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The last thing that the family and friends of the Love Island presenter Caroline Flack need is more speculation about her life or the manner of her shocking and immensely sad death. She took her own life on Saturday. And so in expressing sadness at her death, speculation isn’t part of my own reaction this morning. Complex and various influences are at work here and time is needed for consideration of them. But not least because this has happened to others less famous, the role of social media is once again a proper theme for reflection. Social media is often such a powerful force for good in society: it can relieve the isolation that people feel, and of course huge sums are raised for charity, jobs found, disasters averted. Social media amplifies and encourages our human instincts to connect, to help, to give, to cooperate. But of course it can equally amplify our human instincts to attack, to compete and to crush. We somehow are driven both to want to idolise and destroy each other. And online, both these choices are weaponised. The 18 year old American singer and writer of the new Bond song Billie Eilish said just yesterday that she’s come off social media because it was ‘ruining my life’. The British comedian David Baddiel has commented this week that online our worst instincts are not just weaponised but nuclearized. And it seems to me that the cruellest aspects of the culture we are creating online are fuelled by the wrecking balls of jealousy, fear, rage and contempt. To be honest, all these feelings are thoroughly recognisable to anyone who is a grown up human being. But when distanced from the face to face relationships within which those feelings might be tempered, this sense of unaccountability can turn us into – not trolls – that’s too comic-book – can turn us to behaving something like monsters. In the Christian tradition, words matter. But actions matter more. And I want to suggest that Christian spiritual practice has at its disposal a mechanism that is, in its longevity and power, the equal of such nuclearized feelings. The mechanism is confession, repentance and forgiveness. But it’s much misunderstood. It is not the kind of guilty sorrow or self-blaming that I might fall into on social media. Confession, repentance and forgiveness is calmer, more devastating and more healing than that. Confession faces me with the truth of who-I am- capable-of-being-at-my-worst. It then asks me to say this out loud, without self-justification or excuse. And then, in being forgiven, I’m required not so much to feel sorry or remorseful but to change my behaviour. Actually change it. In December Caroline Flack shared on social media a slogan that was a heartfelt plea: In a world where you can be anything, she posted, be kind.