What happens when the internet turns on you?

From the inside.

Right now, there are a number of people with public profiles who are in the eye of a vicious storm.

When news broke last week that far-right political activist Charlie Kirk had been shot, the commentary was instantaneous. Some people - politicians, journalists - immediately condemned political violence. Others sobbed into their phones, sharing their empathy for Kirk’s wife and two children. Others argued that Kirk had died in exactly the world he’d helped create, that he’d said some gun deaths were a necessary byproduct of retaining Second Amendment rights. Others asked why there was a public outpouring of grief for a conservative extremist, when political violence takes innocent lives every single day.

Just as quickly as the commentary emerged, so too did the backlash. If an op-ed stated the need for empathy, people argued: you can’t force someone to have empathy for a person who had no empathy for them. If a series of Instagram tiles suggested that we shouldn’t gloss over exactly who Charlie Kirk was and what he stood for, the comments lamented the lack of decorum in such an analysis. His body isn’t even cold. Two children have lost their father. A crowd full of people just watched a man be murdered.

We’re in a strange cultural moment where we demand real-time commentary from public figures on everything, all the time, but we also want them to a) always be well-considered and correct, which means they really need to b) constantly reflect exactly how we feel. There’s no room for opinions to change, to perhaps grow more nuanced as thoughts settle, as competing perspectives emerge. Silence is violence. Speak up now. If you don’t, I’ll assume it’s because, frankly, you’re evil.

The backlash, interestingly, existed no matter what your reaction was to Kirk’s death. A prominent left-wing activist, Dean Withers, was hosting a livestream when he saw the news. Withers had met Kirk when they debated the ethics of abortion on Jubilee’s Surrounded series in 2024. They vehemently disagreed with each other. Clips of their exchange went viral, with captions about whether Charlie ‘owned’ Dean or Dean ‘owned’ Charlie entirely dependent on which side of TikTok you happened to be on.

Withers was visibly distraught when he saw that Kirk had died. He was quiet for several moments, shocked, and then he started to cry. “Him and his family, they don’t deserve that,” he said. “His kids don’t f*cking deserve that.”

The footage of Withers went viral, and he was criticised by his own audience for his emotional response. They accused him of making Kirk into a hero, and of not acknowledging other innocent people who also don’t deserve to die.

He ended up sharing another video, explaining his reaction.

“In the last 24 hours, I have received a lot of public scrutiny and backlash in response to the fact that after Charlie Kirk died, I cried,” he said.

“The video of me crying was blasted all over the internet. First and foremost, I am distraught over what happened to Kirk. I think that gun violence is always wrong and I also think that violence leads to more violence.”

He shared context about why he was so affected by the news, but perhaps his most profound point was one he said in passing:

“That was somebody I sat across the table from.”

Tilly Middlehurst also went viral for debating Charlie Kirk. At Cambridge University, she argued with him about religion, the role of women and gender identity.

She, too, was distraught by the news, breaking down on camera. She eventually deleted the video she’d filmed about Kirk’s death, after the negative commentary became overwhelming.

The common denominator, of course, is that people who had met Charlie Kirk - who had seen him in the flesh, who had spoken with him, who had witnessed his humanness in a way you simply can’t through a screen - could not help but see his death as tragic.

That’s the power of being exposed to people who are different from us. To people we disagree with. Even people whose views we find abhorrent. We develop empathy for them.

But apparently even empathy was a sin on the internet last week. As was quoting Kirk’s own words. Or trying to have a messy, imperfect conversation about what his death might mean.

So there are a lot of people receiving death threats, which seems counterproductive. A million pile-ons all over the place. And I’m not sure what we’re really trying to achieve with any of them.

It’s strange timing, then, for a project I’ve been working on for most of this year to come to fruition.

For a long time, I’ve been studying social media pile-ons. I’m fascinated by the language of contempt (the meanness, the biting sarcasm, the name-calling), by the instantaneity and disinhibition made possible by online communication, by the public ridicule.

While I was researching my book, I spoke to a number of media personalities about their experiences of online outrage. I sat opposite them, jaw open, shocked by the reality of what a public shaming event actually looks like from the inside. These people were not okay.

Their vilification, too, seemed absurd in hindsight. Crying because someone died, for example. In almost all of these cases, a moment of mass hysteria had spiraled in a way no one could have predicted, and while the mob eventually moved on, the person at the centre was shattered.

I knew there was a podcast in this. An important story to tell about empathy, and outrage, and humiliation. So I’ve made it. It’s called The Pile-On, and the trailer is live now (on Apple and Spotify), with the first episode launching on September 30.

In all honesty, I think the show is more important now than ever. We live a breathtaking amount of our lives online, but the identity we cultivate there is an avatar - a two-dimensional version of us that cannot possibly represent all the nuances of a flesh and blood human being. It’s no wonder, then, that when we disagree with these avatars, when they do something that makes us angry, when they transgress the social rules we value, we dehumanise them entirely. They are not worthy of dignity, or of slow, considered understanding. Instead, they’re deserving of shallow judgment, of humiliation, of being treated as though they’re morally inferior. What follows is a torrent of private and public shaming, with no limit to what a person is expected to withstand.

We wonder why division and polarisation is so rife. This is why. Because we’re not sitting across the table from the people we’re arguing with, we’re sitting behind our screens. So our language changes, our sense of scale disappears. We don’t want to persuade - we want to destroy.

Interviews will drop weekly, and I can’t wait for you to hear them.

But, yes, the timing is strange. Everywhere I look, someone is getting ‘trolled’ or ‘slammed’ while someone else is ‘calling out’ and ‘demanding accountability’ because they’re ‘furious’. It feels very much like we’re tearing individuals to shreds because the real, systematic problems - climate change, cost of living pressures, war - seem too insurmountable to solve. Perhaps that’s fair.

But where does pile-on culture leave us? And what does it do to the person at the centre of it? I think it’s a question worth asking.