“It seems like the entire internet is celebrating the assassination of UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson. But social media managers and moderators seem to be struggling to tamp down the revelry to stay within platforms’ terms of use,” Samantha Cole writes over at 404 Media. “Thompson, who took a reported $10.2 million annual pay package to head the country’s leading insurer in denied claims, was killed outside of his hotel by a gunman just before 7 a.m. in Midtown Manhattan. … Business went on, but the internet is still losing its mind. On Reddit, a subreddit called r/undelete automatically tracks posts that reach the top 100 of r/all and then are deleted, either by volunteer community moderators or Reddit’s staff of administrators. In the last 48 hours, dozens of posts caught by undelete are about Thompson, meaning the most popular type of recently deleted content is about the assassination. Many of these posts had thousands of upvotes at the time they were deleted. On r/longtail, which tracks deletions that are outside the top 100 posts, there are many more about Thompson and UnitedHealthcare. You can get a sense for the vibe of Reddit in communities like r/nursing, where nurses are posting horror stories about their patients dealing with insurance denials and memes about Thompson roasting in hell. ‘Please don’t let this assassination go to waste,’ one nurse posted. ‘This is the best time for nurses to speak up and contact their elected representatives and ask for action and legislation requiring accountability from health insurance companies and private equity companies that extract as much profit as possible.’ But on the 500,000-member subreddit for medical professionals, r/medicine, moderators deleted a thread about the news of Thompson’s death after it had gained hundreds of comments, mostly doctors and nurses applauding the news or memeing about it: ‘If you would like to appeal the fatal gunshot, please call 1-800-555-1234 with case # 123456789P to initiate a peer to peer within 48 hours of the fatal gun shot,’ one said. Replying to that single new thread on r/medicine, a moderator (who also says they are a nurse) wrote, “People – Please don’t make the life of your mods a living hell. Anything that is celebrating violence is going to get taken down. … I think all the mods understand that there is a high level of frustration and antipathy towards insurance and insurance execs, but we also understand that murdering people in the streets is not good.” Samantha Cole, “Moderators across social media struggle to contain celebrations of UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.’s assassination,” 404 Media.
