When Public Judgement Turns Cruel

Content note: This article discusses public shaming, distress, suicide and death.

I have watched people refuse to read someone’s work because they had already decided it was written by AI.

No evidence. No conversation. Sometimes, not even a detector score.

Just a feeling. A suspicion. A decision made before the person’s actual words had been given a chance.

And that is what has been sitting with me.

Because this is not only about AI.

It is about what happens whenever one fragment of information becomes enough for us to decide who a whole person is.

A score is not a verdict.

A suspicion is not a fact.

And a person does not become less human because we have decided their story fits neatly into one we already know.

Let’s start with AI detection, because it is part of why I am writing this.

AI-generated work is a real issue. Academic integrity matters. People should not be able to pass off someone else’s work as their own.

But detecting AI use is not as simple as a percentage on a screen.

OpenAI withdrew its own text classifier because of its low accuracy. Turnitin says its AI-writing model can misidentify human writing, AI writing and AI-paraphrased writing, and should not be used as the sole reason to take action against a student.

Research has also found that some AI detectors can be biased against people who write English as an additional language.

That does not mean every concern is meaningless.

It means a concern should be the beginning of a proper conversation, not the end of one.

A person should be able to explain their work. They should be able to show their drafts, notes, process and understanding. They should be met with evidence, curiosity and fairness.

Not a percentage treated as a verdict before a person has been heard.

A friend of mine was once pulled up for plagiarism while I was doing my degree. Some citations had been missed. That needed correcting, of course it did.

But missing citations is not automatically the same as deliberately stealing somebody’s work.

This is the bit we keep losing.

There is a difference between identifying an error and deciding you know somebody’s whole character.

A mistake may need correcting.
It does not always need a crowd.

I have thought a lot about where the line is.

Accountability is not pretending nothing happened.

It is not protecting people from consequences.

It is not telling people who have been harmed to stay quiet so everybody else can feel comfortable.

Accountability asks:

• What actually happened?

• What evidence is there?

• Who has been affected?

• What needs to change?

• What would a fair and proportionate response look like?

Cruelty does something else.

Cruelty takes an action, an allegation or a mistake and stretches it until it becomes somebody’s entire identity.

It either enjoys the humiliation, or stops caring that humiliation has become the point.

It treats uncertainty as guilt.

It treats an apology as proof somebody is weak, and silence as proof somebody is guilty.

It does not leave room for repair, learning, context or humanity.

And very often, it does not even make anybody safer.

Accountability is a process.
Cruelty is a performance.

This is where psychology comes in.

Psychologists call one part of this the fundamental attribution error. It sounds horrendous, like a Victorian diagnosis involving a fainting couch, but it means something quite simple.

When somebody else does something we dislike, we are quick to see it as proof of who they are.

We think, “They are dishonest,” “They are selfish,” or “They are a bad person.”

We are much less likely to wonder whether fear, pressure, poor communication, missing context, overwhelm or a genuine mistake might also be part of the story.

Then there is social proof.

When lots of people sound certain, certainty can start to feel like evidence. A hundred comments repeating the same opinion can feel convincing, even when none of the people commenting actually know the full story.

And because each person only adds one like, one share or one comment, it can be easy to feel as though our own contribution does not matter.

But the person receiving it does not experience one tiny action.

They experience the weight of all of it.

Psychology does not excuse cruelty. It helps us understand how ordinary people can become part of it without stopping to notice.

Jason Arday was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge in 2023, becoming the university’s youngest Black professor.

His story mattered to people. He spoke about growing up autistic, being unable to speak until he was 11, and learning to read and write at 18. He went on to gain a PhD, teach at several universities and become a prominent academic writing about race, inequality and education.

Then serious questions were raised about parts of his academic work, qualifications and public biography.

On 5 August 2026, Cambridge announced an investigation into new information about his qualifications and honorary appointments, alongside ongoing complaints about academic misconduct. Jason resigned that day. He denied plagiarism allegations and said the accusations, speculation and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and those he loved.

There were genuine questions to answer, and any investigation needed to be fair and thorough. But a fair process is not the same as thousands of strangers turning somebody’s life into a forensic hobby.

On 14 August, Jason Arday was found dead at his home in south London, aged 41. Police said his death was being treated as unexpected but not suspicious. No public cause of death has been confirmed.

That matters.

We should not invent a cause of death.

We should not claim that one event, one article, one argument or one person caused it.

But we can still look at the environment around him and ask what happens when a person becomes a public object lesson.

Jason’s work, disability, background and claims were being picked apart by people who did not know him. To some, he was a symbol of hope. To others, a symbol in a wider argument about universities, diversity and standards. When somebody becomes a symbol, people stop allowing them to be complicated.

Caroline Flack’s story is different. It should not be treated as though it is identical to Jason Arday’s.

In December 2019, Caroline was charged with assault by battery following an alleged domestic incident involving her boyfriend, Lewis Burton. She pleaded not guilty. Her trial was due to begin in March 2020.

Domestic abuse must always be taken seriously.

Fame and popularity do not make an allegation disappear, and a partner not supporting a prosecution does not automatically mean there is no case. But Caroline was never convicted, and the facts were never tested in court.

Instead, the months before her death became a relentless public story.

She stood down from Love Island. Her name was everywhere. Her private life became daily material for headlines, judgement and speculation.

A Guardian analysis found 387 print stories mentioning Caroline in the six months before her death, with negative coverage rising sharply after she was charged.

Caroline died by suicide in February 2020.

At the inquest, the coroner found that she had been struggling with fluctuating mental health, and concluded that knowing the prosecution would proceed and facing the anticipated media publicity were central to the circumstances of her death.

That does not mean one headline, one tweet or one person caused her death.

Suicide is complex. It is not a neat equation where we can point to one thing and say, “That did it.”

But neither should complexity become an excuse to ignore the impact of relentless public scrutiny.

Everyone affected deserved due process. Caroline also deserved to be treated as a human being, not an endless source of public spectacle.

Jason Arday and Caroline Flack are two public examples.

Every day, people are publicly judged in workplaces, schools, family chats, friendship groups, local Facebook pages and WhatsApp conversations. A mistake, allegation, clumsy comment or overwhelmed response can become a story that moves faster than the person at its center.

Then the story starts moving faster than they can.

And not everybody can keep up with it in the same way.

Someone living with anxiety, depression or trauma may already be carrying fear, shame or the belief that they are one mistake away from being rejected.

An autistic person may find sudden conflict, uncertainty, information overload or a flood of messages particularly overwhelming.

Someone with ADHD may react quickly while frightened or overloaded, then spend days replaying every word they said.

Someone with a learning disability may need more time, clearer information or support to understand what is happening and explain their side.

That does not make anyone weak.

It means we need to stop pretending everybody has the same emotional resources, support network, processing speed and ability to defend themselves while people are talking about them.

Some will go quiet. Others will say the wrong thing, or fail to explain themselves quickly enough for an audience that has already decided what their silence means. And some will carry it long after everybody else has found a new story.

I have seen this in my own work.

Details are deliberately left out to protect the person involved, but I have watched somebody become flustered and frightened while trying desperately to explain themselves.

The more overwhelmed they became, the more others read their behavior as aggression.

They did not see the fear.

They saw the raised voice, the repetition, the urgency and the struggle to get a point across.

So the response escalated.

More people came in. More pressure. More misunderstanding.

And what began as somebody feeling frightened and unheard risked becoming a label that could follow them far beyond that one conversation.

That is what happens when we see only behavior and not the person underneath it.

Fear can look like anger.

A shutdown can look like defiance.

Panic can look like manipulation.

A person struggling to communicate can look like a person refusing to cooperate.

Sometimes the most important question is not:

“Why are they behaving like this?”

It is:

“What might be happening that I cannot see?”

Anger is a volcano.

It erupts. It is loud. It is magnificent in the most frightening way. Everybody turns to look.

Patience is more like hills and valleys.

It is quieter. It takes longer. It holds whole lives together without anybody applauding it.

And online, the volcano nearly always wins.

Research suggests that when social-media users receive likes and shares for moral outrage, they are more likely to express more of it later. Platforms teach us what gets attention.

Online, the sharpest, most certain and most cutting comments tend to get noticed. People can start to confuse attention with importance, and volume with being right.

Some people do join in deliberately. They enjoy the power, the attention or the chance to hurt somebody without having to see the impact.

Others genuinely believe they are helping. They think they are speaking up. They are scared of seeming as though they do not care.

And sometimes speaking up is necessary.

Say your piece.

Ask your question.

Challenge what needs challenging.

Just do it with kindness.

Just remember that speaking up does not require you to become cruel.

Guilt says:

“I did something bad.”

Shame says:

“I am bad.”

Guilt can lead to repair. It can make somebody face what they have done, apologize, change and do better.

Shame attacks the whole self.

It says there is no route back. No context. No future. No life beyond the worst thing people know about you.

Public shaming is especially cruel because it does not only say, “You did something wrong.”

It says, “Everyone can see you are the sort of person who deserves to be rejected.”

For somebody who is already struggling, isolated, frightened or convinced they are too much, that can feel unbearable.

When distress becomes inescapable, a person can start to believe there is no route out.

That is why we need to be careful.

Not because everybody is responsible for everybody else’s mental health.

But because compassion costs us very little, and cruelty can cost somebody everything.

I know the justice system does not always get things right.

I know institutions fail people. I know victims are not always believed. I know some people with power avoid consequences.

That is frustrating. It can make public judgement feel like the only available form of justice.

But a crowd does not become fairer because it is bigger.

It does not become more informed because it is louder.

And it does not become justice just because it is angry.

We do not know every fact.

We do not know who is reading the comments at two in the morning.

We do not know what else somebody is carrying.

The accused has family. The person making an allegation has family. Witnesses have family. People are not chess pieces in an argument we are enjoying from a sofa.

Our responsibility is not to decide that nothing matters.

It is to hold enough compassion for everyone involved to let the facts be found properly.

Compassion does not mean pretending serious concerns do not matter.

It means responding in a way that is more likely to create safety, truth and repair, rather than more noise.

We can slow down.

We can read the actual work, the actual statement or the actual evidence before sharing somebody else’s opinion of it.

We can be precise.

Instead of saying, “They are a terrible person,” we can ask, “What did they do?”, “What do we actually know?” and “What needs to happen next?”

We can let silence mean silence.

A person who is quiet may be getting legal advice, trying to understand what has happened, having a panic attack, protecting their family, or simply not knowing what to say. We do not get to turn their lack of public response into proof.

We can take serious concerns to the right place.

If somebody may have caused harm, there may need to be reporting, safeguarding, workplace procedures, legal action, boundaries or consequences. Those things matter.

But that is different from turning their name into entertainment.

We can support people who have been harmed without using them as weapons in an argument.

And we can choose not to add weight to something just because everybody else is doing it.

One like. One repost. One joke. One “just saying”. It can all feel tiny from the outside.

It does not always feel tiny to the person at the center of it.

Sometimes the kindest and most responsible thing we can do is refuse to become part of the spectacle.

Before we share, comment, like, repost or watch another person being pulled apart, perhaps we need to ask:

• Do I know this is true, or do I know it has been repeated?

• Am I talking about an action, or deciding who this person is forever?

• Is this helping anyone, or am I simply adding weight to the noise?

• What might their silence actually mean?

• Would I say this if they were sitting in front of me?

• If this were someone I loved, would I still think this was a fair thing to say?

The person at the center of the story is loved by somebody. They may need to answer serious questions, repair harm or face consequences. But they are still someone’s child, parent, partner, sibling, friend or colleague. They are still a person. And that should change how we speak.

If this has brought something up for you, Samaritans are available in the UK and Ireland, day or night, on 116 123.

• OpenAI: AI-text classifier withdrawn because of low accuracy

• Turnitin: limitations of its AI Writing Report

• Research on AI-detector bias against non-native English writers

• The Guardian: Cambridge investigation and Jason Arday’s resignation

• The Guardian: reporting on Jason Arday’s death

• Crown Prosecution Service statement on the Caroline Flack case

• The Guardian: analysis of media coverage before Caroline Flack’s death

• The Guardian: Caroline Flack inquest reporting

• Research on how social reward can amplify moral outrage online

• Samaritans: guidance on talking about suicide safely