As the manhunt continues for the person who shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Brian Thompson last Wednesday morning in Midtown Manhattan, the reaction from social media users has shown a notable lack of sympathy for the 50-year-old father of two. On various platforms where users can give a piece of their minds for all to see – from Facebook to Reddit and even YouTube comments sections – negative sentiment toward the company Thompson ran have largely eclipsed expressions of condolences.
UnitedHealthcare’s Facebook post commemorating and expressing condolences for Thompson, calling him “a highly respected colleague and friend to all who worked with him,” was posted just hours after the CEO’s death on Wednesday. By Friday, the post had garnered over 77,000 reactions from Facebook users, nearly 72,000 of which were “haha” emojis, dwarfing the roughly two thousand “care” emojis, according to reporting from Buzzfeed. UnitedHealthcare has since hidden the distribution of reaction totals from public view, and has also disabled comments on the post.
On Reddit, moderators at one of the site’s largest medical communities, r/medicine, removed a thread that announced Thompson’s murder, as the comment section ballooned with statements criticizing him and his company’s practices, sometimes with a sardonic edge. According to a report from the Daily Beast about the since-deleted thread, the top comment (i.e. the one with the most upvotes from fellow users) was a rejection letter satirizing the language used by medical insurance companies to deny coverage. The unnamed recipient was being denied coverage because “you failed to obtain prior authorization before seeking care for the gunshot wound to your chest.” Even in the notoriously rapacious industry of health insurance, UnitedHealth stands apart from its competition in denying policyholders’ claims, with a denial rate of 32%, five percent more than its next closest rival, Medica, and nearly double that of companies with comparable revenue like BCBS, according to valuepenguin.com.
Political pundits who generally enjoy a more or less captive audience on platforms like YouTube have nonetheless found themselves pilloried in their comment sections based on their coverage of this event. Ben Shapiro, one of America’s most prominent online right-wing pundits and founder of the Daily Wire media network, published a video on left-wingers’ responses to Thompson’s murder yesterday with the title “The EVIL Revolutionary Left Cheers Murder!” While Shapiro’s audience usually takes to the comment section to congratulate him or “yes, and” the points made in his videos, YouTube users cut against that grain this time, taking him to task for being out of touch on this issue. Some were gentle nudges, like this comment with nearly two thousand likes: “hate to break it to you, buddy, but it’s not just the Left who is sick of this.” Others were more direct with their criticisms: “L [meaning loser] take. I’m glad the comment section noticed. The CEO was actually a criminal.” Some viewers went so far as to claim that Ben’s framing of the issue exposed him as a grifter, like this comment, which had the most reactions: “I just realized your entire business model requires that us normal folk hate each other.”
UnitedHealth has surrounded its headquarters in Minnetonka with fencing since the murder, while another health insurance company based there, Medica, has temporarily closed its offices.
