Here’s why we play judge and jury on social media

Discovering the truth about celebrity feuds.

Rosie Phillips

Rosie studies theology in Oxford and is currently training to be a vicar.

A montage shows two celebrity faces in opposition

Lively and Baldoni face off.

Depending on your Instagram algorithm, you might have seen that Hollywood actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni continue to make news with their ongoing feud, which is soon to reach litigation in the US civil courts. Then again, maybe you haven’t – in which case kudos to your scrolling habits and for avoiding celebrity clickbait (unlike me).

What interests me about their dispute – and others that have gone before it – is how it spotlights our need, as the general public, to search out the truth. And to make ourselves judge and jury on the matter.

Having starred together last summer in It Ends With Us, Lively soon after accused Baldoni of sexual harassment and of orchestrating a smear campaign against her during the film’s press tour. Baldoni responded by suing the New York Times for libel, and Lively for civil extortion and defamation. Cue some biased media reporting, and conflicting evidence being released by their legal teams, and both actors’ reputations have been significantly damaged by the dispute.

With their accounts remaining at complete odds with each other, the question Instagram’s pundits keep coming back to is: which one of them is telling the truth?

The reality is we’ll probably never fully know (and, obviously, it’s not actually any of our business, so I won’t speculate).

But it makes me reflect on how, in lots of instances of conflict, the answer can be blurrier than we’d like.

The judges and juries of Instagram rarely, if ever, offer us this kind of impartiality in their search for the truth

So often, in disagreements and disputes, both parties’ accounts have a seed of truth in them. But as we ruminate on the event afterwards, the risk is that we re-interpret it according to our values, biases, and past experiences. That seed of truth is watered by the stories we tell ourselves, growing and morphing into something that can become hard to untangle.

Over time, as we centre ourselves in the narrative, we become the ultimate arbiters of our truth.

But when the stories we tell ourselves become the stories we also tell others, and we discover that our respective truths are in fundamental conflict with each other, it exposes how our perception of a situation might differ from is reality.

Which is why, so often, we have to defer to impartial third parties to search out the ultimate truth. Judges and juries who seek to understand each person’s story but who also inhabit the fuller narrative, and who can untangle the layers of interpretation we unknowingly heap onto our experiences.

The judges and juries of Instagram rarely, if ever, offer us this kind of impartiality in their search for the truth.

But they remind us that truth is, ultimately, found outside of ourselves. And that, in discovering the truth, we can also find the justice we’re so often longing for.

Maybe we’re all just suckers for a bit of clickbait. But perhaps the need to make ourselves judge and jury also points to a deeper part of our humanity. We’re all seeking after truth in this world – if only we can find it.

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Monastic life

16 May 2025

4 min read

The Sycamore Gap vandals were chasing the wrong sort of fame

Fifteen minutes of notoriety is nothing - just ask St Cuthbert.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A felled decidious tree lies sprawled on the ground. The freshly sawn stump and roots are in the foreground

The stump of the felled sycamore tree.

Wandering wounder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It was Andy Warhol who is said to have uttered the famous statement: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Never mind the fact that the quotation has been attributed to other people as well, whoever came up with it first can hardly have anticipated how quickly it would come true.

In our times, social media has democratised information. We all now have our own individual press office, issuing our considered statements to the world in the form of Instagram or Facebook posts, comments on X, reels and the like. Secretly we all hope one of our gems of wisdom, a joke or a video of something weird will go viral - in a positive way - and we will get our 15 minutes of fame.

I was thinking of all this recently on a walk by Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland in the North-east of England. It so happened that on that very day, the Wall was in the news, as the two men who had cut down the famous tree at Sycamore Gap – the one featured in the Robin Hood film - were convicted of the crime. We looked up at Sycamore Gap, and it was just that - a gap – denuded of its tree, it is now just like any other depression in the escarpment over which Hadrian's Wall runs. Only you couldn't avoid the memory of the distinctive tree silhouetted against the sky which was no longer there, like an awkward smile with a tooth missing.

The story of Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers is a pretty unsavoury one. Two fairly low life characters without a great deal of purpose seem to have thought of this as a clever stunt which would somehow impress people. The video would go viral, they hoped, and they would be famous - maybe for 15 minutes - basking in the global coverage of their daring action. They seem to have totally miscalculated the affection with which the tree was held and the outrage this stupid act generated. They got their notoriety but not in a good way. Today they wait anxiously to see whether this mindless act of vandalism will lead to a prison sentence.

It is perhaps another symptom of our culture’s desperate desire for fame. Social media is full of influencers who are famous for not much more than being famous. Similar stunts, one more outrageous than the other are performed daily, recorded on YouTube and put out there to gain attention. We are addicted to fame.

The hapless pair were desperate for their moment of fame and got it in a particularly nasty form.

On the same Northumberland trip, not very far away, a very different approach to fame caught my eye. Cuthbert, a seventh century hermit was one of those hardy Christian monks and missionaries who spread the faith in these islands in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. He was known for his piety, astonishing miracles and sympathy with nature. His biographer, the Venerable Bede, tells us he would walk into the cold North Sea, standing up to his neck in water to pray, in order to increase his ability to focus on God, the object of his prayers, not the yearnings of his body. On coming out of the water, sea otters would come and warm his feet, sensing that this man was in tune with the heart of the universe and should be cared for and protected.

As his fame grew, Cuthbert tried to find more and more ways to run away from it. He was given permission to leave his monastery in Lindisfarne to go out alone to live on the remote Farne islands, far from prying eyes, giving him the freedom to focus on the one object of his desire - to know God through a deep life of prayer and meditation. People would try to come to see him, fellow monks bringing supplies, or pilgrims looking for a word of wisdom from the holy man, yet his focus was ruthless. Eventually, says Bede, “he shut himself away from sight within the hermitage, rarely talking to visitors even from the inside, and then only through the window… in the end he blocked it up and opened it only to give a blessing or for some definite need”.

The difference between Graham / Carruthers and Cuthbert could hardly be more stark. The hapless pair were desperate for their moment of fame and got it in a particularly nasty form. Cuthbert fled from fame, longing for the attention not of other people but of his Maker and Redeemer. Cuthbert’s relentless pursuit of God, and its results in a remarkable life - weird in a different and more nourishing way than the stunts on YouTube - fascinated people. After he died, his bones were transferred to Durham Cathedral where they still lie today. You find the name of St Cuthbert everywhere in the North East – in schools, road signs, coffee shops and boat trips. It’s a name will last long after the destroyers of the sycamore tree are long forgotten. We're still talking about Cuthbert 1,400 years later.

Fame is an elusive and dangerous thing. Tom Holland once called it “a beast that you can't control or be prepared for.” If you chase it, it rarely turns out well. Yet if you ignore it, and seek something more satisfying, something really worth attention – which for Cuthbert was God, the source of all beauty, truth and goodness - then it may or not come. But whether it does or not, you won’t be worried, because your attention will be on something more worthwhile.