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It seems like the entire internet is celebrating the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. But social media managers and moderators seem to be struggling to tamp down the revelry to stay within platforms’ terms of use.
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, an hour before his company’s investor conference started. 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.”
This timeline is okay sometimes.
by u/LegalComplaint in nursing
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. It’s a much different scene in r/medicine than it is in r/nursing: there’s only one thread about the shooting in r/medicine right now, while the nurses have a field day.
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 - if not from us, then from reddit. 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. We are a public group of medical professionals, we still need to act like that.” Comments to that thread are a little more subdued, but plenty of people are still commenting with their experiences with the insurer: “I once had to do a prior auth for United for a glass bottle,” a medical resident wrote. “The compounded intranasal midazolam was covered, but the glass bottle it came in was not.”
Multiple other big subreddits deleted popular threads about Thompson’s death. “United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s final KD ratio (7,652,103:1) lands him among the all time greats,” a thread deleted by r/interestingasfuck moderators said. One of r/InterestingAsFuck’s rules is “No politics,” which a moderator for the subreddit told us is the reason it was removed. “This assassination, given its direct connection to systemic failures within the healthcare industry, is inherently political. Consequently, the post was removed in accordance with our rules,” they said. “Furthermore, the medical insurance industry's appalling lack of compassion and accountability has understandably led to widespread outrage. Unfortunately, some individuals have expressed that anger through comments appearing to justify or support this violent act. We cannot allow our platform to become a space for such rhetoric. As a result, we made the decision to remove the post entirely.”
Mods for r/memes and r/facepalm also deleted big threads. The moderators at r/memes said they’re removing memes regarding the murder because they’re prohibited under rule 2 of the subreddit, which prohibits mention of murder and death. “The moderators try to remove all posts that break this rule and it isn't targeted at any specific incident, individual, or company,” they said.
Samantha Cole
“Imagine this is your Payback for your own policies.. Wow” a now-deleted r/facepalm thread said. Moderators for r/ABoringDystopia deleted a thread with more than 2,600 upvotes titled “Nah man, I don't know him,” seemingly referring to the manhunt for the shooter, who is still at large. A thread in r/LeopardsAteMyFace titled “They won't hurt all the billionaires right???” was deleted by moderators for not strictly adhering to the “leopards eating faces” meme format: “As a reminder, people bitching about what is to come does not constitute a face being eaten. Unless and until there are actual consequences it is not LAMF” the removal notice said. That thread had around 8,400 upvotes and almost 400 comments when it was deleted.
On r/NoStupidQuestions, moderators deleted a thread titled “Why is the death of the United Healthcare CEO a big deal? Is it a bad company or something?” at 6,000 upvotes and 1,200 comments for breaking the “no loaded questions” rule. But considering how convoluted, confusing, and frequently arbitrarily cruel American healthcare is to anyone outside of the country (as well as most of us inside of it, too) that doesn’t seem like such a stupid question to me.
Deleted threads show up on r/undelete, which archives deleted posts automatically. We asked the moderators of that subreddit for their thoughts on so many threads about Thompson being deleted across the platform. “Personally, I don't have a strong opinion about post removals on this topic, and I can not speak for moderators of other communities. I understand it's attracting a lot of attention and reactions that bring out admin intervention and likely brigades, so I expect that some communities' teams may be overwhelmed and need to remove posts as they prioritize their time as volunteers,” they said. “One note I want to share is that Reddit does a poor job of explaining to an outside observer the difference between content that has been removed by admins (site employees), versus removed by moderators (community volunteers), versus voluntarily deleted by the author. There are differences, but it is often not clear to moderators, let alone the layperson. There are certainly a lot of removals being done by both admins and moderators in these posts, and the admins and moderators do not always agree.”
In fact, a moderator from a subreddit we hadn’t reached out to for comment reached out because they heard we were contacting moderators to speak about this. They said every instance they were aware of of the surveillance video of Thompson’s death being removed had not been moderators—who, as a reminder, are unpaid volunteers—but Reddit’s paid administrator team that enforces the sitewide terms of use.
The policy for violent content on Reddit states:
“Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual (including oneself) or a group of people; likewise, do not post content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals. We understand there are sometimes reasons to post violent content (e.g., educational, newsworthy, artistic, satire, documentary, etc.) so if you’re going to post something violent in nature that does not violate these terms, ensure you provide context to the viewer so the reason for posting is clear.”
“Reddit admin have been removing the video,” the mod who reached out said. “It does not to the best of my knowledge, and I have pretty good knowledge about this as it is kind of my thing to be an expert in this particular portion of the content policy, violate the content policy. In case that is a bit convoluted, to the best of my knowledge, this was a newsworthy event covered in numerous publications of good repute. The content policy does not allow for death videos except in an educational, newsworthy etc context.”
“This has led to some moderators removing content related to the event that is not the video of the murder, as they do not want their subreddits to have AEO (admin removals) which can reflect badly on the subreddits and result in discipline from Reddits modcoc team (moderator code of conduct.)”
Reddit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Over on X, as Miles Klee pointed out in Rolling Stone, it was open season for comedians, activists, and anyone trying to get off a hit tweet. “Claim denied,” “pre-existing condition,” etcetera—the jokes write themselves and are repeated on the platform formerly known as Twitter a billion times over. Tiktokkers, similarly, got in that pit with reaction videos about the unaliving of a CEO.
— Billy Jarrett (@billyjarrettugh) December 5, 2024
These are all expected shenanigans from X and Tiktok, where the platforms pay people to go viral. They’re also more suited to shitposting and comedy, so it makes sense people are getting their riffs off on the platforms made for viral short form riffing. Likely place for them to be. But on the sites where more normies and corpo thinkfluencers abide—Facebook and LinkedIn—there are signs that United Healthcare, which is the health benefits division of UnitedHealth Group, are fighting for their lives.
On Facebook, UnitedHealth Group locked comments on its post mourning the death of its “dear friend and colleague,” but it couldn’t block people from reacting with emojis, which more than 73,000 have so far with the crying-laughing face (compared to around 2,400 doing a sad face). Laugh-reacting became a meme of its own on Facebook, with a lot of the more than 6,800 shared posts including people telling friends to go hit the laugh emoji.
Unitedhealth Group locked comments on its Linkedin post about the incident, too, but more than 6,000 people so far have “liked” the post (instead of “support” or “heart” reactions) and more than 200 hit the laughing emoji. It’s really special to see people wearing suits in their profile pictures and with titles like “Senior Director in Marketing & Data Analytics” and “Business Development Manager” hitting the laugh button on a health insurance company's announcement of the death of its CEO.
Social media is not real life, but when something is happening across every major platform, it’s fair to call it at least reflective of real life. And there’s rarely such a quick turnaround from outrage to real-world events as we just saw happen this week: In an announcement that couldn't have had worse timing if they tried, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield posted a notice for New York plans on December 1—three days before the shooting—that beginning with claims processed on or after February 1, the insurance provider would only cover anesthesia for surgeries up to a time limit that the physician estimated it would require. Connecticut and Missouri would have similar changes. In other words, if a procedure went long, every moment the patient was under anesthesia—which is almost always extremely expensive—the meter would be running.
Multiple Connecticut lawmakers posted this week that they disagreed with the change. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy wrote: "This is appalling. Saddling patients with thousands of dollars in surprise additional medical debt. And for what? Just to boost corporate profits?"
And New York senator Mike Gianaris wrote: “Ridiculous. Does Anthem expect a patient to get up in the middle of a surgery and walk away?” He also vowed to introduce legislation to prevent such practices in the future.
On Thursday, Anthem walked the change back entirely. "There has been significant widespread misinformation about an update to our anesthesia policy. As a result, we have decided to not proceed with this policy change,” a spokesperson for Anthem told me in an email. “To be clear, it never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services. The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” I asked what the “misinformation” was, which they didn’t answer.
Jason Koebler contributed reporting to this story.
