Tom Minear: Time to log off after ghoulish jokes on CEO’s murder
Social media was ablaze last week with Americans dancing on the grave of a health insurance boss who was assassinated. Tom Minear says it shows the internet has broken us.
Not everyone likes the idea of banning kids from social media, especially not in the US, where the constitutional right to free speech makes Australia’s law difficult to replicate.
That said, even those who oppose the reform here largely agree with the principle behind it: we are failing to protect children online. Perhaps that is because we know – even if we won’t admit it – that the internet has broken us, too. And it is well past time we dealt with that.
Last week, after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in New York City, people rushed online for the latest updates regardless of whether they worked a few blocks away like me or lived on the other side of the world.
This was not surprising. The story read like the plot of a Netflix show or a podcast – both of which are probably already in the works. What was shocking, however, was the ghoulish and even gleeful disassociation from the fact that a man had just been murdered.
At least the armchair detectives chasing clues on the killer could argue they cared about justice. But so many others on social media willingly justified or even celebrated the crime.
Of the 62,000 people who reacted to the insurance company’s Facebook post about Mr Thompson’s murder, 57,000 did so with laughing emojis. Other platforms were flooded with jokes, memes and comments, all revolving around anger with America’s health insurers.
A reporter who joined in – posting a graph on Mr Thompson’s company’s high rate of claim denials to “remember his legacy” – argued the trolling was not “really about him”.
“(It’s) about the rapacious healthcare system he personified and which Americans feel deep pain and humiliation about,” Ken Klippenstein posted.
The online commentary was certainly revealing about the depths of frustration with a system that is often inadequate, unfair and even downright cruel. Far too many Americans are suffering at the hands of profit-hungry insurers and they deserve better.
To Klippenstein and others, this justifies dancing on a man’s grave and baying for blood. They would have you believe this is appropriate in the online world because it is cloaked in dark humour. But the online world is still part of the real world – and none of this is funny.
A father of two is dead. Anyone who sees that as a solution to a problem wants to live in anarchy. They need to log off.
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Originally published as Tom Minear: Time to log off after ghoulish jokes on CEO’s murder