The internet response to Liam Payne’s death is disturbing and points to an emotionally inept generation

Fans of the One Direction singer took to social media to express their grief – but, asks Ryan Coogan, aren’t there better ways to pay tribute than with reaction gifs and emojis?

On Wednesday evening, One Direction singer Liam Payne died suddenly after falling from a balcony in Buenos Aires. His death came as a shock to fans, who quickly took to social media to express their grief.

As with any prominent celebrity death, the incident brought out the kinds of trolls and basement-dwelling social deviants you’d expect to pollute your timeline when tragedy strikes. We get it guys – you’ve never known the touch of a woman. Please stop trying to make that our problem.

But what really stood out to me wasn’t the tasteless jokes – it was the tasteless expressions of genuine grief. What was really offensive weren’t the crap “one direction [insert predictable punchline]” jokes that I’m sure got a load of lols in the edgy WhatsApp groups for those with the sense of humour of eight-year-olds. Instead, it was the people who seemed to think they were paying real respect to Payne by sharing their anger and upset in the form of gifs and reaction images.

I saw people – many of them Gen Z fans of the band, who probably had posters of them in their school lockers growing up – posting pictures of Homelander and the Punisher, anime characters and Pokemon, typing in all caps and using the cry-face emoji – all in what they probably assumed was a respectful tribute to the death of a human being. Even in those instances where the underlying message was, “I am very upset about this”, the overall effect seemed totally obscene. A man died – why are you posting a clip from a Marvel movie to express your sorrow?

Full disclosure: I’m a 34-year-old guy, so the One Direction phenomenon passed me by a little bit. I don’t know a huge amount about Liam Payne beyond what I’ve heard in the past 12 hours, but what I do know is this: he was a person, with friends and a family, who passed away far too young under tragic circumstances. And when it comes to talking about his death, that’s really all you need to know. What you don’t need to do is to head to Twitter/X and make some obnoxious comment about how his death makes you feel – or, worse, make a joke about it.

There was a huge outpouring of outrage and disgust when one outlet published photographs from the aftermath of the fall, in which Payne could be seen. The images were rightly taken down after the backlash, but it says a lot that they believed there was a market for them to begin with. People may have expressed their fury online about the images, but how many of them snuck a quick peek first? Enough for that outlet to stake its reputation on, it seems.

It’s tempting to pin this on a generational divide – “Gen Z have been turned into horrible monsters because their addiction to the internet has left them completely disconnected from the physical world”, says local man whose knees pop when he stands up. And there’s probably some truth to that.

But if we’re being honest, this isn’t a phenomenon that’s limited to any one demographic. Everybody from your kid nephew to your grandmother is being constantly exposed to wave after wave of human tragedy in the form of 10-second clips and contextless images of horror and suffering – it’s probably making us all a little less humane.

And how could we not be? I don’t think there’s a day that goes by where I don’t log into social media and see horrific scenes coming out of Palestine or Ukraine. Just a few days ago, a video circulated of children burning alive in a hospital in Gaza – and while I was deeply shocked by it on an intellectual and moral level, I didn’t find myself breaking down and crying.

If doing so sounds like an overreaction, congratulations on proving my point. Seeing kids burn to death is the kind of thing that should stay with you for the rest of your life and give you trouble sleeping – but most people who saw that video probably saw an unrelated meme right after it and then went on with their day.

It isn’t just images we’re increasingly desensitised to, either. There was a multi-year period where every day we’d wake up to new Covid statistics – thousands of people passing away day by day, delivered to us in handy chart form. We stopped hearing stories about people, because there were too many people and too many stories, so the relentless emotional carnage just became background noise to conversations about sourdough starters.

And if it isn’t photographs and videos, it’s the constant “discourse” online – people sniping at each other, throwing tragic news events and statistics around with no consideration for the human lives that underpin them. There’s underlying pressure to deliver snappy “soundbites” on world events, but all the world events at the moment are scary and terrible, so many of those same soundbites are ghoulish and weird, delivered by people who have become totally incapable of feeling anything other than snide detachment.

The fact is that – for many of us at least – we have forgotten what it means to grieve. We’ve forgotten that when a human being dies, an entire world dies with them. We’ve forgotten that every human death changes the world in myriad irreparable ways, and deserves to be treated with the utmost respect and reverence. We’ve forgotten that when somebody like Liam Payne dies, it means something.

Liam Payne’s friends and family won’t have forgotten that, though. For them, his death isn’t a bland abstraction that can be expressed in a seven-word tweet or a handful of emojis. It’s a real, tangible thing that will stay with them forever. Maybe that’s worth remembering, the next time you’re tempted to reduce a human life – or death – to a reaction gif.