When social becomes antisocial: the boundary between following and feeling authorized to judge

I don’t just talk about online hatred, which exists since the Internet exists, but something subtler: the belief that seeing a person every day through a screen means knowing it and having expectations that give us rights.

The case of Emilie Kiser is an example almost by manual. For those who did not know her, Emilie has a very follow-up lifestyle profile and last year suffered the loss of her son by drowning in the home pool, while she was with her father and she was out for dinner.

The criticisms that are made are cruel and parasocial.

Be careful! Who publishes content can be criticized for what it publishes, just like anyone who produces something intended for an audience. The problem arises when critique ceases to concern what we see and begins to pretend to explain what we do not see.

A video becomes a psychological diagnosis. A smile becomes proof that a mother does not suffer enough. The absence of tears in front of the camera becomes absence of pain. The return to the usual content, such as “Sunday reset” or “get ready with me”, is interpreted as indifference. Even the way a person decides to publicly remember a dead child is subjected to a kind of collective quality control.

The question that is continually being asked is: how can it behave like this after what happened?

Perhaps the question should be another: why do we think we have to understand how it should behave?

There is no correct aesthetic of mourning. One person can become terrified of life after a tragedy; another can come to the opposite conclusion: life can end suddenly, so I want to live it all the way. It can be an explanation. Or not. And that's exactly the point: we don't have to have one.

We have transformed selected fragments of life to be published in investigative material and in a perpetual scrutiny and social relationship.

It seems to have affirmed the idea that, once shown online a part of his life, he loses the right to choose which part to continue to show. “It monetized the family, so the public has the right to ask questions” has become a surprisingly common justification. But a person may have shown his husband yesterday and decide not to show him tomorrow. He may have told a son and then decide that memory no longer belongs to the public.

We also play with the comfort of the hindsight: if we can build a perfect chain of errors, we can convince ourselves that similar tragedies only happen to people who have been wrong enough. And perhaps this calms us more than the alternative, much more uncomfortable: that imperfect parents can take precautions, make mistakes and still live tragedies with irreversible consequences.

Of course we can talk about security. We can discuss fences, alarms, supervision and prevention of drowning. We can even decide that what we see about a creator is no longer a value we want to support and stop following it.

What does not logically follow is to transform each subsequent frame into a referendum on its value as a human being.

The most obvious contradiction is that many of the same people who ask someone to be “deleted” continue to watch every video, analyze it, comment it and produce new content on it. They accuse you of monetizing on mourning while they are doing the same.

And it is perhaps here that the social relationship changes a sign without changing structure. You don't need to love someone to develop a social relationship with him. Hate may also require attention, familiarity, expectations and a sense of access.

At that point we are no longer reacting to what a public person is. We are building a character and asking the real person to behave consistently with the story we wrote for her.

And it is paradoxical that all this happens on social networks. Tools created to connect people are normalizing behaviors that, transferred out of the screen, we would immediately recognize as invasive. Even today, in 2026, we use the most powerful means of communication that man has ever had in the most wrong way possible.

Perhaps the most antisocial degeneration of social media is not that we have become worse. It’s just that we started confusing access to content with access to people.