Latest news with #publicshaming
The Independent
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
The Coldplay CEO ‘kiss cam' scandal was unfair – we all deserve privacy
, I watched the Coldplay 'kiss cam' video with total horror. Yes, sure, the CEO arguably shouldn't have been doing what it looked like he was doing – but none of us really know the whole story about what was going on. It could have been completely innocent. Or, he might be having an affair because of completely untenable circumstances at home. We just don't know. Either way, I don't think putting things in the public sphere l ike this helps – and we shouldn't be allowed to wreck other people's lives when we are only responsible for our own. Why do I care so much? Well, I'll admit that I'm having an affair. So, seeing someone else getting caught out l ike this gave me a feeling I can't even describe: I immediately went cold and felt sick, imagining the same thing happening to me. What if some influencer caught me on one of their reels in the background of a shot, having dinner with my girlfriend? Would it really be anyone's right to expose what I'm doing, because of some misplaced idea of moral virtue? Why are people so judgemental about other people's lives? They need to focus on their own and leave everyone else to their own business. Annoyed Dear Annoyed, I'm fascinated by the fact that you've taken the time to write to me about this. It implies that rather than being completely and defiantly 'cool' with what you're up to, you're actually seeking reassurance – from me, from the world – that it's 'not that bad'; that you're justified in doing it. Why is that, do you think? Are you sure you are completely comfortable with what you are doing? Now, I can't comment on your individual circumstances because you haven't given me enough detail, but I can comment on what we've all seen play out this past week – the CEO caught on camera apparently getting cozy with a co-worker has resigned. Separately, it has since been reported he is (or was?) married and appears to have kids, which gives extra raised eyebrows to the way he reacted when the pair realised they'd been caught on screen. What I would ask you to consider is this: no matter whose business it is – or how inadvertently intrusive the Coldplay robotron may have been (and let's not forget, anyone in the crowd was fair game) – who are you seeking to blame here, exactly? Is it the band for having a 'kiss cam'; Chris Martin for quipping: 'Oh, what... either they're having an affair or they're just very shy'; the public for ensuring the awkward footage went viral – or the CEO, Andy Byron, for doing it in the first place (or not being more discreet)? You say it might have been 'completely innocent', which – frankly – looks unlikely. Or, you seem to be suggesting, if it was an affair, he might have a reason for that because of potential 'completely untenable circumstances at home' (but then, wouldn't it be better for everyone to do the brave thing and break up, rather than doing it behind everyone's backs? Isn't it always better to do the right thing?) Where is your anger really directed – and is it possibly at yourself? I think if you work out where it's coming from, it'll give you a much clearer view of why you might feel this way. And that, in turn, will allow you to unpick the clear cognitive dissonance you appear to be feeling when reading about this situation (cognitive dissonance is the level of discomfort we all feel when our values and actions don't align). Perhaps you know your actions in your affair aren't that great? Let's not forget, I didn't ask you how you felt about this viral story – you volunteered it. It would be enlightening for you to ask yourself why – and who, exactly, you're trying to convince.
Yahoo
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Astronomer executives' Coldplay scandal: Why it went viral and the obsession with public shaming
If combining the words 'kiss cam', 'Coldplay', 'Astronomer' and 'affair' means nothing to you, you have managed to be blissfully unaware of the internet's weekend meltdown over a very public spectacle. Here's the TL;DR recap: A couple, who were in a tight embrace, created a buzz among concertgoers – and later, the world – when they pulled a duck/hide move after they were featured on the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert in Boston. Their reaction was so suspicious that the band's frontman Chris Martin quipped: 'Either they are having an affair or they're just very shy.' It turned out that Martin was right, and the cheating pair were colleagues at US tech firm Astronomer. Internet sleuths uncovered their names and job titles – he's Andy Byron the now-former chief executive at the company; she's Kristin Cabot, Astronomer's chief people officer – as well as information about their other relationships. People also found out who Mr Byron's wife was, with some even sending her messages about what they thought of her husband. Beyond the illicit affair being publicly exposed, the incident led to much introspection about what happens when private moments become public, and leadership credibility. Also, what is our obsession with public shaming? In this episode of The Usual Place podcast, I will speak with: Stephanie Phua, founder of marketing and branding collective Duo Studio and co-founder of The Trampoline Club, a platform which pushes for compassion, understanding and mutual respect in conversations; Pan Huiyan, a millennial leadership coach; and Dr Sunny Johar, managing director for South-east Asia at digital experience agency KRDS. Tune in at 12pm SGT/HKT to watch the livestream and take part in the discussion on our revamped YouTube channel. Follow The Usual Place Podcast live at noon every Thursday and get notified for new episode drops: Channel: Apple Podcasts: Spotify: YouTube: Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction Discover how to enjoy other premium articles here
The Guardian
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Why are we so fascinated by the Coldplay couple?
It wasn't just that a man got caught cheating on his wife. It was that he did it in public. With the whole stadium watching. With Chris Martin, unknowingly, teeing it up. With a camera zooming in at the exact wrong – or maybe karmically perfect – moment. The CEO. The HR director. The affair. The panic. The humiliation. All of it caught, dissected and shared a million times over. We didn't watch that video because we love Coldplay (though, don't we?). We didn't watch just for the scandal. We watched because – despite our small steps toward enlightenment – we're all starving for the satisfaction of seeing someone finally get what they deserve. That's the part we need to talk about. According to a 2023 study in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, the satisfaction we feel during public shaming isn't just about justice – it's about pleasure. Their research found that people experience schadenfreude not only because they believe the person deserved it, but because it simply feels good to watch someone face consequences. We're not just looking for moral clarity. We're chasing the emotional high that comes with it. We don't just want closure, we want content. And cheating, exposed in public, has become the most satisfying genre of all. We as a culture are obsessed with catching cheaters – not just for the drama, but for the justice. We want to see betrayal punished. We want the liar exposed, the philanderer humiliated, the partner who was faithful and trusting to be vindicated. And if we can't get that in our own lives, we'll take it from strangers. This hunger has only grown over the years as the morally hollow have made careers out of turning scandal into spectacle and walking away untouched. But when the deception is undeniable, and the exposure unfiltered, it gives us something we rarely get: visible accountability. Within hours of that five-second clip surfacing, the internet did what it does best: turned a private moment into public symbolism. Their names were revealed along with their titles. Until the camera found them, they looked unbothered, cozy. Then her hand flew to cover her face. He ducked and waddled behind the seats. Then the entire internet gasped, and reached for their popcorn and pitchforks. You could feel the collective applause ripple through the comments section. We all know the feeling of being deceived. We know the sharp loneliness of loving someone who's looking elsewhere, of having suspicions but not proof, accusations returned with a side of gaslighting. So when someone gets caught in 4K, we devour the moment. The visuals were almost too perfect: the Coldplay ballad, the cheering crowd turning confused, the abrupt shift from smug to stunned. Don't we all wish we had that experience? A camera that didn't look away. A crowd that said: 'We see it, too.' Because in our own lives, we confront; they deflect. We cry; they move on. And there's no applause, no witness. Just you and an unrelenting ache, their version of what happened and the truth. The CEO and the HR director are merely serving as stand-ins for the guy who ghosted you after two years, the woman who swore nothing was going on with her co-worker, the husband who moved on so fast you wondered if you hallucinated your entire marriage. Watching those two squirm on screen is a kind of spiritual revenge. We tell ourselves it's about ethics, boundaries, accountability. But at the end of the day, don't we just want someone to answer for the betrayal we never got closure for? Of course, pain is not performance. And justice is not the same as humiliation. Public shaming feels like accountability – but it rarely is accountability. As Jon Ronson warns in his book So You've Been Publicly Shamed: 'An instant digital mob justice can devastate without offering redemption.' Watching strangers get exposed might feel good temporarily. We nod at the cosmic slap, but it doesn't fix the trust broken in a marriage or the respect damaged in a workplace. It doesn't change who they were when no one was watching. There's a flip side to witnessing this embarrassment that flickers just below the surface. We might laugh, but something in us recoils as we imagine the real cost to those involved: lost jobs, fractured marriages, psychological fallout for their children. A hyperlink trail that will follow them to the grave. As Evan Nierman, author of The Cancel Culture Curse and CEO of the crisis PR firm Red Banyan, puts it: 'The internet has a way of locking people into their worst moment. When a misstep goes viral, the court of public opinion rarely allows space for explanation, nuance, or repair.' And once the pile-on begins, it escalates fast. 'Digital shame operates at a scale and speed our psychology isn't built for,' he warns. 'What starts as a laugh can quickly spiral into character assassination, with consequences that long outlast a viral moment.' Yet this moment – our collective gasp at betrayal made universal – revealed something crucial: we're craving truth, acknowledgment. We're craving slow, messy, quiet reckoning with accountability that extends beyond the tap-and-scroll. But in a world where real accountability is rare, a viral headline like this feels close enough – as though love, loyalty and truth might still mean something, even if only for a moment on the Jumbotron. Jessica Ciencin Henriquez is a writer in Ojai, California, and the author of the forthcoming essay collection, If You Loved Me, You Would Know. You can find her on social media @TheWriterJess
The Guardian
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Why are we so fascinated by the Coldplay couple?
It wasn't just that a man got caught cheating on his wife. It was that he did it in public. With the whole stadium watching. With Chris Martin, unknowingly, teeing it up. With a camera zooming in at the exact wrong – or maybe karmically perfect – moment. The CEO. The HR director. The affair. The panic. The humiliation. All of it caught, dissected and shared a million times over. We didn't watch that video because we love Coldplay (though, don't we?). We didn't watch just for the scandal. We watched because – despite our small steps toward enlightenment – we're all starving for the satisfaction of seeing someone finally get what they deserve. That's the part we need to talk about. According to a 2023 study in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, the satisfaction we feel during public shaming isn't just about justice – it's about pleasure. Their research found that people experience schadenfreude not only because they believe the person deserved it, but because it simply feels good to watch someone face consequences. We're not just looking for moral clarity. We're chasing the emotional high that comes with it. We don't just want closure, we want content. And cheating, exposed in public, has become the most satisfying genre of all. We as a culture are obsessed with catching cheaters – not just for the drama, but for the justice. We want to see betrayal punished. We want the liar exposed, the philanderer humiliated, the partner who was faithful and trusting to be vindicated. And if we can't get that in our own lives, we'll take it from strangers. This hunger has only grown over the years as the morally hollow have made careers out of turning scandal into spectacle and walking away untouched. But when the deception is undeniable, and the exposure unfiltered, it gives us something we rarely get: visible accountability. Within hours of that five-second clip surfacing, the internet did what it does best: turned a private moment into public symbolism. Their names were revealed along with their titles. Until the camera found them, they looked unbothered, cozy. Then her hand flew to cover her face. He ducked and waddled behind the seats. Then the entire internet gasped, and reached for their popcorn and pitchforks. You could feel the collective applause ripple through the comments section. We all know the feeling of being deceived. We know the sharp loneliness of loving someone who's looking elsewhere, of having suspicions but not proof, accusations returned with a side of gaslighting. So when someone gets caught in 4K, we devour the moment. The visuals were almost too perfect: the Coldplay ballad, the cheering crowd turning confused, the abrupt shift from smug to stunned. Don't we all wish we had that experience? A camera that didn't look away. A crowd that said: 'We see it, too.' Because in our own lives, we confront; they deflect. We cry; they move on. And there's no applause, no witness. Just you and an unrelenting ache, their version of what happened and the truth. The CEO and the HR director are merely serving as stand-ins for the guy who ghosted you after two years, the woman who swore nothing was going on with her co-worker, the husband who moved on so fast you wondered if you hallucinated your entire marriage. Watching those two squirm on screen is a kind of spiritual revenge. We tell ourselves it's about ethics, boundaries, accountability. But at the end of the day, don't we just want someone to answer for the betrayal we never got closure for? Of course, pain is not performance. And justice is not the same as humiliation. Public shaming feels like accountability – but it rarely is accountability. As Jon Ronson warns in his book So You've Been Publicly Shamed: 'An instant digital mob justice can devastate without offering redemption.' Watching strangers get exposed might feel good temporarily. We nod at the cosmic slap, but it doesn't fix the trust broken in a marriage or the respect damaged in a workplace. It doesn't change who they were when no one was watching. There's a flip side to witnessing this embarrassment that flickers just below the surface. We might laugh, but something in us recoils as we imagine the real cost to those involved: lost jobs, fractured marriages, psychological fallout for their children. A hyperlink trail that will follow them to the grave. As Evan Nierman, author of The Cancel Culture Curse and CEO of the crisis PR firm Red Banyan, puts it: 'The internet has a way of locking people into their worst moment. When a misstep goes viral, the court of public opinion rarely allows space for explanation, nuance, or repair.' And once the pile-on begins, it escalates fast. 'Digital shame operates at a scale and speed our psychology isn't built for,' he warns. 'What starts as a laugh can quickly spiral into character assassination, with consequences that long outlast a viral moment.' Yet this moment – our collective gasp at betrayal made universal – revealed something crucial: we're craving truth, acknowledgment. We're craving slow, messy, quiet reckoning with accountability that extends beyond the tap-and-scroll. But in a world where real accountability is rare, a viral headline like this feels close enough – as though love, loyalty and truth might still mean something, even if only for a moment on the Jumbotron. Jessica Ciencin Henriquez is a writer in Ojai, California, and the author of the forthcoming essay collection, If You Loved Me, You Would Know. You can find her on social media @TheWriterJess
Fast Company
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Astronomer CEO's viral Coldplay moment reminds us: We're all being watched all the time
Convenience stores often have signs that read, 'Smile, you're on camera,' to discourage all who enter from engaging in transgressive behavior. Perhaps those signs should go everywhere now. On Thursday, the CEO of tech company Astronomer was captured on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert, seemingly committing marital infidelity with an employee. A TikTok of the incident went mega-viral, racking up 56 million views in 24 hours on that platform alone, while also exploding across every other social media site, not to mention countless group chats. There's something eerie, though, about how quickly and completely an apparent personal indiscretion became universal content. It's a cautionary tale for a new era of public shaming. The Jumbotron Moment Heard 'round the World blew up at such an incendiary level, on a bustling news day, for many reasons. The clumsy, deeply human way that the CEO and his employee seemed to realize they were suddenly visible, and then struggled to teleport out of sight, is almost objectively funny. It's also a cross-cultural story, encompassing the worlds of tech, music, and general human interest. Few current events, after all, get an equal amount of coverage at both PopCrave and Business Insider. The story also seemed to resonate because Coldplay might be the most memeable band that could've been involved in such a situation, inspiring countless jokes on social media about not wanting to be caught dead at a Coldplay concert. But the reason the Jumbotron moment has not only captured so much attention but sustained it is because, after becoming a matter of public consumption, the story metastasized into a saga. The more people found out what happened, the more unresolved variables they unearthed, including how the spouses of both the CEO and the employee reacted, what the board at Astronomer thinks of the incident, and how the CEO will address all of this. What we do in the shadows Jumbotrongate is now more than just a viral moment—to many online observers, it's become an irresistibly spicy parasocial true-crime drama, one unfolding in real time, rather than in a Netflix docuseries. The apparently grueling wait for a statement from the CEO has inspired chaos agents to release multiple bogus apologies online. A Facebook posting of one of the fakes late on Thursday night has already garnered 55,000 reactions and 14,000 comments. This impatience to hear directly from the person at the center of a massively viral, still-developing saga recalls one of the earliest, broadest, and most notorious examples of online shaming— the Justine Sacco incident. Just before Christmas in 2013, Sacco, a senior PR executive, sent an ill-advised tweet as she boarded an 11-hour flight to South Africa. 'Going to Africa,' the tweet began, before taking a turn for the controversial: 'Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!' Although Sacco had a relatively paltry following of less than 200 people at the time, the tone-deaf tweet came to the attention of a writer at Gawker, who helped it go tremendously, globally viral. The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet quickly became inescapable on Twitter, driving more communal anticipation to find out what would happen next than arguably any public event since O.J. Simpson's white Bronco chase 20 years earlier. The incident sparked both a wave of public shaming and an awareness of how it changing people's lives. (Sacco was let go from her job at InterActive Corp., though she was later rehired in a different role.) In the years to come, people would be shamed for killing a beloved lion during a hunting trip, for threatening to call the police on a Black man under false pretenses, and for appearing to masturbate during a work Zoom. What is now happening with the CEO of Astronomer, however, is a completely different beast. What he did may be perceived as morally objectionable and sleazy but it's ultimately a private matter that managed to break containment and reach a global audience. Who deserves anonymity? Sacco may not have deserved the level of attention wrought by her tweet in 2013, but unlike the Astronomer CEO's conduct, her offensive joke was something that she felt comfortable broadcasting to the world. Meanwhile, as an American abroad, being in a crowd of thousands in an Australian arena during a Coldplay concert must have felt like the most anonymous place in the world. If the lesson from #HasJustineLanded was 'Be careful what you tweet,' the one from this saga is more like, 'Be careful what you do anywhere at any time.' There's certainly something satisfying about seeing an apparent cheater get his comeuppance, but those celebrating it might be a little too comfortable living in a surveillance state. Most people have an implicit understanding that Nest camera footage or Alexa recordings might come up in court, and that we each leave a gigantic breadcrumb trail of data behind us wherever we go online, but it's easy to convince ourselves that the Sauron's eye-like panopticon will never turn on us personally. The Astronomer CEO's turn in the barrel should be seen as a warning that no matter who or where you are, a camera is never far away, and it's probably aimed in your direction.
