because it was dramatic.
She believed it mattered because it was effective.
The next morning, she met a man named Owen in a diner.
He worked for a small firm that tracked disinformation across borders.
Owen looked like someone who never slept all the way.
His coffee was black and untouched.
“After major events,” he said, “adversarial networks move fast.
Not to convince everyone—just to confuse enough.”
He described how state-linked outlets and proxy accounts latch onto tragedies.
How they push contradictory theories, because contradiction itself is corrosive.
Mara had read reporting about false claims flourishing after the assassination.
Foreign amplification, recycled conspiracies, narratives built to inflame divisions. (politico.com)
“But what about domestic actors?” she asked.
“The people who don’t need to be paid to spread it?”
Owen nodded.
“That’s where it becomes self-sustaining,” he said.
He took out his phone and showed her a thread.
It began with grief and ended with a call for retaliation.
“The machine doesn’t have to invent anger,” he said.
“It just has to route it.”
Route it.
Like traffic. Like money. Like electricity.
Mara thought of the comment threads.
How quickly they turned into a scoreboard.
She thought of the day after the shooting, when platforms were still scraping blood off their feeds.
How people had argued about motives before the body was even fully absent from the frame.
Later, back in her room, Mara called her editor.
He answered with a sigh that sounded like his entire calendar.
“Are you writing the piece?” he asked.
“Do we have a story?”
“We have a wave,” Mara said.
“We have a system that turns tragedy into fuel.”
Her editor was silent.
She could picture him rubbing his forehead.
“Readers want a villain,” he said.
“They want a mastermind.”
“And if the mastermind is a market?” Mara asked.
He didn’t respond.
Silence can be agreement or exhaustion.
Mara went back to her notes.
She listed the facts she could anchor.
A political activist was killed at a university event.
A suspect was captured and charged.
Prosecutors announced intent to seek the death penalty.
Investigators urged patience. (reuters.com)
Then she listed what the internet had built on top of those facts.
Foreknowledge theories. False affiliations. Fake headlines.
AI-sculpted images that made the suspect look like someone else entirely. (reuters.com)
It wasn’t just lies.
It was the acceleration of meaning, a race to explain before understanding.
And in that race, speculation felt like participation.
A way to prove you were paying attention.
Mara’s phone buzzed with a new message.
An unknown number.
“Meet me if you want to see the ledger,” it read.
No signature.
No location.
She stared at the screen.
A journalist’s mind does what it always does: imagines a door.
But she had learned to distrust doors that appear too easily.
Especially in stories about manipulation.
She wrote back, “Who is this?”
Then she waited.
The reply came a minute later.
“Someone who worked the rooms.”
Mara frowned.
“Rooms” could mean conferences, campaigns, security—any place where power sits down.
She asked for a name.
The number sent a map pin instead.
A bar on the outskirts of town.
A place with neon beer signs and the kind of parking lot where people look over their shoulders.
Mara didn’t tell her editor.
Not because she was chasing drama, but because she knew how quickly drama becomes assignment.
She went early, sat where she could see the door.
Ordered sparkling water and pretended it was a choice, not a precaution.
A man arrived ten minutes later.
He was in his thirties, wearing a jacket that tried to look forgettable.
He sat across from her without asking.
He didn’t introduce himself.
“You’re writing about the outrage,” he said.
Not a question.
Mara watched his hands.
They moved like they were used to carrying things quietly.
“I’m writing about what happens after,” she said.
“The part people think is spontaneous.”
He nodded.
“Spontaneous is a myth,” he said.
Mara didn’t reach for her notebook.
Not yet.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He smiled without humor.
“Call me Evan,” he said.
“What is this ‘ledger’?” Mara asked.
Evan leaned forward.
“It’s not money,” he said. “It’s attention.
It’s who can direct it, and how.”
Mara felt her stomach tighten.
Attention as a ledger was a poetic line, but it could also be a con.
“Evidence,” she said.
“Not metaphors.”
Evan’s gaze flicked to the TV behind the bar.
A sports game played with the volume low.
“You want to know if outrage is engineered,” he said.
“I’m telling you, it can be.”
“By whom?” Mara asked.
Evan shrugged.
“Sometimes by states,” he said.
“Sometimes by activists. Sometimes by influencers chasing a spike.
Sometimes by nobody. Just by the platform itself.”
Mara heard Celine’s voice: the lever is crowdsourced.
She heard Owen’s voice: the machine routes anger.
Evan took out his phone.
He opened a spreadsheet.
Mara expected names.
Instead, she saw timestamps.
Hundreds of them.
“Look at the pattern,” Evan said.
“Not what they said. When they said it.”
Mara leaned closer.
The timestamps were clustered, synchronized, repeating at odd intervals.
“It’s scheduled,” she said before she could stop herself.
Evan nodded.
“Scheduling is the oldest trick,” he said.
“Make it look like a crowd arrived at once.”
Mara’s mouth went dry.
She had seen coordination before, but this was clean.
Almost elegant.
“Who scheduled it?” she asked.
Evan shook his head.
“That’s the part you’ll want to print,” he said.
“But you can’t prove it with this.”
Mara stared at the spreadsheet.
“What can I prove?” she asked.
Evan’s voice lowered.
“You can prove that the outrage had a heartbeat,” he said.
“And that heartbeat didn’t match human messiness.”
Mara opened her notebook.
Finally.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
Evan’s eyes stayed on her pen.
“I used to build campaigns,” he said.
“Not politics. Product launches. Reputation rescues.
The same tools, different nouns.”
Mara wrote: tools.
Then she wrote: nouns.
Then she underlined both.
“Why tell me?” she asked.
Evan hesitated.
“I saw people celebrating,” he said.
“Not the death. The leverage.
That’s when I knew it was rotten.”
Mara looked at him.
She tried to decide if he was sincere or performing sincerity.
“Do you think the killing itself was manipulated?” she asked.
Evan’s face hardened.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“And neither does the internet.
That doesn’t stop it from pretending.”
Mara felt a small relief.
If he’d said yes with confidence, she would have walked out.
He slid his phone back into his pocket.
“You’re going to write a story,” he said.
“People will read it to feel smarter, not safer.”
Mara didn’t argue.
She had learned that truth rarely wins by making people better.
It wins by making them curious.
Evan stood.
Before he left, he added one more sentence.
“If you want the real manipulation,” he said, “watch what happens when you refuse to pick a side.”
Then he was gone.
Mara stayed in her booth, looking at the condensation ring her glass had left.
In her hotel room, she called Celine.
She didn’t mention Evan by name.
She didn’t mention the bar.
She described the timestamps.
She described the synchronization.
Celine listened, then sighed.
“That’s not new,” she said.
“It’s just more visible when the stakes are moral.”
“So it’s real,” Mara said.
“It’s plausible,” Celine corrected.
“And plausibility is dangerous.
Because people treat it like proof.”
Mara thanked her and hung up.
She stared at the ceiling until the drywall texture became a landscape.
What she was chasing wasn’t a conspiracy.
It was something harder: a system that didn’t require conspirators.
A market that rewarded fury.
A platform architecture that converted attention into currency.
In the following days, Mara interviewed parents.
Not political operatives—parents whose kids had seen the video by accident. (washingtonpost.com)
They described their children’s faces: the blankness after shock.
They described trying to take phones away without turning into villains.
One mother told Mara, “He wasn’t supposed to see death.
He saw it with captions.”
Mara also interviewed a teacher.
He said students used the killing like a meme.
“They don’t mean harm,” he said.
“But harm doesn’t need intention anymore.
Harm just needs bandwidth.”
Every conversation led back to the same question.
Was the outrage engineered, or was it simply inevitable?
Mara began to suspect the answer was both.
Not in a mystical way, but in a practical one.
A tragedy is a match.
Platforms are dry grass.
And there are always people willing to blow on the spark.
One afternoon, Owen sent her a report.
It showed how foreign-linked accounts pushed contradictory narratives after the assassination.
Not one theory—many, because confusion fragments communities. (politico.com)
Mara read it slowly.
She noticed something that made her stomach sink.
The foreign posts weren’t creative.
They were parasitic.
They borrowed American language.
They amplified American conflicts.
They didn’t invent the wound; they infected it.
That night, her editor called again.
“We need a draft,” he said.
“And we need an angle.”
Mara closed her eyes.
“What angle do you want?” she asked.
He hesitated.
“The Rogan angle,” he said.
“Everyone’s sharing it.”
Mara kept her voice calm.
“Rogan is a symptom,” she said.
“Not the disease.”
“Symptoms sell,” her editor replied.
Then, softer: “I trust you. Just make people read.”
Mara opened a new document.
She wrote the first line twice, then deleted it.
She didn’t want to begin with the podcast clip.
She wanted to begin with the moment outrage stopped feeling human.
So she began with a comment.
A single comment under a video.
“I’m glad it happened,” someone had written.
Then, seconds later, someone else had written the exact same sentence.
A hundred times.
A thousand times.
Mara tracked the accounts.
Most were anonymous.
Some were new.
Some had profile photos that looked generated.
She found a cluster that posted every ninety seconds.
She found another that posted in perfect alignment with a TV broadcast schedule.
She could not prove who pressed the button.
But she could prove the button existed.
She brought the pattern to Owen.
He glanced at it and nodded.
“Looks like a farm,” he said.
“Where?” Mara asked.
Owen shrugged.
“Could be overseas,” he said.
“Could be domestic. Could be a contractor. Could be a teenager with software.
That’s the point. It’s cheap now.”
Cheap.
Mara hated the word.
It reduced grief to economics.
But economics was exactly what she was writing about.
The way attention markets make tragedy profitable.
In another interview, a platform policy manager told Mara something off the record.
“We moderate content,” the manager said.
“But we don’t moderate incentives.”
Mara wrote the sentence down and circled it three times.
It felt like the entire story.
When she finally sat down to draft, she kept her paragraphs short.
Not for style—because the truth came in fragments.
She wrote about the shooting as a fact.
She wrote about the suspect as a fact.
She wrote about the legal process as a fact. (reuters.com)
Then she wrote about what happened online.
The false claims.
The misidentifications.
The AI-enhanced distortions.
The chaotic flood that Reuters called rampant misinformation. (reuters.com)
She wrote about foreign amplification.
How adversarial networks exploited the event to deepen division. (politico.com)
She wrote about how grief became a meme factory.
How AI tools were used to produce tributes and parodies and monetizable noise. (forbes.com)
And then she wrote about the temptation.
The temptation to look for a mastermind.
Because a mastermind would mean someone was in control.
And control—even evil control—can feel less terrifying than chaos.
Halfway through the draft, Mara stopped.
She realized she was writing the same story she was criticizing.
A story that would make people feel like they’d uncovered something.
A story that would reward curiosity with certainty.
But certainty was the one thing she refused to sell.
Certainty is the currency of manipulation.
So she changed her approach.
She wrote the piece like a question, not an accusation.
She asked what it means when outrage becomes synchronized.
She asked who benefits when the public stops trusting anything.
She asked why people confuse a viral clip with a verified document.
She asked why platforms profit from the same conflict they claim to moderate.
Then she added the hardest section.
The part about what she could not prove.
She could not prove that any single network “signed off” on an attack.
She could not prove that the killing was “permitted.”
Those claims existed, and they spread, and they felt like answers.
But feeling like an answer is not the same as being true.
Mara sent the draft to her editor.
He called an hour later.
“It’s good,” he said.
“Too careful. People will want more.”
“More what?” Mara asked.
He exhaled.
“More certainty,” he said.
Mara stared at her laptop.
“We can’t give them certainty we don’t have,” she replied.
Her editor was quiet.
Then he said, “Then give them something else.”
Mara waited.
“Give them a way out,” he said.
“A way to exist online without being used.”
Mara didn’t know if that was possible.
But she tried.
In the final pages, she wrote about friction.
How small delays can break manipulation.
She wrote about not sharing the first screenshot.
Not amplifying rage just because it feels righteous.
She wrote about reading before reposting.
About remembering that algorithms reward speed, not accuracy.
She wrote about how disinformation thrives on identity insult.
How it pulls people into tribes by promising protection.
Then she returned to the phrase.
It wasn’t justice. It was manipulation.
She wrote that the phrase can be a warning.
But it can also become a tool.
Because if you tell people everything is engineered,
they will stop believing anything—except the voice that told them so.
And that is the oldest manipulation of all.
The morning the story published, the internet did what it always does.
It turned the nuance into a headline.
Some readers said Mara was covering for the killers.
Others said she was attacking free speech.
Some accused her of being part of the machine.
She watched the comment section and felt the old fatigue.
Then she noticed something.
A thread at the bottom.
A dozen comments from strangers.
They weren’t angry.
They were asking questions.
“How do I know if a post is coordinated?”
“Why did the fake headlines feel so convincing?”
“What should I tell my kid who saw the video?”
Mara answered them.
Not all of them—just enough to feel like the story mattered.
That night, her phone buzzed.
The unknown number again.
“You refused to pick a side,” the message read.
“Now watch who comes for you.”
Mara stared at the screen.
For a moment, she felt fear.
Then she felt something else.
Recognition.
The message was bait.
Not necessarily from Evan—maybe from someone copying him.
The goal wasn’t to threaten her.
The goal was to lure her into drama.
To make her the next object.
To pull her story into the same machine.
Mara set her phone down.
She went to the window and looked at the dark city.
Somewhere, people were still arguing about the death.
Somewhere, investigators were still building a case. (fbi.gov)
Somewhere, foreign networks were still posting,
trying to turn grief into division. (politico.com)
And somewhere, a teenager was likely scheduling posts
because the internet made it feel like power.
Mara understood, then, what manipulation truly looked like.
Not a hidden room with a single mastermind.
Manipulation looked like a thousand small choices,
aligned by incentives no one voted for.
It looked like platforms that didn’t need ideology,
only engagement.
It looked like people who felt helpless,
choosing certainty because uncertainty hurts.
She turned away from the window.
She opened a new document.
This time, she didn’t write about the podcast clip.
She wrote about the first moment she realized she was being routed.
A moment years ago, long before this case.
A moment when she shared a headline without reading it.
She wrote about the shame.
Not the theatrical kind—the quiet kind.
And she wrote about the lesson.
That the most radical thing online is to slow down.
The next day, a colleague sent her a link.
A new viral trend: AI-generated songs, fake tributes, a posthumous carnival.
Even grief was being automated now. (forbes.com)
Mara didn’t click.
Not immediately.
She sat with the urge.
She watched it rise like a reflex.
Then she asked herself the question she’d built her story around.
Who benefits from my attention right now?
She closed the laptop.
She made tea.
Outside, the world stayed complicated.
Inside, she let it be complicated.
Because manipulation hates complications.
It feeds on clean narratives and fast conclusions.
And justice—real justice—moves differently.
It moves with evidence.
It moves with time.
It moves, sometimes, in silence.
Mara thought of the memorial note on campus.
Stop using his death.
She didn’t know if the internet would ever stop.
But she knew she could.
That was not a grand victory.
It was not a revelation.
It was a small refusal.
And sometimes, small refusals are how the machine begins to lose.
If you’re a fan of coming-of-age stories that blend heart, humor, and real-life issues, then Love, Victor should be on your watchlist. This Hulu and Disney+ original series has gained a devoted fan base for its honest portrayal of identity, friendship, and first love. Whether you’re discovering the show for the first time or catching up on all the buzz, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Love, Victor, including the cast, storylines, and where to watch.
Love, Victor is a spin-off of the 2018 film Love, Simon, which itself was based on the bestselling novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli. The series follows Victor Salazar, a new student at Creekwood High School, as he navigates life, relationships, and his sexual identity.
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