After the tragic death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, a number of social media users – and even old-fashioned legacy publications – set about quietly deleting material online which had dated very badly very quickly.
At 6.12pm on the day of his death – hours before the announcement – the Times ran a mocking comment piece by Roland White headlined ‘Jason Arday may want to get himself a nice pair of orange trousers’. Alas, quite why he may have will now never be known, as the article quickly vanished and the URL now returns an Error 410.
The Guardian also deleted a reel from its Instagram page titled ‘How Jason Arday’s story fell apart’. The reel, a link to its Today In Focus podcast, now delivers the message “Sorry, this page isn’t available”.
Others proudly left up some of the incendiary commentary they had written about the troubled academic. While many were screenshotting examples of the Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson deleting X posts, they are in fact still on her feed, including: “Wow. Nearly half a million views on my thoughts about what it meant to get into Cambridge – without an autistic, dreadlocked back-story to open doors. I hope Jason Arday reads it. He can still read, can he, or has he had another stroke?”.
Since his death, Pearson has had little to say, only to repost a comment from the right wing commentator Helen Pluckrose blaming “Critical Social Justice (woke) activists” and adding the comment “Profound good sense from Helen Pluckrose”. Pluckrose, who has posted incessantly about Arday throughout, has since locked herself out of her X account and handed control to a friend after she “stayed too long as usual and fried my own brain”.
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One commentator who has not only left her anti-Arday comments up but actively doubled down is Talk presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer, who plumbed even lower depths than usual when responding to a Sky News story about a fundraiser to cover his funeral costs. “I’m pretty sure Jason Arday’s huge book advance would be enough to cover his funeral costs,” she wrote. “Give your money to a more deserving cause.” Her pinned post is a lengthy musing on how “the only person responsible for Jason Arday’s death is Jason Arday”.
Meanwhile, the Times has decided that the aftermath of Arday’s death is a good time to continue paying for social media posts promoting its campaign against another prominent black figure in British culture, Southbank Centre chair Misan Harriman.
Social media users might have seen a paid post appearing on their Facebook feed at the weekend detailing “a clanging reminder that he should not have been appointed in the first place”. Harriman, coincidentally, has been cataloging deleted articles about Arday in the media on Instagram over recent days.
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