The performance of being right: when opinions matter more than facts

There’s a particular kind of thrill people get when they catch someone out. A celebrity photographed drinking the wrong coffee brand, wearing a pair of vintage trainers from a company with questionable investments, or walking into a shop that, months earlier, made headlines for political donations. In many cases, there’s no scandal. Just a photograph. A choice. A moment. And yet it quickly becomes a moral referendum.

What did this really mean? Who are they secretly supporting? Why didn’t they know better?

We’ve created a culture where intent matters less than optics, and facts matter less than performance. Being correct is no longer the goal. Being seen to be correct is. And for public figures, the consequences of that shift are almost impossible to navigate.

The rise of symbolic outrage

We are in the age of symbolic outrage, where holding the “wrong” object or being in the “wrong” place can provoke more backlash than actually doing something harmful. A celebrity doesn’t need to make a statement anymore. The public will assign one to them.

This is especially apparent in situations involving Israel and Palestine. We’ve reached a point where people are getting accused of political alignment because of what’s in their shopping trolley. If you’re holding a drink linked to a brand with historic ties to Israel, that’s enough to provoke an Instagram thread, a TikTok callout, and demands for an apology. No one asks if you knew. No one checks whether you support the cause. The association is the evidence.

And this isn’t about dismissing real activism. It’s about highlighting how often outrage becomes disconnected from reality. People get more excited about finding the “mistake” than understanding the context. It’s not activism. It’s theatre.

The burden of impossible research

Celebrities are now expected to operate as full-time investigators. Vetting every product they touch, every shop they enter, every company connected to every item they use. Forget stylists and assistants. What they really need is a geopolitical research team on retainer.

There’s no room for mistakes, no benefit of the doubt, and certainly no grace for not knowing something that 99 percent of people wouldn’t clock in the first place. This isn’t about accountability. It’s about control.

Right now, I’m constantly having to check brands and companies before a client posts anything. I’ll be cross-referencing ownership, checking for any news stories, scanning for political links. And even then, you can miss something. There’s no breathing room for error. The expectation is that people know everything, at all times, across every global conflict, and make perfect decisions accordingly. It’s ridiculous. Completely impossible.

When nothing becomes “something”

A lot of the time, it’s not even a big deal. I’ll get a text from a client saying something like, “Ugh, I posted a story and now I’m getting shit for it.” It won’t make headlines or become a scandal. It’s just enough pressure that we quietly remove the post and hope it didn’t catch on. That is the goal now. Not to go viral, but to go unnoticed.

This kind of pressure is becoming relentless. People are opting not to share anything at all, not because they don’t care, but because they just can’t be bothered with the hassle of performative outrage. Why post a coffee run when someone’s going to try to dissect it into a political statement?

No space left to learn

The worst part is, there’s no space left for education. If someone shares a photo of themselves at Starbucks, they’re not going to get a message explaining the company’s history or the ethical concerns behind it. They’re just going to be publicly blasted, screenshotted, called out and labelled. No dialogue. No learning. Just performance.

And when there’s so much real pain and injustice happening in the world, it’s kind of fucking crazy that people think activism means yelling at someone for grabbing an espresso.

The performance of being right

We’ve created a digital stage where the goal isn’t to fix injustice, but to display your values as loudly as possible. People don’t just want accountability. They want a moment of public correction. A takedown. A villain.

This is where it gets dangerous. Because when outrage becomes performance, and facts no longer matter, we don’t just lose sight of fairness. We lose the ability to focus on what actually needs to change.

We punish people for being imperfect instead of asking whether they meant harm. We care more about catching someone out than encouraging better choices. And the more we reward this behaviour with clicks and virality, the more distorted public conversation becomes.

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