Okay, I need to talk through something that's been bothering me all week. There is a part of the internet and digital culture that is fun, exciting and a great way to connect with people and build community.

Then there is the darker side of it all that has gone too far.

Jason Arday was Cambridge University's youngest ever Black professor. After plagiarism allegations surfaced about parts of his memoir, he resigned his post.

Then came 188 articles in nine days, a wave of coverage so relentless that even the reporting itself became the story. He was found dead in his London home last week at 41. His family says he'd faced "a campaign of sustained abuse" for more than three years, and they've pointed to race as part of why the story got the volume it did. The Good Law Project is now calling for a public inquiry into press conduct. I want to be careful here. Arday made mistakes he owned. But there's a difference between a story getting told and a story getting weaponized until a person can't get up from it.

Then there's Sydney Towle, a 26 year old TikTok creator who documented her cancer treatment for her followers. A lot of people showed up for her with real support. But plenty of others, according to the New York Times reporting cited in the Boston Globe, accused her of faking the whole thing and constantly harassed her online. She died last week.

And Jools LeBron, the creator behind "very demure, very mindful," the phrase that basically ran 2024. She opened up about losing her teeth to past addiction and started a GoFundMe to fix them.

The backlash came fast and people decided she didn’t deserve help because she’s famous. She ended up on a livestream talking about self-harm before she pulled the fundraiser and refunded everyone. Someone who was finally being honest about a hard recovery, and the reward for that honesty was getting dragged until she was talking about ending her life.

None of these three did anything wrong. They got harassed, bullied, and effectively canceled for it anyway. Two of their stories ended in tragedy. The third is still speaking out about what the pile-on did to her mental health.

Even Hank Green, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. had by far the lowest stakes situation of the bunch this month, got a full pile-on because four words in a video sounded a little too much like ChatGPT. He ended up pausing his channels and publicly admitting his AI use "isn't healthy," which, fine, is a fair thing to sit with.

But the scale of the reaction to a guy who's spent two decades making free science content for teenagers tells you the outrage machine doesn't really care about proportion anymore.

I'm not saying accountability should disappear. If someone's actually harassing people, abusing their power, or hurting someone, they should absolutely face consequences, and I'll be the first one saying so.

But we've stopped being able to tell the difference between that and a person who's sick, or grieving, or just having a bad week in public.

The mob doesn't pause to ask which one it's looking at. It just fires.

The people organizing pile-ons rarely have to watch what happens on the other end of them. They don't see the DMs. They don't see the person reading a thousand comments at 2am. If they did, I don't think most of them would keep typing.

Cancel culture is the thing that needs canceling. Not the accountability part, the sport part. The part where a mistake, an illness, or a bad take gets treated exactly the same as an actual crime, because outrage is the same shape no matter what set it off. We can hold people responsible for real harm without turning every misstep into a public execution.

That's not a lower standard. It's just a fairer one.

So how do we actually fix this. It starts with the platforms, because they built the incentive structure we're all living inside of. Right now, outrage gets rewarded with reach. A pile-on drives more comments, more shares, more watch time than almost anything else, so the algorithm hands it a megaphone.

If platforms want to claim they care about user wellbeing, they can start by slowing distribution on posts that are clearly coordinated harassment, the same way they already throttle spam. They have the data to tell the difference between a real conversation and a mob.

Aside from the platforms, the rest of this is on all of us.

We have to lead by example. There’s a real difference between giving your honest hot take and adding fuel to a fire that’s already dragging someone’s entire life through the mud without any grace, without giving them room to prove otherwise. Maybe that’s the new social contract we need with each other. Not less accountability, just more of it aimed at real harm instead of whoever the internet’s decided to go after this week. We can’t control what the platforms do. But we can control that part.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, and Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741741) is another option. Use them.

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