Joseph (2:52)

Yeah. So Sam and I and the others, but mostly Sam and I have been working on getting a refreshed like new merch, new shirts, hoodies, crewneck sweatshirts. We tried really hard to get these before Christmas so that you could give them as gifts, but we're not going to have them in time. The reason that I'm talking about this now is because probably later this week we'll put them up on our Shopify if you're interested. And I want to highlight that it's a, it's a pre sale, as in we've ordered them but we're not going to get them before Christmas. But if you want to buy them, I will ship them out the second that I get them, which will probably be at the very beginning of January. So if you want to give your loved ones a piece of paper that says you're getting a shirt from 404 Media now, now is your chance. Is that right, Sam?

Jason Kebler (3:48)

Yeah, yeah. The coveted iou, always a classic for the last minute gift giving. I've done it a thousand times, unfortunately. Um, but yeah, and it helps us if you preorder to know how much to get. So. And I think they look sick, so watch for that.

Sam Cole (4:04)

I haven't done an iou, but I might do that this year.

Joseph (4:08)

I've done it most years.

Jason Kebler (4:09)

I've done it most years. I'm probably gonna do it.

Joseph (4:10)

Here's a printout of what I bought you. It's coming later.

Jason Kebler (4:13)

It's in the mail. It's like that's. Yeah, for sure.

Sam Cole (4:16)

I respect it. I didn't know that was a thing. And I guess soon, yeah, soon we're gonna be game to. I know we're going to get into sneaker culture because we're doing all these drops now and pre sales bots on our website. No, I don't give anybody any ideas. But yeah, definitely go and order that if you want. The show is going to be a little bit different here and then we'll get a couple of breaks because there is just so much to talk about with the United Healthcare CEO. We've done a few different stories on it. Probably different to the ones you've read at other outlets. Obviously this is the biggest story at least in the United States. But let's get into it. The first one that we're going to talk about is one that I wrote called United Healthcare shooting person of interest had 3D printed Glock. I will give a super brief summary of recent events. I'm sure many people know this, but last week a man ambushed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson in Manhattan on the pavement and shot him in the back and killed him. There was a massive manhunt with various things along the way. Police found a rucksack full of Monopoly money in Central Park. Lots of photos of the alleged shooter were released or as police got there, them. And then eventually reportedly an employee at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania called authorities after seeing this person of interest later turned suspect. He's arrested and his name is Luigi Mangong. Abc, NBC, cnn, all obtain images of a weapon found on him. This is where my story comes in.

Joseph (5:50)

I think it's mangione.

Sam Cole (5:52)

Sure, we'll go for that. Thank you very much. I even checked. Trying to be respectful. I'm awful. I apologize.

Joseph (5:58)

Okay. It's the mispronounced word of the week. We're bringing it back.

Sam Cole (6:01)

Bringing it. But yeah, we had a good run. I saw in the replies on Twitter immediately the photo of the weapon and you know, to an untrained eye like mine, it just looks like a black block. You know, it just looks like a pistol. But then people were tagging a particular Twitter user and mentioning somebody and saying it was a particular, a particular design of a 3D printed Glock frame. I then spoke to two people who said the same. One of those sources, we granted anonymity and another one was print shoot, repeat who, for those who don't know, is a pretty high profile youtuber and 3D printed firearm community member. They do all sorts of things with firearms and 3D printed weapons and uploads videos. They have, you know, various issues with YouTube as well demonetizing content as you might expect, all of that. But both of these people, they said that the weapon in the photo released was a Chairman Wong version one. And I think, and I think others would agree that is hugely significant in that this might be the first assassination in the United states using a 3D printed weapon. Now, again, I'm no expert, but Jason helped me with this because you have a little bit more knowledge than me. And through the two people I spoke to, just because we say a weapon is 3D printed, that doesn't mean the entire thing has been made by a printer. You're going to have different components like the slides, which you'll have to purchase. But this was the Glock frame and that was 3D printed. Before we touch on that a little bit more, Jason, we haven't covered 3D printed guns I think directly at 404 Media just because, I don't know, hasn't super come up. But way back at Motherboard, the technology section of ICE where we used to work, and I think actually before my time there, Motherboard made probably like the first serious documentary about 3D printed guns. What was the deal there?

Joseph (8:19)

Yeah, so it was called Click Print Gun and it was made by our ex colleagues at Motherboard. It was, I think it came out maybe in like 2012, like it was a long time ago. And it followed Cody Wilson who made this 3D printed gun called the Liberator or that he called the Liberator and basically was just showing that it was possible to make a 3D printed gun. And I will say just like for people who are interested, the producer and director of that documentary, which I think was like 25 minutes long was Aaron Lee Carr who has since gone on to make some like very high profile documentaries for HBO and other outlets. So it's, it's extremely well made and it's very like it's worth watching. And this was a really big deal for Motherboard as well. Like I remember it got coverage from CNN and like other major media outlets because they had no idea that this was even possible. And it really raised like a lot of questions about free speech, like content moderation, things like that. Like back sort of the extent of the second amendment, various issues like this. Back when people were not talking about it as much, Cody Wilson went on to found this. I guess it's a company. I don't even know if it's a company or if it's just like an online platform like non profit type thing called Defense Distributed, which has like all of these different designs for 3D printed guns, things like that. But the big thing is that the Liberator was I believe made entirely out of 3D print resin, which is like printable plastic more or less. And he fired it like he tested it, showed that it worked, but you know, it wasn't super like reliable as a gun. I think that.

Sam Cole (10:17)

Well there's like footage of it breaking and stuff.

Joseph (10:19)

Yeah, like it breaks. It's kind of like one of those like one time use guns more or less. And I think the very interesting thing is that in the years since then, as most things do in technology, 3D printed guns have gotten a lot more sophisticated and a Lot different. The gun that Joseph wrote about earlier this week that we're talking about, the Chairman Wan gun, is I guess you'd call it like a hybrid 3D printed gun where the case is 3D printed plastic resin. But then as Joseph mentioned, many of the parts are like, are metal and you buy those metal parts from the Internet. And there was actually a kind of interesting academic study that's referenced in that article that came out in October about the rise of this type of gun because they're a lot more reliable than just like a plastic gun as you'd expect. But they're like a lot more sophisticated and it's causing like some. There's speculation in this paper that it's going to cause some problems for law enforcement because the definition of like what a 3D printed gun is, is changing and sort of like tracking this stuff is getting a lot more complicated for that reason. And that paper came out in the United Kingdom that has actual gun laws, whereas like the United States. Very few, Very, very few. But I thought it was, I thought that was like very interesting context was, was this paper. But anyways, Joseph, you want to talk a little bit more about this specific gun and then also what, what this tells us about what, what might happen here.

Sam Cole (12:06)

Yeah, so and I guess just before that when you talk about the Liberator from the early documentary, it, it looks very much like his own gun. Right. It's like a particular design. It's not trying to like replicate a Glock from what I remember it's made in a certain way presumably because the physics of it has to try to be ineffective even if one shot or a couple of shots weapon. Right. And it's different now in that the 3D printed firearms market or community are basically making copies of established weapons that people know work and they're able to effectively replicate them. So this weapon, the Chairman 1v1, I was told, you know, it was released in around 2020 or 2021 depending on where it was potentially downloaded from. And it quickly became unpopular because the V2 came out something like six months later. We don't know enough about the suspect and whether they did download this when they downloaded it. But I thought that was an interesting data point in that this isn't the version 3 or the version 4 or whatever or more recent one. It is a years old model of this particular 3D printed firearm design. So interesting data point there. You just mentioned that UK paper and how we could have problems for law enforcement when the reporting initially came out about this 3D printed weapon. A few outlets relying on the comments of the police obviously were framing it as a ghost gun, which is a gun without a serial number. And of course that is true in that, you know, you don't 3D print a serial number onto it if you have any sense. Right. But I do think it's much More significant this 3D printed than it just doesn't have a serial number. And I think it bears repeating that. As you say, Jason, it could be a real problem in the uk, in the us basically, nothing in the way of somebody just buying a weapon like this. Anyway, that being said, stuff might change now and I'm glad we don't want to make predictions. I remember when Emmanuel was editing this piece, he changed the work. As I said, it might likely have legal ramifications. He's like, we don't want to predict which is true. Print, shoot, repeat. The high profile YouTuber they said, quote, it appears to be the first high profile case involving a 3D printed gun. And it's my guess that this will have a huge impact on DIY firearms regulations going forward, end quote. So that's one of the most prominent members of this community acknowledging and seeing that maybe there's going to be some sort of legal crackdown. Now what that exactly looks like, I'm not, I'm not clear on some members. I think many members of the 3D printed firearms community would say that this is information, it is a speech issue. All we're doing is distributing plans, that sort of thing. So we'll see how that pans out legally. But as well as a weapon of this type being used in a very high profile murder and assassination, I think it really just show how far 3D printed weapons have come. When I was writing my book about Anom, the encrypted phone company, the FBI secretly ran and backdoored and read all the messages on there. The FBI and other authorities got messages showing that a gang in Finland had basically made a factory for 3D printed submachine guns. And you look at the photos and it's crazy. There's like three or four 3D printers all lined up and they just have a supply chain of these things. So you have that. You also have some neo Nazis in Finland who have turned to the weapons as well apparently. And then if you are interested in this, I recommend you go follow the work of Popular Front from Jake Hamrahan who's done a bit more reporting on this and I think he did a recent documentary. But there's also even rebels in Myanmar who are now using 3D printed weapons. Like this is here to stay. Now it's we're so far from the Cody Wilson's doing a single shot pistol now.

Joseph (16:26)

Yeah, I've been pretty shocked at the fact that a lot of the 3D printed guns appear to me to be like submachine guns or like automatic weapons in some way. Preface well or post post face. I don't know anything about guns. Like I know a little bit about 3D printed guns, just enough to sort of edit the piece that you did. But I don't know terminology. I don't know exactly if they're technically automatic weapons or what, but I have been surprised at how far the it has clearly evolved since that initial Cody Williams story.

Sam Cole (17:05)

Yeah, absolutely. Let's have a quick break and when we come back we're going to talk about a couple more stories around all of this. We'll be right back after this.

Joseph (17:35)

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Sam Cole (20:40)

Okay, and we're back this one. Jason, you just published this today. Luigi Mangione Played Among Us Breathes air. Obviously a sarcastic headline. I think, before we get to sort of what you're criticizing, when the name of the suspect came out, what did you do?

Joseph (21:01)

Yeah, I mean, I think anyone who has done journalism on the Internet has done this at some point. And I think actually just like, random people who are interested in stories have started doing this as well, which is the name was announced. The name Luigi Mangione was announced yesterday by the nypd. And then you Google the name and you try to figure out, like, who was this person? And is this, like, you try to look for their accounts, more or less. And in this case, it wasn't like John Smith. Like, it was easy to find quickly. There were several Luigi Mangionis, but the sort of, like, biographical information seemed to match what was happening on these. This person's account. And the most common thing that people Do. The most common time that this happens is in the result of like a mass shooter, where the name of a mass shooter is released and then the people who cover these things essentially go like looking for their online footprint and their manifesto, if there is one. Like there's been several high profile examples where you know, a mass shooter had like a YouTube channel where they had lots of hateful stuff or in some cases explained explicitly like why they did what they did. We can talk about why that is a problem in a minute. But basically it's like I, and I believe all of you to some extent started looking for Luigi Mangioni's online accounts and there were many, many, many accounts.

Sam Cole (22:38)

Yeah, it's almost like a reflex, unfortunately at this point, which I don't really know what that says about us or journalism. And maybe it's not all bad, but it's like a, it's like an impulse.

Joseph (22:47)

Yeah, yeah. And the interesting thing in this case, a couple interesting things. One, we've written a lot of articles about like he was not a mass shooter. This was like a polit, an act of political violence. And they're is. It has resonated with people in ways that we are probably going to talk about in the second half of this show. And so I think that people wanted to see like did this person's online politics align with an idealized version of him where he did this killing? Allegedly it was him to like start a class war against a very repressive and anti human health insurance regime. And I think that people pretty quickly realized that at least on the surface, there was not a manifesto, there was not like a long history of talking about health problems on his social media accounts, things like that. Like some of that has now since been reported. But I think often about the website heavy.com which is like a website that I don't even know what it is other than they're very good at SEOing to the top of any search result for a mass shooter. They do like, you know, terrible mass shooter. Five quick facts you need to know. And it always goes like, it's always the first thing that pops up. And I think that every, well, many, many, many online media outlets are playing that game with this shooter, with mass shooters, with tragedy, with the big news story. And I think that reflex to do that is understandable because I'm very interested in sort of like who this person is and why they did what they did and that sort of thing. There's like a big vacuum of information and then there's like one Little detail, which is his name. And then you try to fill in all of the gaps of the. Of the information that you don't have. And sometimes that's very easy. But, like, usually it's. It's very hard because what people were finding was his, like, GitHub page where he had worked on some AI stuff back in 2016, 2017, you know, we're talking six years ago, like a Facebook page that had stuff on it, but was also very outdated. A WordPress, a substack, a Twitter feed. And most of this stuff was quite dated by years.

Sam Cole (25:33)

Yeah, like a couple of years, Several years, something like that.

Joseph (25:35)

Yeah. And a lot of it was, like, unrelated, I guess, because people's online presences don't neatly align with an act like this usually. And then there was also the Goodreads account. So I think pretty immediately people found the Goodreads account, which is. People don't know. Goodreads is a website where people review books, and Luigi Mangione has an account there. And there's like, dozens and dozens and dozens of books that he read. And so people were trying to, like, form this narrative of what information ecosystem was he surrounding himself with? Is he leftist? Is he a rightist? Is he a class warrior? Like, people learned very quickly that he went to this fancy private school in Maryland and so on and so forth. And all of this is, like, very understandable. But every morsel of information was turned into some sort of blog. And the worst of them that I have seen that everyone has been dunking on was an NBC News article that had the headline and lead sort of explaining that he had once played the game among us, which is, in my opinion, it's a game for children. It like millions and millions and millions of people have played it, adults play it, et cetera.

Sam Cole (26:54)

But it's like one year we played it for my birthday, actually.

Joseph (26:57)

Oh, yeah, we did. We did.

Sam Cole (27:00)

You know. Yeah. I'm not. I'm not mad at anything. A baby game.

Joseph (27:04)

But by that, by a game for children, I mean, like, if I had a kid and they were five years old, I would feel comfortable allowing them to play this game. It's not really like that violent of a game. It's a cartoon game that doesn't have any, like, blood or guts in it, as far as I know. And it's a game about social skills, more or less, if you're not familiar. Basically, it's like the parlor game mafia, where each round or like, each time you play, you're randomly assigned a role. You're either a crew member or an imposter. And if you're an imposter, you try to kill one of the crew members secretly. And then you talk over voice chat if you're on Zoom or you just like, I don't know if you talk in the game in some way, but basically you try to like, trick people into thinking that you didn't do the murder, more or less. And the NBC News article was like, it was more or less like Luigi Mangione, like, role played as an assassin in this game at some point. And that's like, not useful information.

Sam Cole (28:09)

Well, and spoke to a friend who played with them. Right. Or somehow else associated and like, called it extremely ironic that we were playing this game and he turned out to allegedly murder somebody. And it's just like you get to listen the piece. And it's not just your social media posts from years ago are not representative of the very complex person you are. Also, the comments from somebody who you played an online game with years ago mean jack squat, basically. And yet NBC News feels like it should be the headline and the lead.

Joseph (28:47)

Yeah. And then so the article then sort of gets into like, we did this whole search and we talked about whether we were going to write an article, and then we basically didn't write an article.

Sam Cole (28:56)

But then your article, to be clear.

Joseph (28:58)

Yeah, yeah. And then I ended up writing this meta article about it because everyone was talking about this NBC News article and how it's like, useless. It is a useless exercise. And I said this in the article and then you and Emmanuel said really mean things to me. But it's like, I'm not going to do a murder. Like, I'm not going to do, like, I'm not going to do anything like this. I hope to never, ever, ever be in the news for anything like this. But anytime I do this process of Googling for people, I start thinking about what my online profile looks like. If someone were to do this to me. And if you Google me and I have Googled me, it's like all this, like, random shit comes up that has. That is either very old or from like, really old. Like Live Journal. I had as a teenager, you know, photos of things that. Where I've been, places that don't actually mean anything to me. I was actually on Facebook the other day buying a couch on Marketplace and a post came up from 10 years ago that I don't remember writing. Like, there's just all this stuff that I don't really remember doing on the Internet because I've been on the Internet for 25 years, just posting and doing stuff. And if you want to have a narrative about someone, you can kind of, like, pick out any little detail and say, like, oh, this is why he did it, or, like, this is relevant, or so on and so forth. And so that's what I tried to write about.

Sam Cole (30:30)

Yeah, it makes sense. The only time you're going to be able to get a good sort of picture of somebody is when, you know, a magazine comes in and does a real, real deep dive. And we've done those sometimes, at least a motherboard and stuff. They require a lot of time, a lot of resources. But you're simply not going to get that in the breaking news situation to the point where you might publish something completely garbage, you know?

Joseph (30:57)

Yeah, I guess the last thing I'll say on that, and I struggled to say it in the article, but I thought that Riley McLeod at Aftermath did a very good job of this in a similar piece on Aftermath. It's like nothing that they. That Luigi Mangione has posted online or told anyone or done is as relevant as the fact that they allegedly killed a CEO in, you know, broad daylight and had, you know, a message on the bullet casings. It's like, that is a far stronger political statement. It's. It's an extreme political statement that is far, like, more illustrative than a comment they left on a substack or a tweet that they did six months ago. And I think that that is, like, I don't know, worth pointing out for sure.

Sam Cole (31:56)

All right, we have a couple more stories. The first one here from Sam. Major Health Insurance Companies take down leadership pages following murder of United Healthcare CEO. Obviously, we're stepping a little bit back in time here. This is basically right at the start of the manhunt. But, Sam, what did other health insurance companies do in the immediate wake of that murder?

Jason Kebler (32:27)

Yeah, so this was five days ago, which has been a really long. Five days.

Sam Cole (32:31)

It feels way longer than that.

Jason Kebler (32:33)

Let's go back in time to five days ago. It's been a long week and it's Tuesday. Yeah. So this is something that I saw someone, I think someone tweeted about or posted about on Blue sky or something. But someone had. Actually, I had been texting with my friend about this back and forth during the day, that day. And it was like two days after the shooting. But he was like, did you see that UnitedHealthcare took down their leadership page? And I was like, yes, because I was just looking at. I was looking for that page for a different story, and it was down. I was like, well, that's weird. And then he texted me that. And then I looked on Twitter and someone had been posting about lots of different insurance companies, health insurance companies, taking down their leadership and board of director pages or like redirecting them to the home page and things like that. So, yeah, I was like, oh, like, let me look at like every major health insurance company and see if I can find if any of them have taken down their pages also. And most of them that I looked up that day had what were some.

Sam Cole (33:49)

Of the first ones. And of course, this won't mean all that much to non US listeners. You'll still appreciate the lost media archiving aspect of it, but maybe the names of companies won't be much to them, but to sort of US listeners, what were the sort of those first companies you found?

Jason Kebler (34:03)

Yeah, I feel bad for anyone, like, trying to learn about this news cycle from outside the US and they feel bad for us for living in this hellhole.

Joseph (34:13)

But I feel that's. That's something that people like to say, though. It's like, I mean, they're very depressed for us, but I think it's like, that's crazy that y'all. Yeah, that's crazy. Like, sucks, sucks.

Jason Kebler (34:26)

Sucks to suck.

Joseph (34:28)

Sorry. Sorry for you and. Or.

Jason Kebler (34:31)

Yeah, what's going on over there? Yeah. So obviously United Healthcare was down. They were redirecting to the homepage. And this is. This is all on Friday. So again, it was like a couple days after Anthem Blue Cross Shields was down. Or it was redirect redirecting to its About Us page, which didn't have anything in it as far as like, leadership, the Care Source leadership pages, which were like multiple individual pages of every, like, like the cfo, the executive vice president, the CEO, the coo. Like, everyone's page was gone. It was returning like a URL not found Medica, which I had not heard of before this. Their executive Leadership page returned to its homepage and then its foundation leadership actually also was down and said, oops, oops, that page does not exist. Elevant Health was down and said, sorry, that page is no longer here. And then on Monday, I checked again because a couple more had not taken theirs down yet. And I was like, let me see who else Kaiser Permanente's page had gone down as of like, late Friday at NA's page said, Error 404. Many people have pointed out the irony of writing about 404 errors on 404 Media. It's fun. Yeah. Humana's Board of Director page now says, you're not authorized to access this page. So it was nine in total that I checked, and then only one. Actually, I hit all them up, obviously, to see if they had comment, but only one, which was Aetna, which is owned by CBS Health. That was the only one that actually replied to me. And they replied today or yesterday, and they said it was like, out of respect. They said, out of respect for the Thompson family, we are declining comment, which in itself is like, yeah, we're acknowledging that this is about the shooting, which obviously.

Sam Cole (36:41)

Oh, I see what you mean.

Joseph (36:42)

Right.

Jason Kebler (36:42)

Like, I didn't. I asked. I said, was this related to the shooting of Brian Thompson? And then they said, out of respect to the family, we're not commenting on that. Which, you know, it's not just like, oh, our page is broken, coincidentally.

Sam Cole (36:55)

Right. Sometimes as journalists, we know the answer, the reader knows the answer, but we have to ask these questions because that's our job, and we have to give them a fair chance to respond. As you say, most of them didn't get back to you, but one did, and they gave that sort of explanation. I guess just the last thing is that, you know, a lot of people obviously pointed out the way back machine in. Yes. You know, I'm sure the health insurance companies are aware that you can't remove stuff from the Internet like that. I'm just. We have to speculate a little bit. But, like, what do you make of that? And do you think that they are also aware of that or. They must be, right?

Jason Kebler (37:37)

I mean, I think probably, like, this is me entirely speculating, just as a disclaimer. This is me as an individual person, not. Not trying to assume things about these companies and their actions. But having seen this happen, having worked at places where consulting firms are brought in to fix a mess on the fly, I am gonna assume that some, like, safety consulting team, either internally or, like, because they all did it at the same time. I'm assuming, like, they all have the same kind of, like, crisis comms or crisis safety kind of protocols that are being passed around. I assume someone paid about a lot of money to tell these companies, hey, you should take down these pages as, like, just something to do. You know, it's like, it doesn't actually do anything. It might make these very, like, I don't know, I assume panicked and other people have reported not happy. CEOs and leadership teams feel better. So it's kind of like a band aid. It's obviously not anything that's like real security or real OPSEC on any kind of meaningful level. But it's just weird to me to do it at all.

Joseph (38:54)

It's.

Jason Kebler (38:55)

I assume they didn't think anyone would notice, which as we just went over, we're digging around for everything all the time on the Internet these days. So of course people noticed and then it became its own story, you know.

Sam Cole (39:08)

Right. I guess just last thing I would say is that like purely from like a cold security perspective, I don't know, you still got to deal with a low hanging fruit, you know, even though it's like, oh, then someone could get around it looking way back machine or you, you know, someone motivated enough obviously to go cause physical harm is not going to be deterred by a website. 404 in. Right. But I know from a cold analytical security perspective you still deal with the low hanging fruit. So again we have to speculate why, but that kind of all makes sense and it'll be interesting. When do they put them back up or is there a bigger cultural shift around, I mean to put it bluntly, hatred towards CEOs and leaderships of companies like this, which will.

Joseph (39:55)

It's really wild because you can't like hide this stuff like as in they're allowed to not have it on their website. But it's like the disclosure rules around corporate information make it such that you have to know who the CEOs of these publicly traded companies are.

Sam Cole (40:12)

Which is good.

Joseph (40:14)

Which is definitely good. So I don't know, it's kind of interesting. This is a little bit far afield. Promise I'll keep it short. But like the controversy over the private jet tracking stuff where like Elon Musk won't. Doesn't want his jet track. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want his jet track. Like the people tracking them have been banned from threads and have been banned from Twitter. It's like immediately after Mark Zuckerberg banned the tracking of his private jet on threads, he, his private jet was seen at Mar a Lago meeting with, you know, President Trump. It's like there, there is a reason that this stuff can be tracked and I understand that there is, that these companies are worried about protecting their executives, but at the same time it's like they have these very public roles. And so I don't know, I think maybe there will be a push by these companies to either beef up security or keep these things a little bit more private, but they can't really do it that much.

Sam Cole (41:14)

Yeah, I didn't think of the link to the plane tracking. That makes complete sense. All right, let's take another quick break and then we'll talk about one more United Healthcare story before the Subscribers only section as well. We'll be right back after this.

Joseph (41:46)

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Jason Kebler (43:59)

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Sam Cole (44:00)

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Jason Kebler (44:37)

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Sam Cole (44:50)

All right, and we are back with one more from Sam. Moderators across social media struggle to contain celebrations of United Healthcare CEO's assassination. Again, we're back in time. Sort of around the time of the other piece that we just covered these cases. Very quick. Thank you. Okay, so I'm sure people have seen these. Maybe they've participated in them. It's such a wide sentiment across all social media. Just what are some of these posts? I almost feel stupid asking the question because it's so obvious, but we have to lay the groundwork. What are some of these posts and what is the sentiment that people were exhibiting around this time four days ago, as you said?

Jason Kebler (45:38)

Yeah, so immediately after the shooting, before we even knew who did it, we were still unclear on any kind of hint of a motivation. People were like, I mean, the reaction generally online was good. You know, it was like celebratory that the CEO of a health insurance company was shot. So yeah, it's. This story has a lot of, like, elements to it. And I think that's a result of like trying to get the story early and be like, what's happened? Let's, let's just get out there what's happening without doing like everything we know kind of post. But, you know, addressing just like that. This is something that is happening across social media. So yeah, the posts were generally like people were. People were like celebrating. People were saying, you know, telling their own, like, horror stories about health insurance and dealing with that. One really striking example of this was the nursing subreddit. They are wild in there. I think Jason was the one that pointed out that that was the mood in there. The memes are memeing in our nursing. And then by contrast, you have lots of other big front page subreddits trying or, you know, subreddits that were having posts that were reaching their front page trying to keep people from breaking the subs rules, which usually like Reddit's wider terms of use, say no celebrating or Glorifying violence, something to that effect. So moderators have to basically moderate to those rules at a minimum to keep their subs going and to keep them from getting completely banned by Reddit administration. So, I mean, it's, I understand like the mods being like, let's chill on the celebrations because you're literally breaking the rules when you're doing this. But also a lot of the threads that we saw getting deleted, which they're all visible on a subreddit called are Undelete, were stuff like. I mean, I can give some examples. I don't know how far ahead of the story I'm getting here, but yeah, give a couple.

Sam Cole (48:01)

Give a couple.

Jason Kebler (48:01)

Yeah. Some of the big threads were, you know, it was just kind of like, can you explain why, why this is a big deal? And that was deleted. And I think that's like a reasonable question to ask for. Again, like we just said, for people outside of the US who haven't had to deal with this, it was like.

Sam Cole (48:22)

Insincere question is what you said.

Jason Kebler (48:23)

Yeah, I mean, like, who knows really? But like people were replying to it sincerely. And then there was like, interesting as fuck, which we've written about before, had a thread that was like, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson's final kill death ratio lands him amongst the all time greats.

Sam Cole (48:43)

Which for those who don't know, is a reference obviously to the game Call of Duty where you have a kill death ratio and you kill more players and you get killed. And there's a CEO of a health insurance company which will reject a lot of claims. Presumably he would have had a pretty good one this.

Joseph (48:59)

Yeah.

Jason Kebler (48:59)

So that one was deleted obviously, because their reason was no politics. I don't know, it's like, I do, I feel, I feel for the mods. They're trying to tow a line that is, they're unpaid volunteers, first of all, they're trying to tow a line that's like, we want people to talk freely in the subreddit, but we also don't want to break Reddit's rules. There was like in our face palm, which is another great subreddit. Imagine this is your payback for your own policies. That is kind of a face palm. I don't know. Leopards Ate My Face is a subreddit about like the meme that's, you know, the Leopards Eating Faces party. I didn't think they would eat my face meme. And they took a thread down that was basically like saying they won't hurt all the billionaires and the reasoning for that was it doesn't, it doesn't abide by the structure of the meme or something. I don't know. So, yeah, maybe Jason wants to talk a little bit about the Moz answers, because we hit all of them up and we said, you know, hey, what's going on here? And he got some really interesting answers, I think.

Joseph (50:05)

Yeah. So Sam mentioned this, but the undelete subreddit is very interesting because the way that it works is it archives threads that have been deleted from Reddit if they have reached the top. I believe it's top 5, 50, or top 100 of R all. So it only archives posts that are incredibly popular. And for like the two days after the shooting, all of the posts, almost all of them, it was like, sorry, not all of them, but like 75% of the posts were about this. And so that just shows that the overwhelmingly overwhelming sentiment on Reddit was, if not valorizing this guy, then expressing frustration and empathy for what he did. So there's that. And then a lot of the mods were basically like, some of these posts we are taking down because they violate Reddit's rules. Some of these posts are being taken down by Reddit administrators because they are seeing it and taking it down. And unfortunately, there's no real way for the public to know which is which. It's like, it's just not clear. A lot of them were just like, we don't want to get banned by Reddit. Like, we, we basically don't. We're in a tough spot and we don't know what to do. I guess my, my broader thoughts on this because Sam did the heavy lifting here, but I did talk to some of the mods, and I did like, you know, I was kind of. I contributed reporting on this story, so I was looking alongside of it, and I understand that this is tricky and that many people are saying, like, you can't valorize a murderer, and that's bad, et cetera, et cetera. But, comma, but. Like, there's. There's a big but here. And that's like, been the tone of a lot of the conversation online for the last week, is that people are fed up with the American healthcare system, especially insurance company profiteering, et cetera, et cetera. And these are very, very real problems. And we just went through an entire election cycle where Democrats, the left, liberals, et cetera, said we need to listen to Donald Trump voters because they are mad, and here's what they're mad about. And we just had years and Years of discussion about free speech online and censorship and censorship of political speech, blah, blah, blah. And here's political speech, like, very blatant political speech. It's getting deleted, like, systematically by companies, publicly traded companies. Reddit is a publicly traded profiteering company. And it's like they don't want to have the conversation and they don't want to listen to the people who are mad about it. And I don't know, it's like, it's a tricky thing. I understand. It's like, it's not something that we want to, like, face as a society. But I, I don't know, I, I have a really hard time squaring, we must listen to Trump voters who are mad about trans people in bathrooms and we're mad about, and illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, et cetera, et cetera, and then turn around and say we can't have a conversation about health insurance in this country that kills millions and millions of people constantly. And it's like a lot of our behind the blogs were about this last week where we've had experiences with the healthcare system. A lot of people have had it. And I just think that, I don't know, I think that this is like a very interesting time, obviously. Like, obviously it's a very interesting thing. And I think that there are two other things that were very eye opening to me, which is Ben Shapiro and the other dipshit on his, like. Right. I think Matt Walsh both, like, tried to say that these are like leftist plots celebrating whatever, and they're getting shred to bits in their comments by people who say, I'm a conservative, this is not a conservative versus liberal issue. This is like a class and economic and like, health issue for everyone. And so I do think it's very important. I think that I understand that Reddit has rules and these moderators are in a tough place and you don't want to condone violence necessarily or like, promote violence. But at the same time, it's like, this conversation is a very important one and I find it very disheartening to see that a lot of it's just getting deleted. But I don't know. I think that's also had the Streisand effect, where it's just leading people to talk about it more.

Sam Cole (54:49)

So who knows on that? Sam, is it the same now? Like, is stuff still being deleted? Has the conversation moved from people talking about healthcare now to talking more about the suspect or. I know that's kind of hard to answer because you don't have a All seeing eye of social media, but, like, has it moved on or.

Jason Kebler (55:14)

Yeah, thank God. Yeah. I mean, I haven't checked in on Reddit in particular, and if they're still deleting threads, I think probably people had, like, that immediate reaction and then moved on. I. Something that I do think is interesting is people who. I don't know how to word this. Like, people who don't want to have the conversation about health care in this country and who, who think that they have great health care or that they've never encountered this problem before in their lives. They don't understand where this kind of, like, outrage and this vitriol is coming from. They're doing a lot of, like, hand wringing. They want to talk about people's reactions to a murder and not the reason for the reaction. You know, it's like they. They want to talk about how people are glorifying violence and rooting for shootings in the streets, which is not the conversation that I've seen for the most part. Most part, people want to talk about how health care is fucked and how they have had. Almost everyone has had this experience. And we, we now know that the person of interest, you know, who's in this story, who we've been talking about this whole time, comes from a wealthy family and still possibly struggled against this system that's very broken in this country. And maybe wasn't this kind of like violent vigilante leftist that a lot of these podcasters and as Jason said, dipshits want to paint this kind of, like, character as. He's like a. He was probably a tech bro. Like, he was into, like, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. And we don't, obviously, we don't know all this for sure at this point. This is all kind of with that caveat, but it's not so cut and dry, left and right. But instead of addressing that and instead of saying, oh, this is an issue that a lot of people care about and a lot of people are mad about. People with an interest in keeping things very black and white, left and right. Like Matt Walsh and his friends are focusing on that aspect of it, saying, oh, well, people are just like, bloodthirsty and they, they want to see violence in the streets against innocent people, which, you know, is not. Not what we've seen.

Sam Cole (57:37)

Yeah. So I just hope the conversation can remain on the issue, which is healthcare, you know, but okay, if you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a. Paying for a full media subscriber. We're going to talk about how our reporting on deep fake apps has made Congress, you know, push Apple and Google to basically sort their out. You know you can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the Subscribers Only sect where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. But as I said last time, just tell your friends about it. Bring us a new listener. That'd be great. This has been 404 Media. We will see you again next week.