A startling portion of the social media profiles behind troubling praise for the accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson are bogus, a new analysis found.
In the wake of Thompson’s cold-blooded killing in Midtown on Dec. 4, deranged Facebook and X users lauded the then-unknown killer by posting the hashtag #DenyDefendDepose – the three words found on bullets used to kill Thompson, and a message of resistance against insurance companies.
However, at least 11% of the social media accounts behind such posts were phony – meaning they were anonymous, suspicious, or bot-like in their online behavior, according to an analysis by Cyabra, an Israel-based disinformation detection platform.
Additionally, 11% of the posts between the two platforms that contained the words “kill” and “healthcare CEOs” were posted by fake profiles, the analysis found.
A significant number of the bogus accounts were traced to overseas networks, Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy told Forbes – a fact that critics called “troubling.”
“Social media has long been ground zero for malicious foreign influence operations aimed at polarizing and radicalizing American society,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York) fumed in response to Cyabra’s findings.
“As the most powerful nation on Earth, we should stop twiddling our thumbs while foreign adversaries freely weaponize American institutions – toward America,” Torres continued.
To add insult to injury, after Mangione’s Dec. 9 arrest at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s following a days-long manhunt, social media saw an explosion of users lionizing the suspected killer – but many of them were fake too, according to the analysis.
Overall, out of the 2,369 profiles that actively amplified the hashtags “#FreeLuigi” and “#FreeLuigiMangione,” an eye-popping 18% of them were fake, including 80, or 9%, of the 834 Facebook profiles, and 349, or 22%, of the 1,535 X profiles.
Nevertheless, the damage was done: the two hashtags received a whopping 162,636 engagements and reached 138 million views in just one week.
“Disinformation at this scale is dangerous because it taps into psychological and emotional vulnerabilities,” Brahmy said in response to the disturbing findings.
“With 138 million views, these narratives influence everyday users’ understanding of events like this murder by reframing them as moral crusades,” Brahmy said, and added that for children, the impact is “particularly troubling, as it can warp their developing sense of justice and truth.”
Indeed, an Emerson College poll released this week found that in the wake of the murder and subsequent reaction, more than 40% of young voters found Thompson’s killing either “somewhat” or “completely” acceptable.
