Analysing the Online Reaction to Brian Thompson’s Murder
By Matteo Vergani
On 4 December 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in Manhattan. His death quickly became a focal point of online discourse, not of mourning, but of polarised reactions. Many social media users framed his killing not as a crime but as an act of retribution against corporate greed. His name transformed into a trending hashtag, his image a meme, and his death a symbol for widespread frustration with the American healthcare system.
To examine the digital response, a dataset of 95,172 tweets from U.S.-based accounts was collected between 30 November and 14 December 2024. Using a generative AI language model, tweets were classified based on sentiment towards Thompson, his killer Luigi Mangione, and the U.S. healthcare system.
The findings revealed a striking pattern. Initially, public sentiment was divided, but following Mangione’s arrest, negative sentiment towards Thompson and the healthcare industry surged. At its peak, tweets supporting Mangione outnumbered those condemning him, portraying him as a resistance figure rather than a criminal. Meanwhile, hostility towards Thompson intensified, with users framing him as the embodiment of systemic healthcare failures.
This case underscores how social media can magnify public sentiment, transforming violent events into ideological symbols. Digital platforms provided the infrastructure for users to reframe the murder, exposing deep societal grievances about corporate influence and economic disparities in healthcare.
Yet, Mangione’s rise as a folk hero speaks to the distortions of our age. Social media algorithms amplify extremes, privileging simplistic narratives over nuanced understanding. A young man with an incoherent manifesto of shallow grievances and violent intentions was reframed into a vessel for collective anger. Thompson, stripped of his humanity, became a totem of corporate greed. The crime itself—a calculated act of brutality—was recast in the theatre of public discourse as something larger than life.
The dynamics of this storm reveal that such events are never truly about one man’s death or another’s crime. They are about society’s dormant anger seeking release. Thompson’s murder was a catalyst, not a cause—a moment that transformed latent fury into a narrative of resistance and condemnation. The hate storm was as much about the fractures in healthcare, class tensions, and anti-elite sentiments stoked by years of political populism as it was about the crime itself.