Mob rule

Change.org UK@UKChange

In the 22 days before his death, 249 articles were published about Jason Arday. That's more than 10 a day. Tia Lazaro-James has launched a petition on Change.org calling on the government to protect individuals from media harm. 🔗 Link: vist.ly/5f3ju

11:57 AM · Aug 17, 2026 · 1.54M Views

1.98K Replies · 1.17K Reposts · 3.39K Likes

I have said, and will keep saying, that there’s such a thing as too much attention. I will also repeat that it’s near-impossible if not impossible outright to control for. Yet some Brits are trying to control for it. I don’t fault the impulse, but the action itself, well…

There are three problems here. One is the lofty but important question of free speech. A law along those lines rather interferes with it. Free speech, freedom of the press, things of that nature. Yes yes the UK isn’t the US, but it’s not a totalitarian dictatorship either, and a law along those lines sounds a bit excessive.

Second is that one of the roles of the press is to… speak truth to power, punch up, however you wish to put it.

Anne Oatley@AnneOatley

I'm sure Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor would have appreciated Arday's Law

10:09 PM · Aug 19, 2026 · 1.76K Views

2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 11 Likes

Do you want to start limiting how many times newspapers can criticize a Trump, a Musk? And Musk isn’t an elected official so really where would one draw the line? A powerful person acting badly, this could be any number of situations, for as they taught in the liberal arts seminars, power is relative. The line between ‘don’t gossip nastily about ordinary people on and on in major newspapers’ and ‘don’t snark on your blog about the supreme leader’ can be awfully slim.

Third, and least urgent but most interesting to me, is the question of wanted publicity. Sometimes, someone is, you know, selling something, a widget or an ideology, or some mix, and they want all the press they can get. All but the most vile (unless they subscribe literally to all-publicity-is-good-publicity, which nobody really does), at least. And a lot of publicity is neither positive nor negative. Where does that fall?

If you limited the amount of times a newspaper could print the name “Lena Dunham” you would yes spare the world a lot of shitty LD takes, and spare the woman herself some agony, but also, you would put an unnatural check on Dunham’s career. Or: I could think of a lot of reasons the world would be a better place with fewer Hasan Piker profiles. But presumably Piker himself would disagree. Ambitious people tend to want all the flattering publicity they can get.

As my friend-from-the-internet Moebius Stripper keeps shouting to the void (I’m trying here!), even the man at the center of the storm here fell very much into this category.

Moebius Stripper@moebius_strip

Thinking about Jason Arday and the "he would be alive if the media hadn't hounded him to death" narrative, and the place where this all falls apart is the seven-figure book deal. You need to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a book to pay out that advance.

3:50 PM · Aug 17, 2026 · 941 Views

1 Reply · 3 Reposts · 28 Likes

Jason Arday was not a quiet scholar in the dusty archives, doing his thing, whose errors were suddenly everywhere. He was trying to shift units.

A law like that would impede the shifting of units. Also the making of names. I guess the idea is a bit patronizing, a bit protect the fame-seeker from self. Maybe it’s the American in me but I feel like if you’re a grown-up and you want to seek fame, this is your right. If what you want is for a lot of people to be talking about you, do you want there to be a law saying the only people who can be talking about you are an assembly of your friends, closest relatives and ex-significant others? In certain moments you might, but in others, not so much.