Influencers and Moral Responsibility

Moral responsibility has become an inseparable price of a public figure's fame. When someone has millions of followers, every word, post, or stance they take is no longer seen as mere personal expression, but as a message capable of shaping how society views an issue.

In the social media era, digital space has also changed how the public judges a person. What gets evaluated isn't just the content of the message, but the timing of its delivery, the social context unfolding at the time, and the social standing of the person delivering it.

It's no surprise that a single post can trigger both praise and condemnation within hours. This phenomenon is plainly visible in the case recently experienced by Maudy Ayunda.

The video "Mindfulness in the Age of Bad News," uploaded by Maudy Ayunda in August 2026, was actually meant to encourage the public to protect their mental health amid a flood of bad news. In the video, she also offered a prayer for people currently facing hardship.

They have no option to simply distance themselves from the news, because disaster, crisis, and social problems are part of everyday life.

Instead, the public picked up on a different message. The call to take distance from bad news was seen as failing to consider the reality that many people are living in the midst of those very problems.

The mindfulness video, the 31-year-old actress stressed, was not meant to justify ignoring social reality. She apologized and acknowledged there was context she hadn't sufficiently considered, particularly the privilege of being able to distance oneself from the flow of bad news.

Maudy's apology, however, did not immediately put an end to the criticism. In fact, some of her subsequent posts were once again linked back to the controversy, even when they no longer touched on the same topic.

Lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta (UMS), Drs. Soleh Amini, M.Si., Psikolog., explained that from a social psychology perspective, Maudy Ayunda's case occurred because the greater a person's reach of influence, the greater the social consequences of their communication.

According to him, celebrities, influencers, and officials have a far wider communication reach than the general public. A single post of theirs can be seen, shared, and interpreted by thousands to millions of people.

"That's why a public figure's moral responsibility isn't measured only by good intentions, but also by their ability to read the social situation unfolding at that moment," explained the lecturer, who teaches the Social Psychology course, on Friday (25/9/2026).

Public figures, he continued, can function as opinion leaders or social reference points. What they present can shape public attention, frame an issue, and even establish norms about what's considered important.

Even so, Soleh cautioned that this influence doesn't mean public figures always determine public opinion. "Society still has its own values, experiences, and sources of information. A public figure is one factor shaping public opinion, not the only one," he said, offering a reminder.

Maudy Ayunda's case also shows how terms like tone deaf, unempathetic, and socially insensitive are often used to broadly label public figures on social media. So what do these terms actually mean?

"Tone deaf means someone fails to pick up on the emotional tone or context of a situation, so their words or actions come across as out of place," Soleh explained.

However, that person doesn't necessarily lack empathy. They may have had good intentions but simply misread the moment.

This differs from being unempathetic, a condition where someone is unable or unwilling to understand another person's perspective or emotional state. "In psychology, empathy itself covers both the ability to understand another person's point of view (cognitive empathy) and to feel their emotional state (affective empathy)," he added.

Social insensitivity, meanwhile, covers broader ground, since it relates to a failure to read norms, context, social relations, and the consequences of one's behavior.

"That means a person can have empathy and still be seen as tone deaf. For example, they may genuinely care about disaster victims, but choose to share content highlighting personal enjoyment while the public is in mourning," Soleh explained.

According to him, several factors make someone appear insensitive to a social situation.

Differences in life experience are the first cause. What appears to one person as just another headline on a phone screen is, for someone else, a reality they have to live through every day.

"We often forget that what we see as news is someone else's real life," he said.

Another factor is situational egocentrism. People tend to view the world through their own personal experience. A person's choice to reduce their news consumption to protect their mental health, for instance, can be perceived as a form of indifference by someone who is directly living through that very issue.

There's also the matter of timing, differences in privilege, and the phenomenon of context collapse on social media. A single message crafted for a specific context can be read by a wide range of audiences, causing its meaning to shift depending on each reader's own experience.

Because of this, Soleh said, social sensitivity in the digital era demands that everyone, not just public figures, think more carefully about two questions: "What do I want to say?" and "How will other people receive this message?"

From a social psychology standpoint, an apology doesn't automatically erase a perception that has already taken hold. Once a public figure is seen as insensitive, the public tends to read their subsequent posts through that same interpretive lens.

As a result, a message that is actually neutral can still be perceived as part of the earlier controversy. Soleh cautioned that public attention shouldn't stay hostage to a public figure's controversy for too long, to the point of losing sight of the actual social issue at the root of the matter.

Criticizing behavior is certainly legitimate. However, criticism shouldn't turn into bullying or a personal attack. Society also needs to give someone room to explain, acknowledge their mistake, apologize, and learn.

Writer: Genis Dwi Gustati

Translator: Farizal Luqman Majid

Editor: Al Habiib Josy Asheva