Did Burger King say they would have protected the UnitedHealthcare assassin?

We came across the following post on the social media platform X. We also encountered the post being shared on other social media platforms, including Instagram:

The X post states that ‘Luigi Mangione shouldn’t have gone to McDonald’s’. The post appears to be a reference to the person charged with murder for the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of the American healthcare insurer UnitedHealthcare, in New York in 4 December.

Luigi Mangione, the suspected assassin, was arrested and charged with murder on Monday, 8 December, after being recognised by a customer at a McDonald’s outlet in Pennsylvania. The customer informed a McDonald’s employee, who in turn called the authorities, leading to the arrest.

In addition, the X post appears to include a screenshot of another tweet from the fast-food outlet Burger King that says ‘we don’t snitch’. The image suggests that Burger King would not have alerted the authorities as the employees at McDonald’s had done. The image also includes the golden ‘verified’ badge next to the account name, lending it an impression of authenticity.

An Outpouring of Anger

The assassination of Thompson prompted a widespread outpouring of emotion in response to the incident, particularly among residents of the US who have regularly faced denial of coverage or excessive bills for healthcare insurance services.

With words written on ammunition found at the shooting scene evoking language used by insurers to dodge claim payouts, public sentiment in many parts appears to have sided with the assassin rather than the victim.

Thompson earnt roughly $10 million a year, while activists have regularly accused US insurance companies, including UnitedHealthcare of denying claims and care in order to prioritise profits.

Several online social media posts can be seen to be praising the murder of Thompson, while there were multiple mocking responses to a Facebook post by UnitedHealthcare memorialising Thompson.

In addition, as the news broke that the suspected murderer had been nabbed at a McDonald’s outlet with the assistance of an employee there, negative reviews began flooding in directed at the outlet, forcing Google to remove the reviews.

No Beef with Burger King

While the post by Burger King may have been a popular, if controversial, marketing campaign given the anger directed towards McDonalds and UnitedHealthcare, there does not appear to be any evidence that the post is authentic.

A search on the official X page of Burger King revealed no sign of the post in the screenshot. Separate factchecks by Lead Stories, Snopes and Newsweek also found that the post was fabricated.

The factchecking outlets pointed out that since Elon Musk had purchased Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, ‘Retweets’ had been renamed Reposts and ‘Quote tweets’ had been removed.

The two functions remain visible in the screenshot, despite the date of the post being listed as 9 December 2024.

Reached directly by Lead Stories, Burger King responded via email, stating, ‘We can confirm that this did not come from the official Burger King X account. This is a fabricated tweet’.

While investigating this story, we found that Burger King was not the only target of fabricated posts expressing support for Mangione. Snopes found another post by Spencer Althouse, the deputy editorial director at Buzzfeed, with a screenshot of what appeared to be the Japanese game company Nintendo calling for Mangione to be freed.

The screenshot used a picture of Luigi, one of Nintendo’s iconic game characters. Althouse later confirmed to Snopes that he had photoshopped the image himself.

It is therefore false that Burger King expressed support for Mangione or suggested that they would have protected the assassin. The false posts appear to be the product of fabricated images spurred by a combination of public opinion souring against the US healthcare insurance industry and an attempt to create satirical output.

Regardless of the intention of the posts, the likeness of the screenshots to authentic posts creates the potential for these posts to mislead viewers into the positions of the companies involved.

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