by Chris Harris 16/8/26
There was something almost perfectly absurd about Sadiq Khan condemning the “public hounding”, abuse and public shaming surrounding the tragedy of Jason Arday — and then choosing X as the place to tell us about it.
His sentiments may be entirely sincere. Indeed, the central point is difficult to argue with. Relentless public humiliation can become vicious, disproportionate and deeply damaging. Social media has given thousands of people the ability to descend simultaneously upon one individual, often knowing almost nothing about them beyond whatever allegation, quotation, video clip or whatever pile of shit happens to be circulating that afternoon.
But surely there comes a point when politicians, journalists and campaigners — particularly those on the left who regularly condemn online toxicity — have to confront their own participation in the machine producing it. You cannot endlessly describe X as poisonous, abusive, divisive and dangerous while continuing to provide it with exactly what it needs to survive: your presence, your arguments, your content and your audience.
You Cannot Keep Feeding the Cesspit
X doesn’t manufacture every unpleasant human instinct. We managed tribalism, bullying, gossip and public humiliation perfectly well before anybody had a smartphone. What social media has done is industrialise them. Anger generates engagement. Conflict produces attention. Outrage travels faster than moderation.
Yet the political class continues dutifully turning up. They complain about the atmosphere, denounce the abuse, lament the coarsening of public discourse and then post something else. Journalists quote the resulting reaction, politicians respond to the journalists, campaigners respond to the politicians and everybody congratulates themselves for confronting the awfulness while collectively generating another day’s worth of it.
This is where the left has a particular problem. It cannot credibly spend years telling us that X has become a cesspit of hatred, misinformation and abuse and simultaneously behave as though maintaining an active presence there is some sort of democratic duty. Every prominent politician, commentator and campaigner who continues feeding the platform helps preserve its relevance. They are not merely observing the ecosystem. They are fertilising it.
That is what makes Khan’s intervention so extraordinary. A politician warns us about the consequences of public hounding and public shaming by posting his warning into one of the world’s most efficient mechanisms for public hounding and public shaming. The contradiction is almost too perfect.
“But We Have to Fight the Right on X”
The inevitable defence is that progressive politicians cannot simply abandon the territory. If the left leaves X, we’re told, the right will dominate it. Somebody has to challenge misinformation. Somebody has to counter the arguments. Somebody has to stay and fight.
But why?
This treats X as though it were Parliament, the BBC or a public square which democratically belongs to all of us. It isn’t. It’s a privately owned social-media platform whose significance depends overwhelmingly upon people continuing to regard it as significant.
If huge numbers of mainstream politicians, journalists, celebrities, organisations and ordinary users stopped participating, they wouldn’t be surrendering a country to their opponents. They would be leaving a website.
And what happens to a social-media platform when everybody except the most committed combatants remains? It becomes an echo chamber. The endless political warriors can spend their days shouting at one another, congratulating themselves, becoming increasingly furious and wondering why nobody outside their little universe is listening.
The oxygen disappears because everybody else has gone home.
Instead, the left keeps returning because it apparently cannot bear the thought of somebody being wrong on the internet without immediately correcting them. In doing so, it helps maintain the very platform it routinely identifies as part of the problem.
There is something mind-blowingly stupid about that.
Perhaps the Real Wake-Up Call Is to Leave
None of this means politicians should avoid scrutiny or that unpleasant opinions magically disappear when people stop using X. Nor does it mean the right is uniquely responsible for online abuse. The left has demonstrated repeatedly that it is perfectly capable of joining a pile-on when the person being piled upon happens to belong to the opposing tribe. That’s precisely the point. The mechanism is the problem.
Thousands of individuals each convince themselves they’re merely contributing one legitimate opinion. Collectively, they can create an avalanche. Nobody believes they’re part of the mob because everybody thinks their particular contribution is justified.
Then something terrible happens and everybody asks how public discourse became so brutal.
Khan said Arday’s death should be “a wake up call for all of us.” Perhaps it should.
But a wake-up call requires somebody eventually to wake up. If politicians genuinely believe X has become an engine of abuse, public shaming and division, there is a remarkably simple action available to them. Leave.
They don’t need legislation. They don’t need another parliamentary committee. They don’t need a campaign against online toxicity conducted, with magnificent irony, through the medium of online toxicity. Just stop using it.
If enough politicians, journalists, campaigners and public figures did that, X wouldn’t disappear overnight. The people who enjoy spending their lives screaming at one another would remain perfectly free to continue doing so. But increasingly they would be screaming at themselves.
And perhaps that’s the real hypocrisy exposed by Khan’s post. The political establishment condemns the cesspit while remaining terrified of climbing out of it.
#British Politics #Politics Blog #British Left #British Right #Bullshit Media
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