Mayo TikTok star speaks out about online bullying following Liam Payne’s death

Mayo musician and online personality, Garron Noone, has spoken out against online bullying following the death of former One Direction member, Liam Payne.

The 31-year-old boy-band star passed away tragically this past Wednesday in Argentina.

Ballina musician, comedian, spokes model, and TikToker, Garron Noone took to TikTok yesterday to share his thoughts, saying he felt ‘guilt’ for consuming content ‘taking the p**s’ out of the One Direction singer.

In the video, the Mayo man said: “The first thing I felt when I seen [the news] was a little bit of guilt, because not but three days ago I was laughing at a video of Liam Payne at a Niall Horan concert. We've all sort of seen the video, everybody was taking the piss out of it, and once I'd watched that video, I was exposed to a lot of other Liam Payne content and kind of discovered that bullying Liam Payne was essentially a genre of entertainment [online].”

Mr Noone said it’s ‘very sad to see what a lot of entertainment has become’. 

“I know it's always been this way to some extent, but a lot of content creators and a lot of content in general, is sort of based around picking up on whoever is the person of the moment to tear apart, and then making videos, making fun of everything they do, dragging up everything they've ever done.

“I think it's not only harmful to the person that it's being done to, but it's also harmful to us in general as people. That's the culture that we exist in, just complete negativity,” he added.

Mr Noone continued: “I think it's important to remember that people are very complex and people say and do things that are out of character or that they don't mean, and the reasons that they end up there can be very complicated, 

“I'm not saying that people shouldn't be called out for bad behaviour. I'm not saying that at all…but what I am saying is a lot of the videos that I've seen about Liam Payne were not made because people thought they were doing some sort of public service. They were made to get views.”

Describing himself as someone with ‘a dark humour’, the TikTok creator, with 1.2 million followers, said the reaction of the public and the media were ‘devaluing human life’.

“I seen an Irish publication about 40 minutes after the news came out saying, ‘Liam Payne, aged 31, what was his net worth?’ and a lot of just very distasteful jokes and dark humour, I totally get it, I have dark humour myself, but what we do in these situations is we are just devaluing human life, and you're not just devaluing Liam Payne's life, who was a human being, not just a celebrity, you're devaluing life in general.”

He brought the video to a close by telling people to ‘think more about’ the content they consume’.

“We should definitely be thinking more about the content we consume, and not only the effect it has on the people that are the target of it, but the effect that it has on us for consuming it, and I'm not suggesting that this is what caused what happened to Liam Payne. That's very complicated, I would imagine, but, it is just something that I had seen over the last few days, and it really didn't surprise me when I saw the news.

“I'm probably gonna turn the comments on this video off. I'm not really interested in having a big discussion about this, and I'm not looking for engagement or views or anything. It was just a thought I had or wanted to put out there,” he concluded.