How Do We Cry Online?

Between vulnerability and performance, the way we cry on social media reveals something about the spirit of our time.

Tuesday Night on Earth. Feel free to share this letter.

There are tears we keep for ourselves, private and intimate. And then there are the ones that explode online, as our lives increasingly interface through new digital expressions. It has become normal to scream — or be overwhelmed by sadness — in lines of code.

It’s no surprise that interest in dacryphilia — a term describing an attraction to other people’s tears — has increased fivefold in Google search trends.

Extimacy: a peculiar emotional space

Social media has accelerated a double emotional dynamic.

First, it allows us to feel intense joy, regret, or grief over events far removed from our personal lives. Reunion videos of families separated by war, or clips of abandoned animals being adopted, trigger thousands of tearful comments: “I'm crying,” “😭😭😭 too much.” These feelings — these tears — are shared collectively, mirrored back through the screen. A mass affect, sparked by a handful of pixels.

In the other direction, platforms also allow us to make our inner selves visible — exposing our most fragile states to total strangers. Think of those late-night TikToks: someone crying silently, camera pointed at their face, no explanation given. And yet, the likes and comments pour in. Raw emotion, stripped of context, becomes immediately legible — and received.

Tears, like everything else, have been digitized. Grief, too, sometimes needs a stage.
The internet is one — always on, for everyone.

Between emoji and recorded memory

Commemorations for those who pass away too soon are becoming more sophisticated.

In his Western Attitudes Toward Death, historian Philippe Ariès argued that modern Western societies gradually made death invisible — a privatized, hushed experience. But social networks are reversing that trend. Grief is being re-publicized, taking on new ritual forms online.

A 2016 study by Nina Cesare and Jennifer Branstad (University of Washington) showed that while Facebook maintains a relatively private mourning culture — with tributes mostly from close friends and family — Twitter functions differently. The retweet, the @mention: all allow for public grieving. Users still post to the profiles of the dead, writing simple but powerful lines like “Miss you,” “Thinking of you today,” or “You’d be proud of me.” Mourning opens up to a broader digital sphere, where tears and expressions of grief become social artifacts — entry points for conversation, connection, remembrance.

The 🥲 emoji — a subtle, melancholic smile — and the acronym RIP still signal respect in digital mourning. But new ways of crying online have emerged as platform features — and social norms — evolve.

Crying as social performance: the aesthetics of vulnerability?

In 2007, a video of Cara Cunningham (then known as Chris Crocker) went viral: “Leave Britney Alone.”

That filmed breakdown, mocked at the time, is now viewed as something prophetic — a moment of militant vulnerability, of public tears as protest. It marked a turning point in the display of emotion online.

Since then, crying online has become normalized.
On TikTok, emotional breakdowns fill our feeds. Joyful tears, lonely tears, exhausted ones. Bedrooms become stages. Cars become confessionals. Bathrooms turn into wings of a theater of grief.

But sincerity is often shaped by visibility. Today, some speak of “sadbait” — content deliberately calibrated to provoke emotional reactions and boost engagement.
Take the hashtag #BreakupTok, with over 33,000 tagged videos. Most are professionally edited: moody soundtracks (SZA, Lana Del Rey, Sia), slow-motion shots, captions layered over fading transitions.
Tears become syntax. Aesthetic. Format.

@healing.girl.modeStill crying ocassionally though 🤷🏻‍♀️ what can i say i’m a softie #breakup #relationship #brokenrelationship #relationshipproblems #breakups #healing #beforeafter #beforeandafter #relatable #brokenheart

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Platforms for collective grieving

Faced with death, some platforms now facilitate online mourning.

MyDeathSpace chronicles the deaths of young internet users and lets loved ones leave posthumous tributes. Other tools like HereAfter AI go a step further — letting people record their stories for future generations to converse with a digital version of them.
A form of algorithmic grief prep, suspended between memory and simulation.

And then there are the emotional cemeteries hidden in plain sight — like YouTube comment sections under certain songs (“The Night We Met” by Lord Huron, “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman), which become digital mausoleums of memory:

“Dad, I miss you every day.”
“You left too soon. This was your favorite song.”

Music becomes a vector for collective mourning. A way to cry in the present tense.

To cry online is to cry in the moment, in front of an invisible but potentially empathetic audience. It’s to cry in portrait mode, with a caption — and sometimes a soundtrack. It’s also to cry in a comment, a reply, an emoji.

In a world where physical presence is rarer, where speech atomizes, writing and imagery become our new spaces of sensitivity.
Our tears adapt to the format.
They become emojis, stories, tagged memories — traces of an emotion the algorithm may archive, surface, or forget.

Crying like a movie — in Taipei

As if echoing digital rituals of emotion, some cities have invented their own social liturgies for public crying.

Not all tears come from personal grief. Some are collective, ceremonial, even joyful. In Taipei, every January 1st at midnight, thousands gather in Daan Forest Park, a large green space in the city center, to watch Vive l’Amour by Tsai Ming-liang — a cult Taiwanese film full of melancholic silence.

At the end of the screening, the audience is invited to cry loudly together for several minutes.

The tradition began as a joke — a fake Facebook event created by student Harry Li — but it materialized in real life. Today, it's a well-known ritual of emotional release.

This unusual ceremony gives tears a clear social function: to begin the year by letting go of what was never expressed. In this park-turned-emotional sanctuary — as on social media — crying becomes a shared language, a social pressure valve, maybe even a form of emotional reboot.

In a world where physical closeness is fading and speech is splintered, text and image are where we feel now. Our tears reshape to match the feed.
They become emoticons, selfies, archived memories — traces of feeling that the algorithm may store, lift, or lose.

Maybe that’s what it means to cry online:
to try feeling together, across the screen. And, sometimes, to be heard.

The Hashtag of the Week: #CryingSelfie

According to Vogue, taking selfies while crying became a real trend in 2021 — partly fueled by Bella Hadid’s viral teary-eyed photos. Vulnerability, now front-facing.

Amazing links

• American Crying (Flowing Data)

• TradewarTok: what Chinese factories’ claims about Hermès, Dior & Gucci mean for luxury brands (The Drum)

Have a great week! This newsletter is written with love, passion, and (French) coffee. Feel free to share this newsletter, like, comment, or keep sending me emails: these notifications are a joy.

My book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.