#Bekind? Jameela Jamil and her woke warriors should try it
Any sense of decency or respect to Flack’s family after their loss was forgotten
Itry not to have much to do with Twitter. Peering into its abysses feels a bit like lifting the lid on a rubbish bin left outside for a long hot summer: all that pungent dross; all that festering. Once you’ve seen maggots squirming that close, it’s hard to unsee them.
But I’ve had my head inside social media’s bin for the past 10 days, watching the great #Bekind debate unfold with a kind of ghoulish fascination. If you have even less to do with Twitter than I do, I should explain that although #Bekind recurs across social media as a pointless piece of virtue signalling, the latest onslaught of fraudulent kindness has come in the wake of Love Island host Caroline Flack’s tragic suicide.
From the moment reports came in that the troubled 40-year-old had been found dead at her London flat 10 days ago, the #Bekind brigade took to Twitter to apportion blame. People were so excited about making their valuable opinions known, so excited about elevating themselves to meaningful mouthpieces, that any sense of decency or respect towards the family in the immediate aftermath of their immeasurable loss was forgotten.
It was David Walliams’s fault for making a cheap joke at
Flack’s expense at the
National Television Awards. It was the Crown Prosecution Service’s fault for pursuing a case against Flack after she was arrested for allegedly assaulting her boyfriend, Lewis Burton, last year. And yes, they should have seen how vulnerable she was; whether we can really blame them for doing their job is debatable.
But, of course, most of all it was the media’s fault, for doing what we’re always told we do for a living: being unkind. Never mind that as someone who interviewed Flack twice and met her socially on several occasions, I know that the presenter had a very good relationship with the media. Never mind that two of the key journalists being targeted by the #Bekind brigade – one a close friend of mine, and the other my husband – were actually friends of Flack’s, or that there is very little being held up as evidence in what’s too base to be called a debate.
Social media doesn’t need facts or evidence to support its arguments. The beauty of it is that it’s purely emotion-based, and purely self-serving.
“Most of the people on social media who have a high following all hash tagging #Bekind are the same people who ripped her to shreds and showed her no support,” someone tweeted yesterday. “This is exactly why this needs to be shown. It’s important. It’ll never stop if it’s not addressed!”
Is social media really the place to “address” any core human value, though, let alone one it couldn’t be further from representing? After all this is one of the least kind and honourable communities on the planet, so for it to try to cover up its ugliness with a giant #Bekind label is a bit like covering up the ingredients on a Mars bar with a sticker emblazoned “Behealthy”.
Twitter likes to see itself as the inventor of the kind of basic values we should all be being taught at home, if no longer in church. Because in our secular society social media has become our church, and the likes of Jameela Jamil our preachers. Only the vast, flailing congregation being sold kindness as an exciting new commodity need to understand this: kindness has been around for some time. And yes, it’s a good idea. But kindness being used to further one’s own ends is ironic.
Talking of irony, I found a passage in my last interview with Flack in which she mourns our obsession with social media and phones: “I don’t like negativity on any level,” she told me. “And I don’t think people should ever tweet anything too serious.”
If that’s not enough to puncture #Bekind’s grotesquely inflated self-importance, the words of Flack’s former dance teacher and friend of 20 years should be. Kevin Adams went on Sky News to address the army acting in her name. “I don’t want you to be kind,” he told them, “I want you to think about what you’re saying. If you see someone you don’t like, you don’t need to tell them, just leave them alone.”
Angry and tearful, Adams pared it down still further: “What I’m asking, is that if you’ve got nothing good to say, shut your mouth.”