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.