The Dark Side of the #Bekind Movement

You read that right. It seems well intentioned, it IS well intentioned, but there is an insidious and dark nature to the Be Kind movement that must be addressed. Be kind is not enough, be kind is a shirking of the real issues, and be kind could be doing more harm than good.

In the wake of Caroline Flack’s death this year- a British TV presenter who died from suicide after suffering horrendous abuse on social media and via tabloid newspapers, the #BeKind movement rose. A tidal wave of Instagram posts, hashtags and merchandise followed, the message; be kind to everyone, you don’t know what they’re going through. It has risen again since the death of Chadwick Boseman who, like Caroline, suffered at the hands of judgement and cruelty whilst quietly undergoing chemotherapy for stage 3 colon cancer.

Be kind, on the face of it, seems like the perfect antidote to preventing the same happening again; don’t be a dick, be kind instead. Simple, surely we can all manage that.

Well it seems for one, we can’t, as the online ‘trolling’ epidemic continues; comments now just seem peppered with the odd ‘be kind.’

And for two, it definitely is not the antidote. Here’s why.

Most of us have got lost in the comments of online articles and posts at one time or another; memes of someone eating popcorn…