Disturbing number of profiles praising Luigi Mangione are fake: analysis

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 rec...