University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus Principal Professor C. Justin Robinson has warned students about the human cost of social media cruelty, saying technology has amplified people’s capacity to attack, humiliate and publicly condemn others.

Robinson addressed the issue during the campus’ 2026 matriculation ceremony as he urged incoming students to develop character and values alongside their academic qualifications.

He said many of the behaviours now associated with social media are not new, but technology has dramatically increased their reach and impact.

“The age you are in, here is what this age has done. It has taken the oldest human failings, envy, cruelty, the pleasure of watching someone else fail, and handed them an amplifier called the internet, social media, the mobile phone,” Robinson said.

“So we have new names for old sins, cancel culture, trolling. Dragging a person’s name through the mud for likes and attention.”

Robinson also criticised what he described as “manufactured outrage” and the tendency for people to join public attacks without considering the consequences for the person being targeted.

“You have manufactured outrage performed by an audience, by people who feel nothing at all,” he said.

“We now live in a world where every mistake, every questionable judgment, every choice you make now leads to a public hounding, as some satisfy their bloodlust for fame, political points, or whatever motivates them.”

Robinson used the experience of University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday to illustrate his wider argument about the consequences of public condemnation.

He told students that Arday, who died at his London home in August at age 41, had three years earlier become the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s 800-year history.

Robinson said serious allegations had been made about Arday’s scholarship and his account of his life. He noted that Arday denied dishonesty while acknowledging some mistakes.

Robinson was careful not to offer his own judgment on the allegations.

“I don’t stand here to tell you he was innocent. That’s not for me to judge,” Robinson said. “There’s a process to judge this. But that is not what he faced.”

Instead, Robinson focused on the scale and nature of the public reaction.

“What he faced was a pile-on, weeks of it, thousands of people, many of them who had never read a word he wrote, competing to say the cruelest thing about him,” Robinson said.

He said Arday wrote before his death that the relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and his loved ones.

Robinson then challenged students to think about the consequences of what they post or say about other people.

“Of the thousands who typed something about that man in that month, did one of them stop for a second and ask what it might cost?” he asked.

“Not what it would cost them, but what it would cost him, his mother, his two brothers who now sit in that inquest.”

Robinson broadened the question beyond that particular case, asking students to consider whether people adequately weigh the pain they can cause while pursuing their own interests.

“Do we ever weigh the pain we cause other people and their families as we pursue our own narrow goals?” he asked.

“This is not a question about the internet. It’s about … character.”

Robinson told students that the decisions they make about how they treat others would follow them beyond university and into their professional and personal lives.

He said there were two fundamentally different ways people could attempt to elevate themselves.

“You can build something or you can find someone standing next to you and cut them down,” Robinson said.

“The second is faster. It requires no study, no discipline, no talent, and no courage. And that’s precisely why it is so popular. But it has never produced anything at all.”

He urged the incoming students instead to become “builders” and “problem solvers.”

Robinson also rejected the idea that treating others with kindness should be interpreted as weakness.

“Kindness, love is not weakness. It is among the hardest disciplines a person can master,” he said.

“Anyone can be cruel. Cruelty is free. But kindness costs you something. And that is what makes it worth anything.”

He told students that when they eventually graduate, their official university records will document their academic accomplishments but will say nothing about how they treated the people around them.

“The register will record your name, your program, your class of degree, everything the university can measure. But it will not record whether you were kind,” Robinson said.

“It will not record who you helped up when they were failing.”

Robinson said the university also would not record occasions when students resisted participating in attacks on others, but those actions would be remembered by the people around them.

“That part is not written by the university, but it’s written by the people standing around while you were there,” he said. “And they have already begun writing it.”

This article was originally published by Antigua News Room. Read the original article here: UWI Principal Warns Against Social Media Cruelty and Online ‘Pile-Ons’.