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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Comments you see on the Internet are not a random sample! If there's one lesson I could drive home to everyone about media literacy, this is it. Everything you see online is intensely, competitively selected for its ability to drive engagement, and celebrating murder drives a ton of engagement precisely because it transgresses well-established and widely agreed norms. Indeed, as we've seen here, the murder drives so much engagement that people are eager to discuss it in the comments of any article that's even tangentially related!

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> Everything you see online is intensely, competitively selected for its ability to drive engagement

Mostly you're seeing accounts/sites you follow and choose to view and often those accounts have a consistent set of commenters. It's not like you log and the internet shows you entirely random things every time.

If you're viewing "Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, news articles, et al", that's usually not so. Each of these platforms optimize their default views to show you the content they expect will be most engaging, although the first three apply some algorithmic filtering to try and make the content engaging to you in particular rather than the average viewer.

Equally importantly, the content that gets produced is subject to this same filter. If you think the killer was justified, or you think the impulse to justify the killer shows everything that's wrong with America, you'll be excited to go write out a banger Tweet on the topic. If you have the boring, conventional view that all murders are tragic and you hope killers are brought to justice for the sake of the victim's friends and family, it's not going to occur to you to comment on this particular one.

Let’s not forget if you go against the grain and post “people are celebrating murder, which is gross” you are probably going to get downvoted—even on this site!

This whole celebration of murder thing is so bizarre. The fact it seems to be the default “way to get upvotes” and speaking out is “downvote city” is… well… disconcerting to say the least.

It speaks to the deep and broad frustration among Americans towards our healthcare system. This isn't just executives or politicians "screwing people over" like we see in so many other realms. There's a significant number of Americans who love someone who has actually died or suffered severer/permanent physical distress for the sake of insurance company profits.

When someone's family gets blown up from the sky and that someone becomes a terrorist willing to use violence against the party they blame for their family members death, we may not like it but we don't pretend to not understand it. Similarly we can't pretend to not understand this phenomenon.

We actually have no sure idea what the motives of the individual were.

There's the obvious angle.

Then, maybe Thompson paid someone to kill him, so his family could get an insurance payout.

Maybe Thompson was fucking the shooter's ex girlfriend, and he wanted to mislead investigators as to why Thompson was killed.

Maybe it's a Russian operation to sow discord in the US.

Etc

We have a good idea. Not no idea. And we know exactly how people are responding to the killing, regardless of motive, so we don't have to split hairs on that at all.

We know how people chronically on social media are responding to the killing

Do you not have friends? A social network of your own? People I know are responding in a similar fashion to what we are seeing all over the entire spectrum of online media.

I'm going to guess all of your friends and social network use the same sites and are in the same echo chamber as you. And please don't delude yourself into thinking that if you poll everyone on the spectrum of social media, that you will have any idea what the general American public think about a topic.

Neither here nor there, but were you surprised by Trump winning in the fashion he did?

I just don't see your point. I don't pretend not to understand this phenomenon, and the need for healthcare reform has always been one of my strongest political beliefs. But that doesn't mean murder is any less bad!

Is the implication that this kind of murder can only happen as an expression of widespread popular anger? I definitely don't think that's so. There are plenty of places in the world where corporate executives have to fear being murdered in the streets, and it does a lot more to drive accountability to criminal gangs and oppressive governments than to the common people and their interests.

Change the term "the need for healthcare reform" with "the need to stop insurance executives from killing my mother" and you may have an easier time understanding it. It's personal. Make it personal for thousands of people and some of them will inevitably be radicalized.

> Make it personal for thousands of people and some of them will inevitably be radicalized.

I fully understand the motive and can empathize with the alleged assailant but that doesn’t mean I am celebrating the fact somebody got murdered. Being able to empathize and understand the motives doesn’t make what the person who shot that dude morally or ethically right.

> Being able to empathize and understand the motives doesn’t make what the person who shot that dude morally or ethically right.

Never said it does bro.

You might not but go look at Reddit. The glee and cheerfulness is absolutely disgusting.

That being said, odds are looking like this dude is just a nutcase… and yet again Reddit’s hive mind will look like a fool.

> This whole celebration of murder thing is so bizarre.

People are celebrating because UHC is responsible for thousands of denied coverage(ultimately murdering common people) despite paying higher chunks of paycheck.

He ran the health insurance company that holds the record in denied claims in the US. I think that's why hardly anyone sheds a tear. Right now, the culturally transgressive thing to do is, say, make youtube videos about how shocking it is for the public to have no love for this CEO, and then getting ratio'd, everywhere, all the time.

What do find troubling is the glorification of the killer. We know nothing about his motives, might be a paid hit, whatever. But I attribute part of that to being basically drunk on the fact that people really enjoy that this CEO -- as a faceless representative of a whole class of people -- got killed. And they genuinely do enjoy he did, not necessarily for noble reasons, but it's not "really about something else".

The problem boils down to the abuser reacting in shock at backlash, instead of realizing they've abused people into genuinely hating them this much.

So I "checked", so to speak, instead of just going by the random things I saw, and yes, it's everywhere. Where people can speak freely, this is what they say. There is nothing wrong with any of these people. The only noteworthy thing here are the attempts to smear or silence them.

CNN: "Some social media users seem to lack sympathy for the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s death"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcY38-ILjos

top voted 10 comments as of now:

> A "civilized society" doesn't allow its citizens to suffer and die needlessly so that insurance CEOs get filthy rich.

> CNN doesn't get to dictate how people should feel.

> How many people died to fund the CEO's lifestyle?

> You can see how fox and cnn suddenly have the same opinion when it comes to safety of elites

> Shut up, CNN. Your days of being relevant are running out anyways. The people have spoken.

> I love how the media, complicit in the war against the poor, tells the poor how they can and cannot express their anger.

> We're giving back the same sympathy that was given to us.

> No. You’re not going to tell me I need to have sympathy for someone who spent his life and career without sympathy for others. Not being sad a bad person died does not mean something is wrong with me.

> Finally, something all Americans can be UNITED against

> You're morale grandstanding for a mass murdering pyschopath. The CEO was a monster.

MSNBC: "What the online reaction to CEO's killing reveals about America"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zY1phtEuT4

top voted 15 comments as of now:

> So the problem is social media? Why aren't they talking about the real problem? The appalling US healthcare system.

> Celebrate murder?? normalizing insurance companies is celebrating murder, you hypocrites.

> His $10 million salary was $10 million of healthcare that was denied. How many people had to die for that $10 million. Healthcare should not be for profit. Do you get it now?

> This clip is all the proof we need that corporate media is more out of touch with the average person than ever before.

> 3:50 So you want to censor valid public opinion rather than address the root issues leading to such opinions? Good to know.

> These elite people sitting at a round table discussing how the peasants are behaving! Not once did the hint at that just maybe the insurance companies should evaluate their policies

> The only people who are surprised by this reaction are the talking heads. The media is more out of touch than ever.

> We keep being told that the deaths of poor and middle class people (old and young) is not a problem for the system. Then a fat rich man gets killed because of his greedy actions and the upper class is shocked that we say “it is not a problem”. That is part of the problem.

> So the lesson we learned is to silence people online? Get a grip. People aren’t upset that he was murdered, because he runs a company that denies care that leads to people’s deaths. “We’re normalizing murder”… well we’ve already normalized it for companies like UHC, why is this so different? Because we don’t have it on video?

> this woman says we should be outraged at the murder of a human being, ok, then why are we not equally outraged at the murder of thousands caused by the frivolous denial of life saving care by these insurance companies? Where is the outrage at that and why are those deaths acceptable?

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