(UCA News) — On a crowded bus last month in the Indian state of Kerala, a woman pulled out her phone and started recording. There was visible space between her and a man identified as Deepak U., who was just trying to get home. She moved closer. Then she accused him of touching her inappropriately. Within hours, the video was everywhere. Within days, Deepak was dead.

He did not die from violence. He died from shame — the kind that arrives in thousands of hateful messages from strangers who watched a thirty-second clip and decided they knew everything.

His family begged people to look closer at the footage to see his arm held against his body and his movement away from her at the end. Nobody listened. The mob had spoken. Deepak hanged himself, and his mother collapsed at his funeral, asking a question nobody could answer: “Who will give me back my son?”

That question should haunt every person who shared that video. It should especially haunt the churches.

Across Asia, where Christianity touches millions of lives and pastors hold genuine moral authority, the Church has been strangely silent as social media turns into an execution ground. We preach about loving our neighbors, about not bearing false witness, and about the danger of quick judgment. Then our congregations go home, pick up their phones, and become the very mobs Christ warned against — the ones ready to cast the first stone without knowing the full story.

This is not just about one tragic case. Asia has the world’s highest social media engagement rates, and we are weaponizing that connectivity faster than our moral frameworks can........

© Eurasia Review