Social Media is Bringing Out The Worst Of Humanity...and The Bible Seems To Warn Us About It

It's fascinating how much The Bible foretells. Whether you are a Christian or not, it is a book of immense wisdom and prescience. This may be my most important article yet.

Luke 23:21

“But they kept shouting, 'Crucify him! Crucify him!'"

Whether you are a Christian or not, the historical event of a baying mob calling for an innocent man’s death is one that coldly echoes throughout history.

How is it that otherwise normal humans can become complicit, even frenziedly supportive, of acts of such flagrant evil that should be so patently disgusting?

I used to ponder how so many people in Nazi Germany went along with hunting down and handing over Jewish people for slaughter. Turned their backs on gas chambers and concentration camps. Burnt books and didn’t flinch at a wailing child being dragged from its mother’s arms.

How could it have possibly happened among an otherwise unsavage nation?

For Lent this year, I gave up social media. I took the time to especially reflect upon its impact on not just me, but society as a whole.

And what came to me during that period I can no longer unsee.

This is perhaps my most important article to date. Please do read on.

Just before my break from social media, I was pondering what to sacrifice for Lent. Which thing should I give up to draw myself closer to God? What is crowding out his message, usurping humility, and poisoning me most?

I had lazily decided I would ditch alcohol and was pondering how I would navigate various forthcoming social events, reluctantly contemplating whether my abstinence would bring net benefit, as I am not a problem drinker and becoming puritanical would actually potentially be a downer at a big reunion I had organised and hosted. After all, at The Last Supper, wine came to represent the lifeblood of Christianity. Consumed together responsibly and with joy, it can be a great unifier and plays a role throughout Christianity.

But then I found myself at the mercy of an online pile-on. Having asked important questions of the implications of ethno-nationalism in politics (a subject that still keeps me awake at night) and expressing concerns about the future welfare of young advocates, all from a genuine position of sincere compassion and concern, I became the butt of abuse. Portrayed as a mad woman, a harpee, a banshee, a woman of low morals in an adulterous relationship with a party leader, a barren and deranged spinster (that one had thr effect of emotional disembowlment having recently gone through a heartbreaking separation) I was left extremely disturbed. Of course I was personally hurt. But that hurt had limitations as I know my own motivations and moral fibre. More than this, I was deeply troubled, watching people I knew and liked become part of the frothed and foaming mob. They knew me. They are surely aware of my character and nature. And yet here they were, joining in.

It became clear what seems to be separating many self-prophessed Christians from God.

And so my mind was made up. The next 40 days I would reflect upon human relations, and how these are being warped by the internet.

My first reflection was nothing new: That the in-built biological impulse to run with the pack can blot out sense even in the face of patently illogical and irrational wickedness. That the veil of anonymity that comes from disappearing in a crowd, or behind an avatar online, removes personal accountability.

I have long spoken of the harms of social media and many of the extreme phenomena that have resulted from it. Pornification leading to mass plastic surgery. A huge uptick in mental health issues. Neurological rewiring from over stimulation and affirmation seeking.

From drugging kids with puberty blockers and yelling death threats to anyone who questioned the practice, to demonising those who refused to take the knee for a dead, violent felon, beattified as though a Biblical martyr, despite toxicology reports revealing fatal levels of fentanyl at the time of death, common sense itself.had become controversial. Meanwhile quack advice, lack of real life interaction as we text instead of talk, was dangerously dilluting our natural and God given gifts of empathy and emotional intelligence.

Meanwhile, it became clear that something deeply dangerous that resides within us can become a rapid inferno when dowsed by viral algorithms online. The need to fit in.

Social media promised connection and the democratisation of information. And at times, it does also bring out the best in us. When the kernel that erupts and spreads across ‘the web’ like myriad dandelion spores is one of kindness and charity, we get mass crowdfunding, a multitude of support and advice, a chorus of praise and celebration. Heartwarming acts of human cooperation that deliver important moral messages or even change lives.

But when - and this seems to be increasingly more present on social media - the proposition is that of public humiliation, punishment and persecution, a sociopathic myopia grips the mob, who quickly forget that a real, emotional sentient human is on the receiving end.

Social media becomes a high-speed amplifier of humanity’s darkest impulses.

It resurrects the ancient phenomenon of crowd madness. Mass hysteria where rational individuals dissolve into frenzied collectives.

From Biblical times to the 20th century to today, history shows that when people unite en masse without restraint, they are capable of astonishing evil. Social media does not create this flaw, it supercharges it through algorithms engineered for outrage, turning isolated users into digital mobs.

The Crucifixion: The Most Famous Mob Rule

Consider one of history’s most infamous miscarriages of justice, the crucifixion of Jesus. In the Gospels, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, presents the crowd with a choice to either release Jesus, whom he finds innocent, or the criminal Barabbas.

The crowd, initially stirred by religious leaders and swept up by collective copying, roars “Crucify him!”

Pilate himself washes his hands of responsibility, not wanting to condemn Jesus “Ecce Homo” cowed by the sheer force of the outcry, and thus an innocent man dies in the most drawn out, public, brutal and sickening way.

At no point does anyone without a personal connection to Jesus try to stop the flogging, the torturous dragging of the heavy cross to Golgotha. Even thosr who loved him fled. No. The crowds hiss, spit, jeer and delight in the barbarism. And yet this is a man who only ever brought joy, preached kindness and was famous for healing, for preaching love, for being humble.

No single person in the crowd would likely have acted alone in the face of such cruelty. But united, they overrode reason, mercy, and evidence.

This is the madness of crowds in its purest form: individuals surrender personal judgment to the emotional contagion of the group.

Social media recreates this scene daily. Users pile on without full context, driven by the dopamine of collective outrage. The mob forms instantly across continents, and the target, whether a public figure or not, faces digital crucifixion.

But it is not the historical event of a man called Jesus from Nazareth, so violently and wickedly slaughtered, that first provided Biblical foreboding. The warning comes much, much earlier. In the very first book in fact: Genesis

The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11:9

The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

After the flood (something else that is documented globally in folklore in multiple cultures around the world - but that’s a fun fact for another article) humanity speaks one language.

United by a common tongue, they formulate a shared ambition.

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves”

Their technological prowess fuels a cynical godlike arrogance. But the Bible tells how God confuses their language, scatters them, and in doing so, halts the project.

The Tower of Babel suggests how unified humanity, freed from limits and individual accountability and introspection, pursues self-glorification and greatness that may become perilous to human kind itself.

It is an assertion grimly echoed in the much later book of Revelation in th New Testament where the “End Times” come following a system of "every tribe, people, language, and nation" (Rev 13:7).

Now, whether you believe the author John was a genuine prophet, describing Old Testament-like visions of divine provenance, or is providing a contemporaneous cultural critique of the ills of The Roman Empire through graphic symbolism, the thrust is the same: The Bible warns against supranationalism and Globalism or mob rule, expressed as social control.

It is a warning that echoes through the ages as empires have risen, reached for greater authority, spread and power, almost always resulting in inhumane acts, and finally fallen as a result, be it The Romans, The USSR, The Ottomans or the Nazis. And yes, The British Empire too.

Today, empires have been replaced with global organisations. I have often argued democracy is like butter. The further you try to spread it, the more meagre and thin it becomes, until it altogether vanishes.

But technological revolution has created a One World space where trends sweep across borders, where international conversation removing barriers of contact has provoked the provenance of identity politics, mass hysteria, even the repression of speech and public persecution when the exact opposite was doubtless envisioned.

Children are increasingly brainwashed. Cults and mobs have formed. Terrorism has become internationalised. Humans have started to lose their humanity, siloed and stuck to screens rather than expressing compassion and empathy through direct interaction. We now text, hollow little letters rather than eye contact and body language responsible for 85% of human connection and understanding.

Social media functions as our modern Babel. Platforms create a single digital language, where translations, memes, emojis and algorithms, bind and brainwash billions, while we become divorced from genuine empathetic reaction.

Users build virtual towers through echo chambers of shared ideology, mass action campaigns that inevitably defy nuance and eventually rationality, and global movements that demand deference and obedience, Neo-Religions that no longer need to justify themselves or appeal to sense. They just Are.

Indisputable even when contrary to any logical argument.

When Tourette’s suffer John Davidson shouted “N*gg*r” at The Oscars, a frenzy of faux fury errupted immediately deciding the real victims were the two millionnaire Hollywood actors on stage, who were not just expected but were demanded to be gravely affected by this word, despite the fact that it is ubiquitous in rap music that they will doubtlessly have been exposed to, despite the fact it was just a word delivered without cruel intent, despite the fact that evidentially there was no harm, nor injury nor suffering as a consequence, all the while grotsequely and cruelly ignoring the matter of a man who suffers from a crippling, embarrassing, life changing condition that a few moments before everyone was swooning over in order to signal to the world their inner, superior compassion.

Anyone with half a brain cell knows that the real victim was John Davidson. But an unspoken global rule of victim hierarchy, cultified through identity politics, demanded everyone instead feign horror that two grown, wealthy and privileged men be subjected to such oral violence. Inevitably, people started looking for the lamb to send to the slaughter. The wantonly reckless individual that failed to foresee such horror unfolding.

When people ask why autism is on the rise, I would suggest it is the inevitable consequence of a dearth of genuine and direct human interaction, either failing to teach emotional relationships or deeply exacerbating those with predispositions. But that’s also an article for another day.

For crying out loud, I thought about the Oscars furore, can we no longer laugh and move on?

But we are not allowed to. And we are not even allowed to ask why. Doing so itself would be an act of immoral disobedience.

What began as far reaching connection online has fast devolved into the propagation of tribal warfare. As it always, inevitably does when humans collect en masse.

At the same time, algorithms reward the loudest, most extreme voices, just as Babel’s unity enabled unchecked ambition. The result? Not enlightenment, but confusion, polarization, and collective delusion.

Hitler and the Nazis

Perhaps the most striking example in modern history is Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The regime mastered crowd psychology long before smartphones, TikTok and X even existed.

Drawing on thinkers like Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 book The Crowd described how individuals in groups lose rationality and become suggestible to emotion and repetition, the Nazis staged mass rallies, used radio broadcasts, posters, and films, to manufacture consent to acts of extreme wickedness.

Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine turned ordinary Germans into a mob that cheered book burnings, supported antisemitic laws, and eventually enabled the Holocaust. The crowd did not need facts, only a shared narrative of grievance, unity, and scapegoats. And how chillingly that echoes today.

That is not to say all mass gatherings spawn wickedness. The opposite can also be true.

But when the common denominator is negative, it is alarming how guard rails are off.

We cannot condemn mass Muslim protests, we are pre-programmed as to whom the victims must be, and who is to blame as if from Original Sin.

Social media is propaganda on steroids.

No single dictator controls it; the algorithm does. And this is even before AI reaches anything like its full potential.

It identifies grievances, feeds confirmation bias, and scales emotional contagion exponentially. Le Bon’s insights apply perfectly. Online crowds exhibit “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason,” and a “collective mind” that overrides individual ethics.

BLM: A Neo Religion born online

The 2020 killing of George Floyd provided a stark modern case study. A bystander’s video of American Policeman Derek Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck spread rapidly around the world.

Within hours, #BlackLivesMatter exploded and was used nearly 48 million times on Twitter alone in the first two weeks.

Protests erupted in every U.S. state, then over 20 countries. Social media organised and amplified outrage, also fueling misinformation, conspiracy theories, and violence.

Peaceful demonstrations sometimes spiraled into riots, looting, and arson as the digital mob fed on graphic imagery and unverified claims, emboldened by a free pass of being on the ‘right’ side to perform acts of criminality, bullying and persecution. Platforms became battlegrounds for competing narratives, while fake accounts and foreign actors joyfully stoked division. Youths gleefully attacked statues of national heroes and yelled expletives at innocent bystanders, while adherents demanded money, special treatment, prefential privileges, and retrospective demonisation.

This episode revealed social media’s power to transform even the most obscure event into a collective frenzy that multinational companies, world leaders, religious figureheads, workplaces and celebrities all instantly joined. Nuance vanished and entire institutions were condemned en masse or wholesale adopted the mantras and mannerisms of a brand new cult with feverish religiosity.

Revelation’s The Beast

If you are a Christian, you probably think Revelation is the most phantasmagoric, fascinating, difficult, disturbing and challenging read in the entire Bible.

If you are not, let me explain. It prophetically outlines what the Apocalypse will look like before the Messiah’s return, through bold and weird symbolism in a flood of harrowing metaphors and nightmarish images that race like a fever dream. For a non-believer, Revelation is a definite turn off for its abject weirdness.

Some Eschatoligists (those that study The End Times) draw connections to some of the verses to events unfolding today. And the parallels are uncanny. Although many times in history this could be said to be the case. Two world wars. Atomic bombs. Again - an article for another day!

But at the heart of today’s madness are not necessarily twisted tyrants and wicked world leaders, but the algorithms themselves, morphing rapidly into an independent, sovereign overlord through AI.

Please bear with me!

Designed to maximize engagement time they disproportionately reward negative or high-arousal content. Stanford University research analysing millions of posts found that negative emotional news spreads faster and farther than positive or neutral material. Even mainstream outlets increasingly chase it. They always did through the art of the headline and front page. As the old adage goes “No news is good news”. Rage bait is hardly new.

Studies show platforms like TikTok can quadruple exposure to extreme content such as misogynistic or radical material in a matter of days by targeting vulnerabilities such as loneliness or anger.

It creates vicious cycles of users seeking validation or outrage, thirsting to receive more of it, descending into echo chambers that then breed new ideologies. Many fringe, some downright dangerous. Conspiracy theories, cancel culture, and rapid radicalisation flourish because algorithms act as invisible psy-ops operators. They are not answerable to human rationality or individual empathy. They do not even kowtow to groupthink. They are the groupthink, in coded form.

They do not reflect society, they shape it, turning isolated grievances into mass movements. Research links this to rising anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and even real-world violence.

Anyone with enough knowledge, or any state actor with ill intent, can manipulte masses through bot farms and by gaming the algorithm. Crazy new ideologies emerge as if overnight, from gender extremism to political cults, because the crowd rewards conformity and punishes dissent, and a crowd means footfall and footfall means profit.

Soon, the provenance may not even be from a human-linked actor but from AI itself, with dominion over all humanity. As the greater than human intelligence evolves, at what point does the child usurp the parent?

Revelation 13:5

The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise its authority…It was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation

Social media has not invented humanity’s capacity for evil; it has provided the potential for it to be industrialised, and finally released from human control altogether.

The crucifixion crowd, the Babel builders and the Nazi rallies, all reveal the same truth: When individuals merge into an unrestrained collective, reason dies and hysteria reigns.

But next time there may be a master of the masses, the manufactured monster and hidden hand that ensures the mob never disintegrates.

We cannot uninvent the technology. But we must recognise its power and potential peril.

Whether a believer, a student of eschatology, an agnostic, atheist or bystander, the Bible warns against unchecked unity in rebellion and mob justice without truth. It warns that this is an inevitable by-product of human universalisation.

The fact that Communism chalked up the greatest numbers of deaths throughout human history, with estimates of a body count of 80-100 million in the 20th Century alone, indicates that history knows the cost of surrendering to a crowd.

Perhaps the antidote lies in reclaiming individual discernment.

Take time out, or leave social media altogether. I found my fast over Lent to be utterly transformative. I would recommend everyone do the same. And not just social media, YouTube too.

Stop reaching for virtuality and reach out for real human contact instead.

Do not engage in comments or personal abuse, however much one might disagree with a sentiment. Resist the dopamine of the mob.

In a world of digital towers and virtual crucifixions, the choice remains ours.

For now.

If you have felt moved by this article, please do share either it, or it’s message. I believe this to be the single most important issue of our time. Thank you.