What Is Wrong With People?

I hate unfollowing people.

I follow a lot of people I don’t agree with, and on purpose. Christian leaders across the city, people from every wing of the Church, people well to my left and well to my right. I like hearing from people who see it differently to me. I think it’s healthy. I think it’s part of the job.

So it took me a couple of days to unfollow someone this week. I wrestled with it — turned it over, told myself I was overreacting, went back and looked again. In the end the answer didn’t change. A man who, I’d wager, would tell you he’s a Christian if you asked him. His feed isn’t debate. It isn’t even anger, really. It’s just gutter. Comment after comment, aimed at whoever the internet has decided to hate this week, dressed up as opinion. I didn’t block him. I just couldn’t have it in my timeline anymore.

It got me thinking about a question I can’t leave alone: what is actually wrong with people?

The lifeboat and the stone island stormtroopers

This week the RNLI became a target. Volunteers — unpaid, ordinary, the kind of people who leave a warm bed at 3am because someone else is drowning — have been abused online and in person for doing the only thing they’ve ever done: pulling people out of the sea.

The man at the front of a lot of this is Daniel Thomas, known online as Danny Tommo. He’s from Hayling Island.

I need to tell you what Hayling Island is to me before I tell you what it is to him. I spent most of my boyhood summers there. It’s a place stitched into the coast — a lifeboat station on the eastern side, looking out over the Solent, a community that has always understood what the sea can take from you if nobody comes. It’s not incidental to Hayling — it’s practically the town’s reason for being.

So when a man from that same stretch of coast stands in the water filming himself while lifeboat crews do their job, and calls them traitors for it — that lands differently for me than it might for you. It’s not abstract to me. It’s personal geography. He grew up somewhere that knows exactly what the RNLI is for, and he’s chosen to make his name attacking it anyway.

Not politics. Something else. What, exactly?

The woman who has already survived the worst thing

A few years back I was at St Joseph’s School in Stoke at an event with Katie Piper and her daughter Tegan. I watched her in the room — warm, funny, completely unguarded with a crowd of strangers. You wouldn’t have guessed, if you didn’t already know, what she’d walked through to get there. What struck me wasn’t the survival story. It was how much life she still had to give away.

This week she was in tears again — not over anything new, but over comments on her appearance after a red carpet event. A woman who survived an acid attack, who has already paid a price for existing in public that most of us can’t imagine, was made to justify her own face to strangers on the internet.

Danny Tommo. Katie Piper. A lifeboat crew. A pastor’s timeline. Different targets, same weather system. So — are people really this nasty? Or is something else going on?

The handshake that gave the game away

Rudy Giuliani said publicly that he didn’t want New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, at the 25th anniversary of 9/11 — because Mamdani is Muslim. He said it offended him. Then the day came, the cameras were on, and Giuliani shook the man’s hand anyway.

I don’t know what changed in him between the interview and the ceremony. Maybe standing at Ground Zero does something to a person that a Newsmax studio doesn’t. But it’s a small, telling picture of the gap between what people are willing to say into a microphone or a comment box, and what they’re actually willing to do to a person’s face. The keyboard version of us is braver, uglier, and considerably less honest than the version that shows up in the room.

The persona was the product

Then there’s Andrew and Tristan Tate, who told a Florida court this year that the whole “uberwealthy” act — the rented Bugattis, the yacht that wasn’t theirs — was exactly that: an act. Their own lawyers said it plainly: the more outrageous the post, the more it’s shared, the more it pays. In short, they said, he’s playing a role.

I thought of Eminem, of all people — a song where he talks about kids at his shows mimicking what he does on stage, taking the character for the man. He’s been saying some version of that for twenty-five years: this is a performance, don’t confuse it with a plan for how to live. The Tates just said the quiet part in a courtroom instead of on a stage. Someone built a persona because outrage sells, millions of young men took it as a manual for manhood, and it took a bail hearing to get an admission that it was never meant to be real in the first place.

That’s the same engine as the RNLI abuse and the pile-on against Katie Piper, just running the other direction. In one, the cruelty gets aimed outward at a target. In the other, the cruelty is the product itself, manufactured and sold to people young enough to believe it’s a template. Either way, someone worked out that the ugliest version of a thing travels furthest, and built a business, or a feed, on that fact.

Something else is going on

I don’t think most of the people leaving those comments would say a single one of them to a face. It’s not a guess — it’s basically the whole of internet psychology in one sentence. Take away the face, take away the room, take away the pause where you’d see someone flinch, and something in us goes looking for permission it would never get in person.

Psychologists call it the online disinhibition effect. Behind a screen, you’re invisible enough to feel safe and distant enough to feel unreal — the RNLI volunteer or the woman in the gown stops being a person you’d have to look in the eye and becomes a character you’re arguing with in your own head. And once someone’s a character, you can say things to them you’d never say to a person.

There’s a second piece to it, and it’s the more damning one. Cruelty needs a story to hide behind, and people are remarkably good at building one on the spot. She’s a public figure, she signed up for this. They’re not really rescuers, they’re a taxi service. It’s just banter. Everyone’s saying it. None of it’s true, but it doesn’t need to be true — it just needs to be enough cover to let someone keep thinking of themselves as a decent person while they type something a decent person wouldn’t say.

And then there’s the machine underneath both of them. Contempt travels further than kindness ever will online, because outrage is what keeps people scrolling. The platforms didn’t invent cruelty. But they built a very efficient engine for rewarding it — which is exactly where this piece picks up the thread I started in “The Treasure Your Algorithm Is Feeding You.” Different fear, same feeding.

Punching down is not free speech

Somewhere along the way “I’m just saying what I think” became cover for going after people who are already carrying more than their share — a burns survivor, a charity volunteer, anyone the crowd has decided is fair game this week. That isn’t courage. Courage looks like challenging power, not piling onto someone who’s already been hurt once. Punching down dressed as plain speaking is still punching down.

Micah put it about as plainly as it can be put: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. There’s no clause in there for “unless it’s on the internet and someone else started it.”

The good news this week

Here’s the part I want to end on, because it’s true and because it matters.

The RNLI has seen a surge in donations this week — new supporters, an outpouring of exactly the kind of decency the abuse was trying to drown out. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston called the intimidation what it was: disgraceful. And when Katie Piper posted through tears, she wasn’t left alone in it — the response from friends, colleagues and total strangers was immediate and warm, and by her own account she came through it still certain of who she is and whose she is.

That’s the answer to my own question, in the end. What’s wrong with people isn’t the whole story. Something in us does go looking for cover to be cruel from a distance. But something else in us — the bigger something, I think — still shows up when it matters. Still gives. Still says the kind thing out loud where the crowd can hear it.

I unfollowed one man this week. I could point you to a few hundred who make me glad I didn’t unfollow the internet altogether.