The wanton murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson left Robert Sterling, CFO of a sports nutrition startup and a former exec at Koch and Cargill feeling shaken. In response, Sterling took to LinkedIn. He penned a post praising how Thompson rose from humble beginnings to become a prominent executive who oversaw a company with over 100,000 employees, and whose insurance unit is expected to bring in $280 billion in revenue this year.
“This guy—not the person who murdered him in cold blood—was everything that’s right and good about America, and the American Dream,” Sterling wrote.
It was a thoughtful sentiment—but many of the responses on LinkedIn have been anything but. Since Wednesday, the post has garnered almost 1,000 reposts and over 5,000 comments, and many are filled with disdain or worse.
Everyone from a logistics specialist to a real estate agent and even a Stanford student, for example, slammed Sterling's expression of admiration and sympathy for Thompson. One person wrote of the CEO: "This man executed people with a stroke of his pen and a click of his keyboard every single day."
The LinkedIn responses reflect how Thompson’s murder has opened a firehose of social media complaints from those who have struggled to receive or pay for medical care, and nasty comments making light of his death. It has also caused alarm for C-suite executives in general. In New York City, “wanted” posters targeting health care executives have appeared alongside widespread social media posts circulating alleged “hit lists” of industry leaders, Fortune reported.
But is LinkedIn, created for professional networking, an appropriate form of social media to broadcast anger? You need to be careful to not make "outrageous comments," Jason Walker, founder of Thrive HR Consulting, told Fortune.
For the most part, the comments will live in perpetuity on the platform, said Walker who’s had a more than 20-year career in HR, including working as a chief people officer, and has about 15,000 followers on LinkedIn.
“Going on LinkedIn and discussing how you are aligned with what the gunman did and how you support the killing of a CEO, is not going to serve you well in the community when you are looking for a job or posting career highlights,” Walker said. It shouldn’t be tolerated on any form of social media, he said.
Posting insensitive comments can especially be a slippery slope for professionals when they look for jobs. It would completely make a recruiter think differently about hiring someone, Walker said. There should be no exception to the very basic rule that killing another human is wrong, he added.
“Anybody that would advocate such a position clearly would make them an outlier to join any organization,” Walker said.
Fortune reached out to Sterling for comment, but didn’t receive a response as of press time.
