In Defense of the Coldplay Couple: An Examination of the Social Media Surveillance State
Added 2025-08-02 02:02:40 +0000 UTCLast month, two middle-aged white people were caught embracing on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. A video of them awkwardly dodging the cameras went viral on a scale that harkens back to the Ellen era. The Internet decided that the two were having an affair, and within a day, their names, job titles, and families were plastered across social media and cable news. The videoed man’s wife ran from the spotlight, but sleuths chased her down anyway. The marriage of strangers became a real-life investigation in the court of TikTok.
Today, feminist streamer Caroline Kwan and I contextualize this latest viral story in the Internet’s long history of doing very similar things to people far less detestable than a tech CEO and his head of HR. We make the case for why strengthening the surveillance machine Is Not Good, even when it’s wielded against people we don’t like.
Follow Caroline on Twitter: https://x.com/carolinekwan
Follow Caroline on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/carolinekwan
Watch Sarah Z’s video essay on West Elm Caleb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeCi4CSqtzw
Read Couch Guy’s essay: https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/tiktok-couch-guy-internet-sleuths.html
Comments
Oh, I didn't realize pressing enter would submit. Anyway, thank you for a thoughtful podcast (as always. I find it so interesting that assumptions of cooperation and good-naturedness has been dwindling in general, and degrades especially quickly online. I can see how the paranoia or hypervigilance (or less clinical versions of those terms, I agree that psychology terms get overused and watered down) that true crime obsession causes could contribute to this. We as a society don't give people the benefit of the doubt that there is actually just some misunderstanding and not everyone is acting maliciously as much as we could. I think this relates to how everyone is sympathetic to whoever has gotten the most recent word in on a scandal with multiple people (I just finished your "Bye Sister" series). I see stuff like this all the time. On Reddit subs that talk about what people's biggest pet peeves are, for instance (I've gone to try to study how to act in public), I'll see "I hate when someone does x, it's literally the worst thing ever" (x is a small trivial thing), and then a reply will be "I have to do x because of xyz, e.g. an invisible disability." Then the person who said it's the worst thing and people who do x should die just responds "oh, well you're one of the good ones, it's totally fine when you do x, it's these other people [that I assume have malicious intentions instead of also having valid reasons] that are the problem." Even tone in written communication is increasingly assumed to be hostile or AI if it's too formal--I have had to cut back on em dashes aside from the one I just used now in protest, lol. I'm a gay millennial but I just don't understand emoji use, and often when writing to someone informally they will assume I'm upset or something because I don't thrown in a lol and smiley every other sentence (at least I've learned to drop final periods in texts). Anyway, now I'm mostly rambling, but my main point is that in all of the cases in this video, people are assuming malicious intent where there is no evidence (aside from perhaps the reaction of the titular couple, but even then we don't know if the response was two members of a polycule just avoiding publicity because they hadn't disclosed the relationship to work, which may have been unfeasible to do anyways because polyamory isn't protected from job discrimination). Thanks a lot, and thanks for being one of my only portals to broader cultural phenomena
Neal
2025-10-07 02:54:26 +0000 UTCI want to thank Caroline for mentioning autistic people (like myself) in the context of this panopticon. I'm not very online so I wasn't aware of any of these cases, but I definitely felt both confusion at why some of these were even issues and dread that my existing in public could lead to any of these things happening. If I realize I'm in the background of someone's recording, I immediately revert to making funny faces (mostly just instinctually/to be silly, but I also figure they might get amusement looking back at the video and if they are recording me without my consent I should be allowed to do what I want with my face).
Neal
2025-10-07 02:32:56 +0000 UTCI've never participated in public discourse about perceived bad behaviours, mostly for fear of being drawn into it and the mob turning on me, but I do privately condemn, and this video has changed me. I feel in general that your podcast has made me a more thoughtful person.
Sarah B
2025-10-01 18:08:42 +0000 UTCThis is exactly how I feel about serial killers being caught with 23 and me DNA. They start with the undeniable cases so everyone backs it, then after a few years all of our genomes are up for grabs. I only saw positive reporting in true crime podcasts, because saying anything against it could be met with “but he killed 700 people!! Don’t you want him in prison??” It’s great that btk was caught but the implications are …. Concerning to say the least
eggiana
2025-09-16 23:14:12 +0000 UTCWhenever I saw an article about this i was just thinking "Kim, people are dying"
Elliot
2025-09-09 20:37:16 +0000 UTCI have been meaning to listen to this episode for a while, but what really reminded me to come and find it was the Kendra drama on TikTok. You said that this will have happened again twice by the time you had edited the video and here we are again. I agree with Caroline that people use social media to try to feel power and also project their own trauma onto these situations. They are using this as a way to regulate their emotions. I can’t disagree with anything you said in the video and don’t think that people should be doing this, but I do find humour in the fact that a CEO of an AI company (which as you say is primarily being used for surveillance) was so ignorant to the possibility of being observed. While I agree that it is not good that people had the ability to find out who he was, I don’t feel sorry for him, and if that makes me a shitty person I’m at peace with that. You talked also about moral perfectionism and I think that while we should hold each other to such principles, we should also allow for the fact that people are not gonna care about shitty CEOs. *In case it wasn’t clear, I mean that AI is primarily being used for surveillance, not his company specifically, I haven’t looked into it.
Amy
2025-08-13 01:46:20 +0000 UTCWait, does bullying in english mean one instance of being mean or cruel to someone? I'm confused. I thought it meant targeting someone at least a few times and often getting others in on it with you. Working from the definition I thought this word had, the influencer was the one doing the bullying not the two girls being mean. She may have not understood that the harassment campaign would commence but those were the consequences.
Leo Bergs
2025-08-11 18:46:13 +0000 UTC
