The Coldplay Concert Kiss scandal[1] went viral on TikTok on July 16, 2025 and since dominated social and news media for a while. The ramifications on the different lives are being analysed, tracked, and reported, with individual voices on social media giving their takes, and relaying their ‘live’ experiences from the concert and more. Some of these shed light on workplace policy, infidelity and privacy. In this commentary, I aim to unpack the incident through a systemic lens by focusing on scandals, shame, and their normalisation in an era of virality.

Scandal refers to ‘circumstance or action that offends propriety or established moral conceptions or disgraces those associated with it’ and in this case, playing out at the digital stage. The moral outrage of infidelity has brought different people into conversation, who typically note the devastating effects on the family either in sympathy or empathy. However, the conversation is invoking a time-tested rhetoric and is not happening in isolation. A quick way to locate the rhetoric is by turning to pop culture, where infidelity has been used as a tool of blackmail. It is a turning point of many narrative arcs across detective and political dramas; notwithstanding, the different framings of ‘let’s hope for a sex scandal’ are commonly used and invoked multiple times. Here, two distinct perspectives are normalised: one, the anxiety and fear of partners potentially cheating; two, the fear of moral and social outrage, which enables the blackmail. It points to the role of fear and shame that keep to great promise of coupledom and family together. Here, the institution of marriage is noted to crumble at the personal level for those involved, while the onlookers, at a societal level, navigate through these fears and constantly make sure to distinguish themselves from not being ‘that’ couple. Unsurprisingly, not only, the public discussions end here, without inviting or engaging with questions that are critical about the structure of coupledom or family at a fundamental level, but as Berlant (2008) notes, these fears and shame go on to structurally strengthen the institution of marriage.

The deep resonance with infidelity across different voices on social media makes a case that not just the wedding but also marriage as a whole is buttressed through social opinion and moral indignation. Consequently, shame comes down on different people differently. Take the case of another major ‘scandal’ involving Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. Lewinsky was othered, considered a whore for trespassing on the institution of marriage more than Clinton. The social and moral opinion ensured that the institution was not critiqued or examined. So much so that these responses have been almost templatized and repeated without allowing investigation of what it is about couple-norms that allows infidelity to be common. If we humanise infidelity, not as a way to justify but as a symptom of a crumbling institution of marriage, what does it say about relationships and the system? There is no one answer, and nothing that absolves the emotional weight, but the need to investigate it more acutely is a pressing concern because it has a human cost.

Beyond the moral outrage, what recourse do different parties have when the institution crumbles? The couple at the Coldplay kiss cam scandal did not have a vast power differential between them, unlike with Monica Lewinsky. Most crucially, Lewinsky’s public shaming was almost one of the early instances of technology-facilitated social shaming, humiliation and bullying. Even in 1998, the early era of the internet, Lewinsky was already used as clickbait to generate more ad revenue by generating more clicks and shares (Lewinsky, 2015). Amongst the diverse opinions that are flooding social media right now, many are taking a moral high ground, and these become means of exhibiting social surveillance of a society through digital media.

Coming back, the recourse mechanisms of such a personal-political issue are scant, because they would need to reassess the institution of marriage. Can it be looked at that all parties in the Coldplay scandals were victims in their ways, not as means to justify infidelity but as people of social bullying, and the agential partners working through the crumbling institution? Is it also possible that, at a personal level, the people involved might be having different negotiations within their relationships, which, under the public and social eye filled with moral outrage, cannot be expressed? These could be relationships with emotional or sexual boundaries, open marriages, or even moving through with forgiveness and negotiations. The fragile interventions become harder to express, explain, navigate, undertake and justify against the backdrop of a dominant morally-coded marriage that comes with ever louder public opinions. These opinions, gossip, and social surveillance become handmaidens to the institution of marriage, while the law, governance, media and popular culture are its army to crush any kind of dissent that these fissures highlight.

Through this articulation, I do not intend to downplay the emotional weight of infidelity; instead, I use it as a window to examine the complicated stakes involved, to humanise people in the scene and understand the nature of harm that it can potentially erase. The virality feeds into capitalism, with AI tools, where now deepfakes impinge on the realm of the personal through practised, unnuanced third-party narratives. It becomes crucial to take a stand on privacy at this juncture so that subsequent scenarios do not perpetuate similar harm and instead hold people accountable.

To sum up, ‘scandals’ like these act as a litmus test of the society in an atypical fashion, showing the deficits of the different systems in place, particularly when people are served as public sacrifices.

References:

Berlant, L. (2008, March 12). Against Sexual Scandal. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/against-sexual-scandal/

Lewinsky, M. (Director). (2015, March 21). The price of shame | TED [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_8y0WLm78U

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Lakshmi Venkataraman is a recent sociology graduate working towards an understanding of sexual citizenship by working on questions of intimacy, kinship and queer theory. More can be found here – https://lakshmiv.com/

[1] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/08/01/kiss-cam-twin-cities-facts-post-coldplay-drama