‘Who’s next?’: misinformation and online threats after US CEO slaying
Brian Thompson’s murder has unleashed pent-up anger towards America’s health insurance companies
A US health boss’ murder sparked a torrent of online misinformation and calls for violence against other executives, suggesting a failure of social media moderation that analysts fear could translate into real-world harms.
The posts, allowed to spread unfettered across tech platforms, came in the wake of the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York on December 4 and lay bare a Wild West internet landscape that is largely bereft of crash barriers.
“As much disagreement as there is about what content, if any, should be moderated – at the top of most peoples’ list would be ‘explicit threats of violence,’” Jonathan Nagler, co-director of New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, said.
“So seeing posts on social media that explicitly encourage violence against anyone including CEOs of health insurance firms, suggests that content moderation has failed.”
Further exemplifying that failure, disinformation security company Cyabra identified hundreds of accounts across the Elon Musk-owned X and Meta-owned Facebook that spread a host of conspiracy theories related to the murder.
