The story of the Coldplay couple unfolded like a soap opera. But was the pile-on that followed a proportional response?
Within 24 hours, the internet had done what it does best: turned sleuth. The names of the pair were quickly revealed. LinkedIns found. Both were senior executives at a New York data firm, he, the CEO; she, the head of HR. Both married. With children.
The story unfolded like a soap opera. The CEO's wife's Facebook was discovered. Internet watchdogs noticed she'd removed her last name. The internet was furious and equally entertained.
Thousands of memes circulated. Parodies flooded TikTok. Calls to fire them rivalled calls for humanitarian justice and in the most corporate plot twist of all, it spilled over to LinkedIn. Beneath the HR manager's last post, commenters asked if cheating was in the job description.
This was a media storm. But more than that, it was a public trial.
We live in a digital panopticon. Surveillance isn't top-down any more, it's lateral. It's ambient and crowdsourced. It can come from your neighbour. A passerby. A stranger on their phone.
Think of the people unknowingly caught in the background of an OOTD video. A 'what are you listening to?' vox pop could inadvertently feature a woman on the run from an abusive partner. In a world obsessed with consent, there seems to be a blind spot when it comes to online consent.
There's an entire genre on TikTok dedicated to background reactions. Someone in the corner makes a face, maybe startled by a flash, maybe just not wanting to be filmed and the internet crowns them a hater or a bully. Then, their account is found. Their employer tagged. Calls for termination follow.
When did virality replace due process?
Public shaming is now a participatory sport. Viral justice is gamified. We chase information like it's loot in a moral scavenger hunt for names, jobs, partners, homes. Every new fact unlocked is rewarded in likes and retweets.
What starts as accountability often becomes performance. What begins as critique becomes content.
Yes, if the Coldplay couple were having an affair, it may be amoral. It might shed light on power dynamics in the workplace. But was the doxing, the intense, invasive publishing of private details a proportional response?
Don't get me wrong, doxing has done good. During the January 6 Capitol riots, internet sleuths helped identify rioters, some of whom were later arrested. It showed that the people, armed with nothing but wifi and rage, could hold power to account.
But doxing is neutral and the internet is agnostic to moral weight. It rewards the performance of outrage, not the ethics behind it.
Sometimes, people get doxed over something as small as complaining about a coffee order or a haircut. We don't pause to ask: What kind of day were they having? What if they were grieving? Overwhelmed? Underpaid? In the rush to moralise a moment, we strip away all context. There's no room for nuance.
Sometimes, innocent people get caught in the crossfire, punished not for who they are, but for a single frame of a much bigger picture.
The collateral damage of instant moralism is real.
Do we really want kids harassed at school because their parent made a mistake? Or someone's house posted online because they turned away a guest and their antipasto salad?
What about the CEO's wife, who woke up one day and watched the entire internet dissect her life, her job, her marriage?
Once something is online, it metastasises far beyond the original wrongdoing. It's not just about justice any more. It's about content spreadability.
Today's reality is knowing your face might be the next meme. Your breakdown, someone's new Twitter DP.
The just world hypothesis suggests we like to believe people get what they deserve. It comforts us. But 'deserving' is a slippery logic. It changes depending on the narrative, the context, the mood or even the meme template.
Honestly? I was entertained by the Coldplay spectacle. He's a CEO, and I'm a card-carrying member of the 'eat the rich' school of thought. But even that is a slippery slope.
We're collectively trying to decide through digital telepathy, what makes it OK to ruin someone's life. That is an impossible task. It's endlessly malleable. Infinitely debatable.
What do we lose when we treat every viral moment like a courtroom?
What do we gain from piling on, without considering the proportion of the punishment?
Yes, celebrities have chosen to live in the public eye. They have PR teams. They have crisis managers. Sometimes, they have Oprah and a tell-all interview.
But the Coldplay couple? They don't have a publicist and even if they did, they owe the public nothing. If something did happen, the only people who deserve an explanation are their families, whose lives have been permanently altered by two people's choices.
Well… maybe also the HR manager at their workplace.
Oh, wait. Never mind. I never said I wasn't part of the problem.
Miski Omar is a speech pathologist, writer and director from Sydney
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BreakingNews.ie
21 minutes ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Explosion at steel plant leaves one dead and dozens hurt
An explosion at a US Steel plant near Pittsburgh left one dead and dozens injured or trapped under the rubble on Monday, with emergency workers on site trying to rescue victims, officials said. The explosion sent black smoke spiralling into the midday sky in the Monongahela Valley, a region of the state synonymous with steel for more than a century. Advertisement An Allegheny County emergency services spokesperson, Kasey Reigner, said one person died in the explosion and two were currently believed to be unaccounted for. Multiple other people were treated for injuries, Ms Reigner said. Allegheny County Emergency Services said a fire at the plant started around 10.51am. The explosion sent a shock through the community and led to officials asking residents to stay away from the scene so emergency workers could respond. Advertisement 'It felt like thunder,' Zachary Buday, a construction worker near the scene, told WTAE-TV. 'Shook the scaffold, shook my chest, and shook the building, and then when we saw the dark smoke coming up from the steel mill and put two and two together, and it's like something bad happened.' Dozens were injured and the county was sending 15 ambulances, on top of the ambulances supplied by local emergency response agencies, Ms Reigner said.
BBC News
21 minutes ago
- BBC News
One dead after explosion at US steel plant, with more workers missing or injured
Update: Date: 19:19 BST Title: Explosion declared a 'mass casualty incident' Content: Dozens of people have been injured in what authorities have described as a mass casualty incident. At least 15 ambulances are at the scene, Allegheny County Emergency Services' Kasey Reigner told CBS News. It is still not known what caused the explosion. Update: Date: 19:13 BST Title: Pennsylvania governor briefed on the explosion Content: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro says he's monitoring the situation at the steel plant and is in touch with emergency services. He wrote on X: "The scene is still active, and folks nearby should follow the direction of local authorities. "Please join Lori and me in praying for the Clairton community." Update: Date: 19:05 BST Title: At least one dead after Pennsylvania steel plant explosion Content: At least one person is confirmed to have been killed in an explosion at the US Steel Clairton Coke Works, a large plant south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Confirming the incident, local police said: 'Two people are currently believed to be unaccounted for, and multiple individuals have been treated for additional injuries. 'The status of those individuals is not known at this time.' This is a developing situation and we will bring you more information as soon as we get it.
Times
21 minutes ago
- Times
William H Webster obituary: director of both the FBI and the CIA
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's founding motto in 1935 was 'Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity', but by the late Seventies the third of those tenets was thought to be distinctly lacking in the court of US public opinion. Forty-eight years under its controversial founding director J Edgar Hoover had taken their toll. His patriotic instincts may not have been in doubt, but his methods and principal targets most certainly had been. In 1978 the Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, proposed to do something about restoring the tarnished reputation of an agency that had overstepped in countering perceived Marxist subversion in the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam, while paying too little attention to corruption in high office and white collar and organised crime. Carter turned to Judge William H Webster, a moderate Republican and teetotal Christian Scientist who was polite, affable, hugely patriotic and ready to persevere in what he called the 'gruelling and thankless' task of restoring probity. Only the third man to head the FBI in a permanent capacity, Webster was already a long-serving federal judge noted for his scrupulous fairness and attention to legal propriety. Insisting on being addressed as 'Judge', he earned the respect of FBI agents, despite his formal manner and frequent bouts of bad temper. Engendering fear with what one colleague called his 'steely blue eyes', Webster took on what he called the 'Hoover hard hats' and imposed his will on those parts of the organisation that had long gone rogue. He was praised for ordering a sting aimed at exposing corrupt congressman in what became known as the Abscam case, where agents posed as representatives of a bogus Arab company offering bribes for political favours. A senator and six congressmen were snared and convicted in 1981. 'There were times when the undercover operation was the only way,' Webster told an FBI oral history project. A man who saw ethics in black and white, strictly framed by law, he tried and failed to impose a written legal charter defining the limits of what the FBI could do. However, tighter budgetary constraints were imposed along with greater accountability to Congress on how money was spent. From 1980, he dedicated far greater resources to dealing with the threat of terrorism. 'We were not having Oklahoma bombings and [World] Trade Centers, but we were having an average of 100 terrorist incidents a year in the US, all of which were life-threatening, so I asked that that be made a top priority,' he said. He identified a lack of diversity as a contributing factor to some of the bureau's failures. As such, he was proud of having increased the number of female operatives from 90 to some 800 during his nine years in the post. 'We doubled the number of African-Americans. We did about the same thing with Hispanics.' The end of his tenure at the FBI laid the foundations for his second great act of public service, as director of the CIA from 1987 to 1991. An operation had gathered evidence that the CIA had been involved in an unconstitutional scheme to sell arms to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with the added advantage of creating leverage to free American hostages in Lebanon. Proceeds from the arms sales would then be used to finance the anti-communist Contra rebels against the Marxist regime in Nicaragua, in defiance of a congressional ban. It was clear from the investigation that national security advisers were implicated in the biggest White House scandal since Watergate. It broke in November 1986. Months later, President Reagan appointed Webster director of the CIA with a brief to restore public confidence — a 'safe pair of hands' who could placate Congress after the departure of that zealot for political intrigue and clandestine operations, William Casey. Webster approached the task with prudence. John Bellinger, his assistant at the CIA, recalled: 'Judge Webster would always ask, 'What's chapter two?' He thought ahead of what the consequences of an initial decision would be.' Although he was allowed to attend more social functions at the White House than his predecessor because, in the estimation of Nancy Reagan, his table manners were a marked improvement on Casey's, it did not betoken admittance to Reagan's inner circle. Refusing to toady up to 'big hitters' around the president, Webster insisted on total transparency in all his dealings in the White House. 'If the White House invited me to come over to talk about something and hadn't called the department first, I would always call the attorney-general and say, 'I was invited to go over, would you or somebody like to go over with me?' I wanted the protection of working through the department.' He respected Reagan as 'a very polite person who wasn't out to get people but was out to get the job done right'. Though he often played tennis with Webster, Reagan's successor George HW Bush was less inclined to defer to him and often acted on his own initiative to gather intelligence reports, especially as some in the White House, including Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz (obituary, February 8, 2021), had been critical of the quality of his briefings. When Bush became president in January 1989, Webster found himself gradually superseded by Casey's former deputy, Robert Gates, who was appointed deputy national security adviser. Gates was suspected of undermining Webster, while Bush's chief of staff John Sununu and the secretary of state James Baker were also suspected of briefing against him. His relationship with Bush was fatally wounded after Webster disagreed with the president's plan to invade Panama in December 1989 to topple the corrupt dictator General Noriega. Several months later, Webster presented Bush with powerful evidence of Saddam Hussein's plans for an imminent invasion of Kuwait a week before this actually occurred on August 2, 1990. Bush chose instead to trust his personal contacts in the Middle East and discounted the evidence. Some argued that it was Webster's much-vaunted independence from the foreign policy-making process that undermined his credibility at this crucial juncture. The CIA was then deemed to have failed in its evaluation of Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons capability and in particular its undercounting (by 300) of the Scud missiles that Iraq had at its disposal. The agency was given a roasting by General Norman Schwarzkopf for the unreliability of its satellite-imaging technology in assessing bomb damage. Throughout the Gulf War, Webster had met Bush daily to brief him, but he was not one of the 'Gang of Eight' who effectively ran the show. In May 1991 Webster dropped hints that he might be prepared to retire, though more in the hope that Bush would rush to dissuade him than otherwise. However, Bush readily acquiesced and nominated Gates to replace him. Webster had inherited a demoralised organisation, uneasy about the legality of its clandestine operations and uncertain about its role. It needed someone with his genuine respect for Congress to guide the agency through the thicket of external criticism while maintaining its effectiveness. Although there were some intelligence blunders over China and eastern Europe, there were solid achievements as well; the CIA correctly identified nuclear and chemical weapons proliferation as the most significant trend; it predicted the economic travails of the Soviet Union and the likelihood of an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev as well as the civil war in Yugoslavia; and it developed a policy of economic intelligence-gathering towards foreign trade competitors. Webster may have been politically naive and inept at wooing the press, but he kept the CIA on a straight course. Through it all, he stuck to his guiding principle: 'Order protects liberty and liberty protects order.' William Hedgcock Webster was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1924 to Thomas Webster, a farmer and small businessman, and Katherine (née Hedgcock). His was a traditional Christian upbringing, steeped in 'God, family, and service'. He attended Amherst College, Massachusetts, but interrupted his studies there to serve in the US Naval Reserve from 1943 to 1946, attaining the rank of lieutenant. He went on to study law at Washington University Law School in St Louis, graduating in 1949 and joining a law firm in the city. However, he was recalled to the navy in the Korean War, during which he was assigned a member of the legal staff to defend a seaman who had been accused of theft. He urged his client to remain silent, as the man had not been advised of his right to legal representation prior to his interrogation. Although the ploy antagonised his senior officers, Webster was congratulated by fleet headquarters and his procedure was incorporated into the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Returning to private practice at the same St Louis law firm, he was elevated to partner after four years and appointed US attorney for the eastern district of Missouri by President Eisenhower in 1960. Resigning from this post after the inauguration of President Kennedy, Webster went back into private practice. In 1971 President Nixon appointed him judge of the United States district court for eastern Missouri at a salary less than half what he had been receiving from his law partnership. None of the 44 decisions that he handed down was reversed by a court of appeals and in 1973 he was appointed to the federal Court of Appeals for the eighth circuit. His record as an appeal court justice was characterised by judicial restraint. He rarely refuted the decisions of juries or lower courts and only overturned 16 of the more than 600 appeals he heard. In criminal cases he turned down suits brought by members of the militant American Indian Movement who had occupied Wounded Knee, but ruled in favour of a black woman seeking to bring a class action suit against the Pillsbury Company on grounds of race and sex discrimination. Notably, Webster joined a ruling that the University of Minnesota could not deny recognition to a campus organisation supporting gay rights. He also supported a suit by women on the Fargo, North Dakota, police force who were paid 50 per cent less than men with comparable duties. In 1975 he was one of six finalists considered for promotion to the US Supreme Court bench. Webster was first married to Drusilla Lane in 1953. She died of cancer in 1984. In 1990 he married Lynda Jo Clugston, a 34-year-old hotel sales executive, who had some years earlier applied to join the CIA and been turned down for health reasons. Their courtship was not easy. Whenever Clugston entered his bedroom, security alarms would go off. She survives him along with three children from his first marriage: Drusilla, Katherine and William Jr. After leaving the CIA, Webster returned to private practice as a senior partner at Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCLoy. Having been driven everywhere for decades, he was obliged to buy a map of downtown Washington simply to find his way around. He would still be called upon to sit on various legal bodies and conduct investigations into wrongdoing at the FBI. In 2018 Webster and other former CIA directors co-signed a letter condemning President Trump for revoking the security clearances of a former CIA colleague who had criticised the president's flouting of legal procedure. A year later, the 95-year-old Webster was the victim of attempted online fraud. The scammer picked the wrong man, whose perspicacity endured. Keniel Thomas was given a six-year sentence in 2019. William Webster, US federal judge and director of the FBI and the CIA, was born on March 6, 1924. He died on August 8, 2025, aged 101
