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Caroline Flack’s death shows how social media has
democratised cruelty
The days after the death of Caroline Flack have seen an admirably sober,
reflective mood on the part of politicians and the public. Labour leadership
candidates are denouncing press intrusion and calling for regulation of social
media, while Downing Street wants social media firms to be more proactive in
removing “unacceptable content”. Journalists are contrite over allegations that
the tabloids hounded Flack. After the feast, the penitence.
Amid the contrition, of course, everyone is searching for someone else to blame.
Social media users blame trolls. Politicians blame social media. The press
blames reality television – a format that specialises in “interpersonal
torture”, as Douglas Rushkoff puts it.
But this problem can’t be reduced to a single source, and Flack’s trials in
particular seem to have been orchestrated by an informal alliance between the
press, social media, and police and prosecutors – who furnish the titillating
details for lurid headlines and furious tweets. But there is no single villain
in this coalition of moral persecution: in fact, it involves us all.
Flack was about to be prosecuted over allegations of assaulting her partner,
despite him withdrawing his complaint. Most of us know next to nothing about
what really happened. However, the press that had happily built her up as a star
also delighted in taking her down, cackling about Caroline “Whack”. On the back
of these headlines, armies of online vigilantes were equally happy to harass
someone about whom they knew little, often acting as judge, jury and executioner
while dispensing with the presumption of innocence. What is really happening
here is that a form of punitive moralism towards celebrities, long associated
with the tabloid press and the police – whose alliance was exposed by the
phone-hacking scandal – has now been democratised. The issue is not unkindness
or random bad behaviour, but a cultural system of public sadism.
This is obscured by the fact that such sadism usually has some virtuous
justification. The former director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald has
offered the state’s rationale for prosecuting Flack after the allegations were
withdrawn, rightly noting that victims often withdraw their complaints under
pressure from their abusers. The tabloids, meanwhile, have their own
justifications for exposing private lives. “Privacy is for paedos,” the News of
the World hack Paul McMullan told the Leveson inquiry.In all his years of spying
on celebrities for public titillation, he had “never found anybody doing any
good”.
Online culture has its own forms of justification for vigilantism. The hashtag #believesurvivors,
for example, has often been interpreted on social media to mean that every
horrendous allegation is automatically true. There are good reasons for all of
this: abusers exert pressure on their victims; the criminal justice system is
under increasing public pressure to rectify its mishandling of such crimes;
privacy can be used to shield bad behaviour; and survivors are all too often not
taken seriously. Yet we have already seen examples – including the collapse of
Operation Midland and related inquiries into elite child abuse – of how public
shaming, online and off, can be used to destroy people’s lives, even if the
charges turn out to be baseless. But the dirty secret in all these episodes is
the pleasure we all take in participating.
What is at stake in the monstering of celebrities is a prurient relish in the
excesses and meltdowns of cultural elites – a form of what Theodor Adorno called
“malicious egalitarianism”. If you’re in the public eye, it is said, nastiness
goes with the terrain. It is the quid pro quo for privilege. Many people online
now argue that the consequences of such attacks usually aren’t even serious.
“Just about everybody ends up fine,” the columnist Lyta Gold writes, regarding
“cancel culture” with “their careers intact”. Yet this is a standard of “harm”
that says it doesn’t matter what torment a person endures – if they’re not dead,
or in career oblivion, then they’re basically fine.
But now it is not just the ostensibly powerful who are in our sights. The upshot
of social media is that we’re all in the public eye, all celebrities. An entire
industry has developed – call it the social industry – which converts social
life into celebrity competition. The social media platforms, along with a
network of advertisers, PR firms, multinationals, celebrities, news media and
gaming corporations connected to them, have helped create a highly profitable
new ecology of public visibility.
Anyone with an account has a public image – and, by deciding what to post, a
public relations strategy. Anyone can become a magnet for the volatile feelings
associated with what psychiatrists call “celebrity worship syndrome”, which
burden the sufferer with anxiety and depression. Over time, especially as the
follower is disappointed by the object of their worship, these feelings segue
into a no less passionate loathing, or even a desire to destroy the celebrity.
The social industry did not invent these tendencies. Even McMullan admitted that
his paper’s articles about Jennifer Elliott, daughter of the actor Denholm
Elliott, may have contributed to her suicide. Richard Littlejohn’s hounding of
the trans woman Lucy Meadows in the Daily Mail contributed, according to the
coroner, to her suicide. However, the social industry has democratised cruelty,
ramped up popular sadism and enrolled all of us into these rituals of
punishment.
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