Barry Keoghan proves Tik Tok is a cesspit
Barry Keoghan’s recent comments about online abuse were bleak in a way that cut through the usual celebrity-interview fog. The torrent of mockery about his appearance has made him not want to go outside any more, it has made him shy away from events, and it is starting to affect his work.
What is striking is not just the cruelty, but the fact that none of this is remotely surprising. Of course Barry Keoghan is being abused online. Of course people think his face is public property. Of course TikTok, that sleek little attention casino, has turned this into content. We have built an internet in which millions of people can perform their worst instincts under the banner of banter, and then act the victim when anyone calls it out.
For a while, social media sold itself as democratising. Everyone gets a voice. Everyone gets a platform. Everyone gets to join the conversation. Lovely. Very stirring. What it actually did, in many corners, was flatten the distinction between having a thought and deserving an audience for it. So now every bored stranger can lob a remark about someone’s face, body, grief, relationship, addiction, or children into the void, then watch the algorithm reward them for it.
And we should be honest about the specific kind of nastiness at work here. This is not critique. Barry Keoghan is an actor, not public policy or a government institution. Nobody is bravely speaking truth to power by stitching together clips of his face and old instagram posts and cackling in the comments. This is not accountability. It is not cultural analysis. It is metastasised playground bullying.
The most pathetic part is that online mobs now dress up ordinary cruelty as discernment. They are not being nasty, apparently. They are just saying what everyone is thinking. A phrase which has done catastrophic damage to public life. What everyone is thinking, quite often, is stupid. It is also no moral achievement to say it out loud.
TikTok did not invent online nastiness, obviously, but it seems to have perfected the conditions for it. Its entire logic is stranger-based. The first thing you see is the For You feed, which is built to keep throwing strangers at you. When content is mostly drawn from people you did not seek out, and who did not seek you out, it becomes easier to treat them less like people and more like passing objects. Something to react to. Something to rank. Something to laugh at before you swipe on during your lunch break. The relationship is so thin it barely exists, which is exactly why contempt flourishes there so easily.
TikTok is not a cesspit because millions of uniquely evil people happened to gather there by chance. It is a cesspit because its speed, its stranger-led feed, its blurred accountability, and the grim economics of engagement all push in the same direction: toward reaction, pile-on, and the performance of contempt.
That is what makes the whole thing so warped. We are constantly told the internet is where people “show who they really are”. I don’t think that is quite right. It is where people become degraded versions of themselves: less inhibited, less reflective, less human.
The celebrity angle muddies this because people think fame cancels vulnerability. If you are rich, recognisable, and professionally visible, then apparently you have forfeited the right to be wounded. As if money creates some magical membrane between a person and humiliation. It is such an adolescent view of other people that I am always faintly amazed adults still believe it.
I should probably admit here that I am not writing from some stainless moral perch. I think unkind things all the time. So do most people. I say some of them to friends, in private, and then sleep at night by telling myself that at least I did not type them under a stranger’s video for thousands of people to enjoy. That distinction does matter. Private bitchiness is not the same as public humiliation. But it is also a comforting one. Because the uglier truth is that the impulse itself comes first. The app does not create that impulse from nothing, but it does feed it, train it, reward it. It turns the passing mean thought into a habit of mind. It encourages you to look at another person and instantly assess and sneer. Not always aloud, not always online, but often enough that you start to feel the change in yourself. That is part of what makes TikTok so poisonous. It does not just give cruel people a stage. It teaches the rest of us to become a little crueller.
The grim little joke in all this is that these platforms still market themselves with the language of connection. Community. Expression. Creativity. Meanwhile the actual emotional atmosphere often resembles a public stoning. We are meant to be impressed by how participatory culture has become. Participatory in what, exactly. Turning a man’s face into a meme until he says he no longer wants to leave the house? What a triumph of digital citizenship.
Barry Keoghan’s comments matter not because he is uniquely fragile, but because they expose something wider and uglier about the culture we now treat as normal. Too many people have become comfortable living as disembodied online presences, moral vapours floating from one target to the next. No eye contact, no accountability, no shame, just comments sections full of people pretending this is all somehow frivolous.
It is not frivolous. It is dehumanising. And the longer we keep pretending TikTok is just a silly app where people dance and lip-sync, the longer we avoid admitting that it has also become a machine for organised unkindness. Not by accident, either, but by design.