At a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts on Wednesday, an unlikely cheating scandal broke out. The CEO of a unicorn tech company was caught on the concert's jumbotron, where a live video showed him in a passionate embrace with his company's HR chief. The two were captured awkwardly dodging the camera, as Coldplay's lead singer Chris Martin laughed, "Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy."
Turns out, the former explanation may be true. Internet sleuths put two and two together. A video of the HR fiasco went viral on TikTok, with over 58 million views and counting. By now, it feels like the entire internet has seen the video (and has something to say about it). The general consensus, of course, is that infidelity is wrong and the accused adulterers deserved to be caught.
One user posted on X, "Genuinely enjoying every single thing about the cheating ceo and chief people officer at the coldplay concert I loveeeee when terrible people get exposed for their tomfoolery in grand ways." Another wrote, "Good that CEO got caught cheating at the Coldplay concert and it’s being posted on social media. If you doing some disrespectful shit you deserve getting exposed."
While the morality of their actions isn't up for debate, the gleeful reaction to the viral video can be. As 404Media wrote, the sweeping reaction across social media platforms is "emblematic of our current private surveillance and social media hellscape." The internet's obsession with cheating, surveillance, and doxxing is once again at play. People online are increasingly excited by exposing these scandals, passing judgment — sometimes unfairly — and making memes out of misery. Every time this has happened, so has undue speculation and self-righteousness, without a second thought about how private lives are being unduly exposed and put through the wringer.
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We've seen it before. First, with the infamous couch guy. Then, last year, a TikTok taken on a United Airlines flight went viral, with a user alleging that one of her fellow passengers was cheating on his wife. The couple was outright doxxed, with thousands of TikTokkers engaging with the post. As Mashable wrote then, the trend of TikTok sleuthing, especially when it comes to cheating, "spells out one of the graver consequences of digital culture today: a lack of empathy and nuance beyond the confines of a phone screen."
The "married man on the plane scandal" actually had people questioning our attention to such moments of virality. No one is denying the hurt of infidelity and the rippling consequences it can have. But the internet presents a deeper problem with its fascination with exposing the act: that this is a form of entertainment and surveillance, without much regard for the consequences that the people actually involved will face.
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As Business Insider's Katie Notopoulos writes, "The thing is, I don't know these people. (Neither, probably, do you.) I don't know their lives. I have no idea what was really going on. I can say that the online attention they've received is certainly distressing to them — on top of a situation that may also already be very distressing in other ways."
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The situation illustrates something larger: another voyeuristic fascination, new levels of surveillance emerging every day (some far more dangerous than others), and our collective lack of privacy. We don't need to know everything about each other, but we increasingly do. And when it comes to developing empathy in the age of TikTok, this is a step in the wrong direction.
