What happened to Jason Arday shows how social media has warped us all. Sadly, I have first-hand experience of this.

Share

Show your appreciation with a tip

In January 2022, my husband died by suicide. Seven months earlier, he had posted a tweet in which he intended to satirise what he saw as anti-Semitism on the part of Jeremy Corbyn and the far left of the Labour party. The tweet had involved an image of Corbyn reading from We’re All Going on a Bear Hunt, the front cover of which had been doctored - I don’t know by whom - into a copy of the anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Most of my late husband’s tweets had reached a tiny audience, but this one provoked widespread outrage, and was seen and retweeted millions of times. Details of Pete’s place of work were posted online and his line managers were bombarded with literal thousands of emails calling for his resignation.

One journalist posted details online of what he thought was Pete’s home address, and I called the police, who sent a patrol car to sit outside our house overnight. My husband was put through a major institutional disciplinary procedure, which lasted months. The onslaught of tweets to him and about him, shaming him, ridiculing his academic work, calling for his total cancellation and disappearance from visibility, were incessant. National newspapers, including the Guardian, reported on the case. The shame and perceived unfairness of his loss of reputation consumed Pete, and impelled him to pursue redress through legal action. Over the following months, he lied and kept this - along with many other things - secret from me and his family, and when the legal action took a turn he hadn’t expected, and when all his lies started to come crashing down, he couldn’t endure it and took his own life.

Obviously the death of Jason Arday reminds me of what happened to my husband. And my first thought is absolute heartbreak for what Arday’s partner and children and his family and friends are going through right now, and how their lives have been irrevocably altered.

My other thoughts are these:

We’re living in an era in which there’s widespread fascination with people who are revealed to be fantasists and fabricators. Raynor Winn - the author of The Salt Path who has been the subject of an ongoing Observer investigation into the, erm, inconsistencies in her memoir of purportedly being made homeless and hiking the South West Coast Path with her husband, who had been diagnosed with a dreadful degenerative brain condition - is the subject of the longest-running and busiest series of Mumsnet threads, stretching to around 26,000 separate comments.

I fully understand such fascination. It is fascinating to think about the mechanics of deception: the psychological drives that impel individuals to lie; how they are able to get away with it for so long; how lies escalate into more and more lies; what finally exposes them and brings them down. Perhaps many of us have been hurt by other people’s lies in the past, and there’s a satisfaction in being able to publicly condemn such behaviour. Perhaps many of us are unwilling to look at times in our own lives when we’ve lied or embellished and been rewarded for it, and how easily we ourselves could have become trapped in a series of escalating lies. And perhaps we feel personally absolved by, instead, pointing the finger at those whose lies were far worse, and pretending that we’re nothing like them.