Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare
Courtesy: UnitedHealth Group
Tens of thousands of people have expressed support on social media for the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, or sympathized with it, in what at least one researcher is calling a worrying sign of radicalization among segments of the U.S. population.
“And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” wrote Taylor Lorenz, a former New York Times and Washington Post journalist, in a post on BlueSky a few hours after the CEO, 50-year-old Brian Thompson, was gunned down in Manhattan by a man with a silenced pistol. After a backlash, Lorenz later posted, “no, that doesn’t mean people should murder them.”
The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University identified thousands of similar posts on X within hours of the killing. The posts, which could have been viewed by more than 8.3 million accounts, garnered 180,000 likes and 24,400 retweets, according to the institute.
“The surge of social media posts praising and glorifying the killing of UnitedHealth …